Continu at Peter Jay Sharp Building

German dance-theater savant Sasha Waltz has turned the stage into a flame-licked apocalypse (Gezeiten, 2010 Next Wave), a teeming humanoid specimen box (Körper, 2002 Next Wave), and a sun-soaked underwater playground (Dido & Aeneas, Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg and Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin). For the austere Continu, visual spectacle morphs into vibrational awe as the dissonant ecstasy of composer Edgard Varèse’s 1927 orchestral piece Arcana—bookended by works by Iannis Xenakis, Claude Vivier, and Mozart—takes center stage. In a maelstrom of torqued torsos and writhing limbs, 21 dancers scramble to skirt the blows of Varèse’s modernist grenades, using big gesture as both shield and kinetic sanctuary.