For Simonet, who teaches dance at a private school in New Jersey, the initial idea for their piece, which wittily and harshly illustrates the rise and fall of a pop star, began in his classroom. His students started imitating moves from Backstreet Boys videos; Simonet was riveted. "I'm fascinated by the split in our culture, where people dance all the time but the art-dance world is marginal," he says. "The people making movement for the Backstreet Boys produce the most widely seen choreography in the history of dance! There's something sad about that, but it's also interesting."

Brick and Smith share a slightly more cynical view of the MTV generation. "Andrew doesn't think that pop culture is inherently destructive," Smith says. "I feel much more negative about it. I think of pop culture as being a subset of consumer culture." Brick, who grew up in a deaf family, approached the topic with more emotional distance. "I didn't listen to music or go to movies until I was 19," he says. "Andrew and Amy really remember being teenagers. But I do believe that no matter how crass our culture is, human beings are profound. So there's a spiritual quest going on in this piece-the expression of this culture contains in it deep questions about appearance and beauty and self and acceptance and love."

Framed by composer Rick Henderson's remixes of pop songs by Spears and the Backstreet Boys, Inferno features a Spears character at its centerpiece. She rapidly rises to the top and crashes just as quickly, her breakdown facilitated by a Greek chorus of dancers who shout things like "I think she sucks!" and perform reconstructed movement lifted from music videos. One segment was inspired by watching videos with the sound muted.

"In one Backstreet Boys song, the body language of the people in the crowd is angry and intense and cold and really strident," Brick recalls. "There's all this wincing and fisted hands slamming down in the air. But the lyrics go, 'I would never do anything to hurt you. I'll always be here for you.' So it's all about fidelity and love, but when you turn the sound off, you see another world. We learned the gestures and put different music to it. For me, the process was like excavating the movement for layers of actual meaning."

Of course, to behold such hokey movement vocabulary-in all of its mechanical and repetitive simplicity-in an experimental dance setting is odd. Simonet's goal all along, however, has been to reveal the movement in music videos as a contemporary folk art. "To move like the Backstreet Boys is really the least cool thing you can do in the art world," he admits. "But for us, it's both a simple and very difficult process of taking what's actually happening in culture and throwing it through a funny lens that both condenses it and shakes it up."

The work was first performed a year ago at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, after Spears had peaked in popularity. But such a factor feels irrelevant to the threesome; to Simonet, that reality even underscores their point. "I love that!" he exclaims. "We premiered it after she had her first little meltdown in Mexico City and walked offstage after singing only a few songs; there was a riot and she said, 'I'm taking a break.' Her albums were still huge, but if you thought about it, you just knew: This is the peak. Now when you see the piece, you really do have the feeling of 'God-Britney Spears! I almost totally forgot about her!' You're almost in a better setting to get into the mood of it."