At first, I thought, there’s no way to get a grip on a string of pop songs with a different dancer in each. But by the end of the first set, Ladies Night Out, things were beginning to add up. The songs, by the Beatles, Randy Newman, and Bonnie Raitt, all spoke of disappointment — maybe in love, maybe not — and a resigned commitment to going on regardless. Audra Carabetta seemed the purest of all the dancers who followed, stepping back along a diagonal, alternating between mechanical pacing and relaxed swings and spirals. RuthAnn Callen and Kate Cross followed the same diagonal path. Their phrases took different shapes from Carabetta’s, but they might have grown from some of the same motifs. I remember Callen as tall and spiky, Cross as dynamic and determined.

In Radio Daze, a tribute to Woody Allen, Lorraine Chapman was like a kid at a small-town carnival. Gawky and appealing, she tilted off-balance, poked her elbows out, stomped around with flexed feet, to “They Didn’t Believe Me” played by Red Nickles’s swing band.

Randy Newman recordings backed up nearly half the dances on the program. Newman’s sophisticated, often mordant poetry, sung in his indolent, faux folksy style, slides over you stealthily, and I think it’s the combination of innocence, nostalgia, disillusion, and irony that must appeal to Schulkind. None of his dances conveyed Newman’s actual words, but all of them suggested sensibilities in conflict.

Jim Viera seemed pulled into introspection in Guilty. Randy Newman sang, “Takes a whole lotta medicine for me to pretend that I’m somebody else.” Ruth Bronwen couldn’t resist breaking out of her contained, small phrases with exuberant leaps and gallops in Rollin’. Newman sang, “Ain’t gonna worry no more.” Jeanine Durning struggled and scrambled in Job, to Newman’s bitterly agnostic “God’s Song.”

Allemande, Schulkind’s new dance for Liz Waterhouse, had no words to accompany it, and it showed off her musical range. To piano and cello selections by Valenti, Vivaldi, and Corelli (otherwise unidentified), Waterhouse worked with classical clarity at first, then slowed to a melancholy middle section. In the lively final part, the music at times seemed to propel her into bursts of locomotion, but she never gave in entirely to its rhythm.

Clarence Brooks treated us to a rare modern-dance classic, Talley Beatty’s 1947 Mourner’s Bench. The piece constituted one section of Beatty’s early work Southern Landscape, which is drawn from the sad aftermath of the Civil War. During Reconstruction, freed slaves were thrown off the land and persecuted by Southern racists. The funerals of lynching victims had to be held at night, and in secret.

Although Beatty’s main teacher was Katherine Dunham, his concert choreography also reflected the politically engaged work of the left-wing modern dancers of the 1930s. He set Mourner’s Bench to the gospel hymn “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” sung by a concert choir, when he revived Southern Landscape in the early 1990s. (The original score, by Elie Siegmeister, had been lost.) The dance translates into physical metaphors a survivor’s feelings of grief and despair, the tension between earthly sorrow and a longing for peace. (Southern Landscape, African-American choreography, and a whole lot more get discussed in a fascinating new book, A Game for Dancers — Performing Movement in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960, by dance writer Gay Morris.)

Clarence Brooks inches along a plain wooden bench, slides around it, balances on it, reaches upward, and finally levitates, his legs gripping the bench but his upper torso lifted and floating. After this brief image of transcendence, he rolls off the bench onto the floor in an image of death.

The current repertory has so few examples of modern dances from the past. Mourner’s Bench was important for us to see, not just as a token of historic humanism. The program supplied an odd note about it, sketching in the racial background but casting the dance itself as “a spiritual struggle through muscular interplay between a male dancer and a bench.” I guess this description is supposed to reassure the audience that a 60-year-old dance is okay today, when physical prowess is supreme. Mourner’s Bench shouldn’t be trivialized in this way.

Special dance events of another kind are being presented in the Boston area by Java Kawistara!, three dancers and a musician from Central and West Java. I saw them two weekends back at the Dance Complex, where they’ll give another show this Friday, June 16. They’ll also appear at the Cambridge River Festival on June 17 at 2:30 pm.

Indonesian dance takes many forms — after all, the country is an immense archipelago of big and small islands. Its hundreds of languages, diverse ancient and modern cultures, and multiple religions have somehow kept their autonomy, syncretized with one another, and fed into a national identity that emerged in the mid 20th century and is still evolving.