Headlong Dance Theater is an apt name for the venture of David Brick, Andrew Simonet an Amy Smith, who use plunging, plummeting, and somersaulting as a basic means of communication. Now the Philadelphia-based trio has nervily dived into Ulysses: Sly Uses of a Book by James Joyce - borrowing Joycean strategies such as the fostering of multiple interpretations and shifts in style and perspective. The piece is dedicated to the late Richard and Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull and, like those two, the five performers use improvisational elements wittily and with verve. The result, while hardly matching Joyce in power, is clever and charming - although a tactic occasionally gets ground down through overuse.

Themes of witnessing and recording run through Ulysses (at Dance Theater Workshop in October). As it starts, the performers sit at the edges of the space beneath bare lightbulbs. Some take notes, one types, others shoot photographs or record sounds. While Christy Lee rearranges herself fascinatingly on the huge white sheet that covers the floor, Simonet asks questions, like "What's in her mouth?" which she answers ("Dirt"). Lee as a cuckolding wife, her florist husband (Brick), and her fireman lover (Simonet) are contemporary echoes of Joyce's Molly Bloom, Leopold Bloom, and Blazes Boylan. Later Smith, with her Carol Burnett looks, gets unwound from her skirt by Simonet, and he reiterates the raunchy motif of hauling her in by sticking his foot between her thighs. Unlike a Joyce character, a Headlonger tends to talk while turning somebody else upside down or lugging that person around or removing another's foot from around his or her neck.

Other little scenes slip in - hinting at confused desires and muddled relationship. The occasional vaudeville team of Nicole Canuso and Heather Murphy directs or manipulates the others, as well as stepping out in perky dances. To underscore the slipperiness of words, a dancers stands with a bucket over his or her head while another person improvises a dance and a third describes it into a tape recorder (sometimes very fancifully). The one under the bucket then interprets the taped description.

The evening's last moments are the tenderest. Smith kneels by the slumbering Brick, walking her fingers over his body. In the end, they all frisk as the white sheet balloons around them like the sea.