Subcircle's new "Still Unknown," performed in a series of gleaming white installations in the Ice Box Projects Space, a former frozen-fish factory, posed the specific question of what is still unknown in an age of boundless information. Conceived by Niki and Jorge Cousineau, the hourlong piece was constructed to be seen from two perspectives by two groups of audience members.

The occasional faint sound of the other, invisible audience laughing was enjoyable, as was a pretty sequence of a woman flying on a trapeze through projected colors. Best was the discovery of images on a small monitor turned away from the audience on a bed table in a rumpled room, complete with male sleeper, an unexpected throwaway. But as with most dance and performance pieces that unspool in a created rather than found environment, the visuals were mostly antiseptic, as was the dancing and would-be ironic commentary by the performers.

Headlong's new piece, "Cell," choreographed by Andrew Simonet, Amy Smith and David Brick, was one of the festival's most talked-about works. Essentially a 45-minute walking tour of a small, old section of Philadelphia, each "performance" was scheduled by appointment for an individual audience member (given the code name Buzzz) who received instructions by cellphone calls from a mysterious "McKenna," code name Buzz, on where to walk and what to look at. The mostly silent guides, who sprung up unannounced along the route, included a pleasant woman sitting in the second floor of a bookstore; a woman in a large white hat who spoke only Spanish, very fast; and a male dancer whose smiles seemed reassuringly unscripted.

Capering across cobblestones, whirling down a street in a wheeled office chair and swinging around a lamppost are not for everyone. I did try to be "present in the moment," as the bookstore woman unnecessarily instructed. I would have liked to stop to admire the burnished old brick buildings rising from those cobblestones. I had already sat in the park across from the bookstore and watched the passers-by, though without the accompaniment of a ringing cellphone. But "Cell" did confirm the general resiliency and good-naturedness of dancers, who here included three performers who used my halting moves and gestures to make interesting choreography of their own in the finale, in a humming, soft-lighted and sweet-smelling "hive."

What then is the "still unknown"? "Lie to Me and Shorter Stories," a new hourlong piece conceived by Amanda Miller, Tobin Rothlein and Antony Rizzi of the Miro Dance Theater, provided one answer. One unknown might be what is reliably unknowable in art, like the churning, contradictory truths and images that splashed and pushed across the tiny, bare stage of the Cinema at Penn like the fountain water and greenery in a segment of the dance's vivid, stylish video component.

Ms. Miller and Mr. Rizzo worked long years with William Forsythe, the dance world's favorite intellectual, and their influences here were unsurprisingly brainy, including the writings of Franz Kafka and French film techniques. And "Lie to Me" - an Almodóvarish title - burrowed into the displacement of travel and the contemplation of lies and truth. Performed by Ms. Miller, Rick Callender, Kristin Osler, Melissa Toogood and Andre Zachery, "Lie to Me" created a gnarled, invitingly impenetrable-seeming world with too many mysteries to savor for thoughts of the unknown or present moment to arise.