White Bird regularly brings high quality contemporary ballet and dance troupes to Portland, but they outdid themselves recently with Radical System Art The Vancouver, B.C. outfit has long made dance-theater works that challenge the alienation baked into this corporate, mechanized and digitized world, on subjects like business success, self-help and extreme fitness. But RSA's newest piece, "Momentum of Isolation" was a stunning departure from modern dance norms.

Group founder and artistic director Shay Kuebler opened the show at PSU's Lincoln Hall, playing the office worker stuck with stamping and calculator tasks, with only his potted plant for company. Trained in capoeira and hip hop as well as more traditional modern dance moves, Kuebler bashed and crashed his way through the first scene, then journeyed "home" to watch an offstage TV. Elastic tethers pulled him forwards and backwards, as he clowned like a horizontal marionette. It was the audience's first taste of this "feeling-expressed-as-action" that went into overdrive when the other seven performers were on stage.