Tonight: Disappear Here blends dance and video at the ATLAS Black Box in Boulder

Dance is a hard sell. A lot of people don't really understand it, nor do they desire to, and many of those who say they do like to stick to the basics: Tap Dogs, So You Think You Can Dance, once a year, The Nutcracker. But, really, that is just the very tip of the ho-hum corner of an enormous iceberg. Disappear Here, a collaborative performance beginning tonight at 8 p.m. in the ATLAS Black Box Studio on the CU-Boulder campus, on the other hand, takes audiences on a skinny dip below the surface to expose the deeper depth of dance, and where it can take an audience. Two very different yet equally modern-thinking dance groups, Nathan Montgomery's Syzygy Butoh and the Kim Olsen/Sweet Edge modern dance company joined forces with videographers Ana Baer Carrillo and Caren McCaleb for the production, which combines real-time choreography with a 360-degree videoscape using footage of the troupes dancing in nature, making full use of an ultra-modern venue, one of the few in the nation that could afford the collaborators the level of technology needed to stage Disappear Here. "The audience will not be viewing this from the usual proscenium," Montgomery notes. "We'll actually be dancing from the ceiling down and projecting video 360 degrees at the same time, so they'll really be immersed in the media. It'll be like a dreamscape." The sense-surrounding dance will be performed four times in ATLAS, on Fridays and Saturdays at 8, through September 25. Admission is $13 to $20.