When you take in a GroundWorks DanceTheater performance, you can’t miss, as in the case of the dance concert the group put on in Glendale Cemetery last weekend as part of the Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival.

At the end of each piece at the Saturday evening performance, audience members could be heard practically cooing as they said things like, “I really liked that work a lot!” or “Wasn’t that great?” The answer is nearly always “yes” with GroundWorks.

GroundWorks DanceTheater. Photo by Dale Dong

The dance up first was “Before with After,” a work which is arguably founder and artistic director David Shimotakahara’s best work. The work is lush with ballet vocabulary but with a contemporary and free-flowing feel that comes from the introduction of some moves that seemingly could be taken from an energetic yoga class (like the infamous “upward dog” and “bicycle pedal”).

It all works as set to various fugures, partitas and preludes of Johann Sebastian Bach, along with two of the composer’s “Goldberg Variations” and his “French Suite #5.” The dance, as Shimotakahara commented, “acknowledges life’s encounters, steps and crossing in poetic response” to the music.

That it does, as seen mostly in the interaction of dancers to one another – at times playful and youthful, near reverential in other moments, or seemingly showing the strength and stamina it takes to keep going and hold on.

Amy Miller, artistic associate, GroundWorks DanceTheater. Photo from www.cleveland.com

Also on the bill was artistic associate Amy Miller’s brand new work that got its title, “Way Leads to Way,” close in time before its premiere at this performance.

With her choreography, you need to watch – see what the dancers are doing and how they are moving – to get some idea of what’s going on. Maybe that’s just the way with all dance performance really. It’s all visual metaphor of some sort.

Set to an electronic score that ticks away (with moments of thunder sounds added for some emotional changes going on), the dancers seem indeed to be a kind of forceful and fast-paced search for direction, or in her terms, a “way.”

At first the five dancers are poised facing the audience as though lining up for a sprint, a race to somewhere and in a hurry to get there. Other sections seem to be in slow motion, as though the energy taken to sustain, to keep going, preoccupies time and space. And in still others, there is a show of strength, much like there might be to hold onto a relationship or something important. In one sequence, a female dancer is poised against a male dancer in what seems to be an agonizingly difficult strong man (make that woman) move. It’s powerful stuff and a dance work to be studied.

After an intermission, the evening’s performance ended with the upbeat and seemingly frolicking dance set on GroundWorks by famed choreographer Doug Elkins – namely, his “My Hummingbird at the High Line.”

It’s all danceable stuff, set to the far-ranging music from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to a melancholy French-speaking chanteuse’s ballad down to the oratorical music of Friedrich Handel.

Elkins’ work is infused with fun, even when trying to be serious about such stuff as love.