The word furimukuto describes the action of looking over your shoulder, as if suspicious that somebody is watching you, or perhaps just to check what's going on around you from all visual angles. Choreographer Shigehiro Ide chose it as the title for his newest dance work at Theater Tram in Tokyo's Sangenjaya Jan. 11-14.

Members of Idevian Crew perform "Furimukuto" at Jan. 11.

What Ide has got to be suspicious about is anybody's guess. His company, Idevian Crew, is enjoying the sort of popularity most commonly reserved here for underage musicians and Hello Kitty products. Each new piece of choreography is breathlessly covered by the media, and not surprisingly, the Jan. 11 performance sold out well ahead of time.

The reason for all this enthusiasm is clear -- Ide's work "Which," from almost one year ago. "Which" charted the ungovernable territory of a Japanese funeral, and rendered it meaningful in dance and communicable body language. There wasn't one slack moment in the entire piece, despite the questionable taste of some of the more emotive scenes.

But "Furimukuto" looks to be a little bit of a lay-by for Ide on the journey from gifted amateur to gifted professional. The tight musical phrasing was still there, the inventive patterns of movement, samples of which blended into new scenes, the quirky use of group movement in unison, the little human touches of parlaying ordinary scenes (boy shyly holding a girl's hand in an agony of indecision) into full-scale theatrical cameos. But the thrust, the pace of the thing, was a much gentler version of the dance Ide he has created to date.

The actual looking-over-the-shoulder sequences usually emerged after one performer walked down a path of white painted in the middle of the stage floor of doughnut shapes in white and beige. Otherwise, blackouts divided the scenes, which didn't help with continuity. The floor design reflected the lighting: psychedelic revolving spheres, pinks and greens, deep blue and other variations, as the dancers, in white tops and khaki pants, walked, ran, hopped and skipped across the stage.

Like the no-longer "new" dance predilection for having chairs onstage as props to the movement, this "enter-exit" choreography has also had its day. It's a take on cafe voyeurism or talent-spotting at Shibuya intersections, but the real thing, as in so many cases, is far better than this truncated view of bodies crossing one's vision with not a lot to say.

As ever, Idevian Crew delighted in an eclectic soundtrack, from 1970s groove music with laid-back electric guitar to cutting-edge bossa nova. Ide relies so heavily on his musical impetus, and builds his movement so closely on it, that it would be impossible to imagine an Idevian Crew production set to an abstract piece of music. It works wonderfully in showing off the company's sense of rhythm, and the tricks Ide can play with it, whether it's creating a slice of pert bum-wiggling with deadpan expressions or having a gormless couple perform laconic standing poses to passionate flamenco. But it also means that these unassuming yet quite brilliant dancers are shackled to the rhythmic demands of the score.

One of the segments in "Furimukuto" that Ide would do well to excise if the production ever tours is the loose-limbed beach section, in which the dancers mimic crabs, seagulls (with a precise "pecking" neck action), fish and for all I know, seaweed in various stages of decomposition. This cute overview of bodies on a beach, to an appropriate soundtrack recorded at the seaside, was stretched too painfully and for too long, with each dancer doing individual exercises that closely resembled studio work.

The best thing about Ide continues to be the power of the work he creates for a group of dancers in fast unison movement. In "Furimukuto," this was delayed to the end, when he sent 14 dancers in black skirts careering like ground-bound ravens from the back to the front of the stage to a driven soundtrack of Arabic, possibly Algerian or Lebanese, music. He is one of the very few Japanese choreographers who can pack a lot of energy, which explodes almost instantly, into dance of direction that simply gobbles up space like a whirling supernova.

But now, for Ide, it's time to stop looking over his shoulder at his golden oldies -- and time to get back to the drawing board.