Wil Swanson's simple moves.

The choreographer Wil Swanson called his show at Danspace Project late last month "Wild Human Poetry." The two very likable dances on the bill were none of these things?neither wild nor poetic nor particularly human. But they didn't pretend to be, either.

They offered none of the allusion and metaphor that people have in mind when they speak, somewhat breathlessly, of dance's "poetry." When the steps were mesmerizing, the cause wasn't wildness and whimsy, but systematic accumulation. And the dancers, moving with matter-of-fact dedication, were instruments of shape and motion more than sentient beings, human or otherwise.

Dance stretches along a continuum. On one end is easily readable gesture (shrug of shoulders = "I dunno"). In the long, rich middle, the steps don't speak so much as imply (here's the "poetry"), shadowed by psychological suggestion and existential conundrum. Dance emerges from that underground passage into the light of just-the-facts-ma'am motion, where an audience's pleasure and insight are mainly perceptual and kinetic. Here, Swanson sets up camp.

He keeps esthetic company with the likes of Donald "The Box" Judd, Carl "Bricks" Andre and the composer Steve "Loops" Reich, forerunner of avant-garde turntablism. Like these other artists, the choreographer restricts himself to plain stuff because the point of a work is not its ingredients, but the architecture of its creation. Bach minus the grace notes.

Swanson's premiere this year, cubic legroom, begins with three dancers arrayed in a row. In unison, they each swing a leg, pivot the torso, swing an arm, tumble to the ground. It is nothing at all: a few bricks laid flat on the floor, chalk lines on a wall, a simple pulse. But then one dancer rolls off the floor onto the sidelines while another, from the other side of the room, rolls on. Our brains click into pattern-detecting mode.

The movement phrases grow longer and the rectangular space more populated, now with nine dancers falling in and out of phase. A woman begins a phrase that a man, on the other side of the space, is finishing; half the cast rises one by one from the floor as the other half descends. The dance shifts and pulses into being as you watch. You sense the presence of a larger pattern than you can yet fathom. The systems freaks in the audience (like me) drool in happy anticipation.

Eventually, the dancers make two vertical lines at center stage and begin a tumultuous braiding pattern that culminates very suddenly in their returning to their two lines. A sudden streak of pure space appears, zooming straight down the middle of the stage toward us. You don't expect to go from bricks and mortar to this piercing Red Sea parting, even though you've been watching the dance's methodical unfolding from the start.

I've said Swanson's kind of art?often called minimalism, to the disgruntlement of many of its practitioners?isn't poetic; this turns out to mean it takes the direct route to God. If I wanted to find Him, my guide might be Reich's methodically sublime Music for 18 Musicians, not Swanson's cubic legroom?not quite.

Because, first, except for the sequence that ends with the parting of the space, the dance's structure isn't quite rich or translucent enough to justify its plain materials. Second, the fine dancers occasionally remind you that they are people, with worries and foibles, not simply bodies moving in Zen time. When they fumble a step?usually a partnering maneuver?I wonder what they're thinking (probably a variation of "Damn!"). Their inevitable humanity pulls me right out of the trance of the dance.

A Donald Judd box never gets you speculating about its feelings. That's part of the point of picking a box as one's primary material. None of us is as plain as a box.

Which is the nice thing about us, isn't it? So perhaps there is something sinister about creating an architecture not from notes or boxes, but from people. On the other hand, the dancers look happy enough?mostly absorbed in their work, as am I. So maybe it's okay.