Miki Liszt took the audience on an intriguing voyage for about the first two-thirds of "Touch," presented by the Miki Liszt Dance Company on Friday night at the Bessie Schönberg Theater. It has been said that dance is derived from natural movement. Ms. Liszt, a modern dance choreographer from Charlottesville, Va., takes walks, pauses, slow and gentle collisions and standing still and makes them suggest purpose and meditative thought. No one touches anyone else for a long time in "Touch," except for small cuffs that spin the recipient into motion. At first, the six men and women have as little to do with one another as the pedestrians moving behind the dancers, projected on the stretched white fabric surface of three freestanding sculptures.

A voice murmurs phrases built around the word "Touch," an unneccessary wrinkle that seems a bow to fashion. But the choreography creates the effect of layered and refracted realities. The performers are wanderers through life in dance that replicates the apparent aimlessness of everyday activity, in the process heightening and intensifying the unfocused behavior so that it becomes both a state of being in all ordinariness as well as a commentary, simultaneous and intense, on that state. Life flows in a logical, well-ordered stream of consciousness.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the dancers draw close as a group and in smaller clusters. They begin to react to one another, the setting and their own unspecified emotions. The music turns foreboding as the strollers link arms. An odd-woman-out tries jealously to insert herself into the passing couples in a chain of changing partners. Bodies tangle. There is an understated fight. A man clutches himself as if in wrenching pain. A woman stands alone, thoughtfully. And on it goes.

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Ms. Liszt and her dancers were full of personality. They included Katharine Birdsall, Glenn Harris, Anne Megibow, Greta von Kirchmann, Brad Stoller, and Suzette Buck.