Dance NOW! Miami and the Little Haiti Cultural Center hosted the first Miami Open Stage, an ongoing series of open-format performances dedicated to promoting and nurturing the works of emerging and established South Florida-based choreographers. Last Friday’s event featured works-in-progress and complete works by Diego Salterini, Constance McIntyre, Pioneer Winter, Hannah Baumgarten and Christine Beggs.

The evening began with “Mitosis.” Dance NOW! Miami Artistic Director Salterini choreographed this gender-neutral — the dancers represented a divided cell — science-inspired duet. During the question and answer session, Salterini revealed that the genesis for the piece began with a piece of music he heard by Dakota Suite & Emanuele Errante. After he heard the music, he put it away for a few weeks and began to choreograph the piece based on his memory of the music.

From there, Salterini let the dancers find their musicality within the music. When he noticed the two dancers pulling and pushing away, looking like a cell that was trying to separate, he knew that’s where he wanted to go with the piece. Costumed in skintight silver leotards, the dancers, Megan Holsinger and Quilvio Rodriquez, delicately realized Salterini’s mitotic vision.

The second performance of the evening was “Others” by Constance McIntyre. Inspired by an experience at the Miami Dade County Women’s Prison for a presentation by Arts Spring, McIntyre shaped her piece around the theme of revenge. Thus, the costumes were flowing, one-sleeve red gowns with gold trim. The dancers’ movements were precise, determined, yet fiercely controlled. Anguish radiated from the faces of the dancers. The spirits filled the space as they moved across the stage. All of this flowed from an audio recording of original text by McIntyre and found text from the Arts Spring performance and a song by Isaac Johnson.

In contrast to McIntyre’s work, Pioneer Winter’s work-in-progress “Mother-Son(days)” was a duet performed by Winter (as the son) and dancer Ana Bolt (as the mother). Winter choreographed “Mother-Son(days)” to raw, unedited diary entries written when he was 10, shortly after his mother passed away, and to his mother’s own diary entries when she was a care-free 17-year-old girl before Winter was born. Spoken word artist Marie Whitman brought the diary entries to life with her nuanced live reading while the dancers moved.

As Whitman alternated reading the diary of mother and son, the dancers alternated, too, and moved only when she gave voice to their character. Energetic and frantic, emotional and perfectly contrived yet fluid are the thoughts that came to mind while Bolt and Winter moved. Each dancer captured the heart of each diary entry. Each movement was a step back in time to a place of innocence and irony. After the performance, Winter revealed that most of his movements were improvised.

I missed the next two pieces of the night —“Unburden” by Hannah Baumgarten, Dance NOW! Miami artistic director, and “Precipice” by Christine Beggs. However, I caught the final piece, “Three Moments in Time” by Diego Salterini. “Three Moments in Time” was a sensual, fast-paced performance that showed the passage of time between a couple from the first date to the honeymoon and then their 10th anniversary. The dancers, Dariel Milan and Cristiane Silva, convinced me with their provocative choreography. They never took their eyes off of each other. Their movements were fiery and passionate. Authentic. Real. As if the two were the lovers they were portraying.

For more information on the next “Miami Open Stage,” contact Baumgarten at Dance NOW! Miami.