A hush came over the room as two figures under a white sheet emerged, side-stepping like a two-headed ghost across the room. Country music faded into the background and the lights, designed by Portland artist Jeff Forbes, dimmed red. Back and forth, the ghost tiptoed in silence. When it got to one of the downstage-most corners of the room, it turned — revealing a pair of bare buttocks standing side by side.

Drive Wolves Mad, an hour-long duet choreographed and performed by Seattle-based artists Jenny Peterson and Kaitlin McCarthy, had its Portland premiere at Performance Works NW in Southeast Portland on October 18 and 19, co-produced by PWNW. McCarthy costumed the work with fabric designed by Peterson, who also arranged and performed the music sound score. Originally cultivated as part of auxiliary programming for Velocity’s NextFest 2014, the off-kilter, two-dancer show started with a humorous bang. The two often make comedic work under the moniker “The Bonnies,” and have been collaborating on self-described “strange performance works” together in Seattle since 2013.

After sinking to the floor, one of the bare-bottomed ghostly figures darted out of the sheet, completely nude, and skittered off stage. Moments later, the other followed. An orange square of light illuminated downstage right, and a microphone hung limply from the ceiling. When the performers reappeared, they wore pajama pants and neck scarves printed with the repeating image of a face. The dancers engaged in simultaneous movement, rooted in gesture and pedestrian repetition. Their gaze, distinctly outward past the audience, created a barrier between the performer and the viewer, laying the existing space created between each other through lack of acknowledgment.

McCarthy and Petersen delivered a sense of both neutrality and urgency in the dance. Just when the audience was becoming hypnotized by their synchronized movements, the two lifted their scarves over their faces to reveal a face-facade that became their own (think: a photograph of a face printed on fabric and stretched out over theirs — creepy).

They continued to move through the space, guided only by touch, tumbling towards an increasingly humorous tone. At one point, the dancers got so close to the audience that one, perhaps mistakenly or for an extra sprinkle of audience participation, grabbed my shoe. Still dawning their face-like blindfolds, they set out a sheet and atop it, a picnic, complete with white ceramic dishes from the kitchen as their long, blonde faux ponytails — attached to the backs of their masks — swung.

The light physical comedy, a strength of McCarthy and Peterson, continued from there. Bowls of porridge, seemingly a Malt-O-Meal substance, were ladled from a slow-cooker pot (and later tossed out the theater’s front door during a swift cleaning scene) into dishes. The dancers moved and maneuvered with these dishes of hot breakfast cereal before splatting them satirically against the wall.

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This stark moment punctuated the otherwise leering Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears themes, permeating the music and scene, foreshadowing the evening’s darker tone to come. A beauty hung in the silence as the porridge dripped, welcoming to the performance a nod toward magical realism that can often live in simplicity.

Throughout Drive Wolves Mad, McCarthy and Peterson play with the mundane, unzipping it to expose the boisterous, and twisting “the regular” into slightly unsettling irregular forms. This Lynchian way of approaching a work can often lend otherwise tightly executed choreography and motif an ominous air. The dancing, which may seem simple at first glance, was executed with clean unison by clearly trained modern dancers deeply rooted in Seattle’s distinctly postmodern scene. Later, after they removed their masks, the performers’ intention of movement became even clearer; tactile, embodied, and satisfying in their use of repetition.

A red square appeared in the space again, and the sheet, originally used as a picnic blanket, was tossed into the center. A dancer grabbed the hanging microphone, humming and singing “Run From Me” by Timbre Timbre. Both performers then harmonized with the music, one later succumbing to twitching heavily as she traversed the floor. A buildup of music, movement, performed effort, and facial expression contrasted with the robotic, pedestrian, and controlled choreography of the piece’s beginning. Later, the sheet returned almost as a slingshot and tug-of-war rope between the performers. Whether the two were meant to signify friends, lovers, adversaries, or complex consciousness was not particularly clear, but their ambiguity as narrative vessels remained consistent.

Drive Wolves Mad is an abstract exploration of pop-art-meets-fairytale. From classic stories involving porridge, bears, and wolves, to allusion to Rapunzel’s long hair and punctuating lyrical tunes, McCarthy and Peterson blend social critique with comedy to pose a question to their viewer. Sexuality, sensuality, and gaze are themes brought to mind by the recurring presence of nudity, while concepts of gender, cliché, appearance, and binary are dissected through deconstruction.

Despite its messaging that moves from dissociation into empowerment, there is something soft about the work. The dancers exchanged prolonged eye contact when they first noticeably saw and understood each other, coming into their own while dancing a low-tempo cardiovascular phrase to “Take My Breath Away,” made famous by Berlin when recorded for the movie Top Gun.

The end of the performance came almost as suddenly as it began, and while the ghost did not return, the audience was given the surprise of being addressed directly by the dancers. “Reach under your chairs,” they instructed. Taped underneath the black seats were white masks with the eyes cut out.

The audience put on the masks and watched the remaining dancer-on-dancer-on-sheet trio through these two eye holes. Sightlines were limited, though we could not help but look around to witness a sea of paper-white faces around us as the music ended for a final time. The dancers took a humble bow and the audience trickled into the night, leaving their new paper faces behind.

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