“You can’t roll,” Rodney Bell taunted his fellow dancers last night during a performance of David Dorfman’s piece, “Light Shelter.” Fellow dancers from the mixed-ability AXIS Dance Company responded to Bell’s challenge by somersaulting across the bare stage at the Colony Theatre. “But you can’t roll like this,” Bell retorted as he zipped past them, flipping the relationship between ability and disability as effortlessly as he flipped his wheelchair up and down.

“Light Shelter” closed the Florida Dance Association’s WinterFest [UPDATE: and the joint FDA/Tigertail project DanceAble, see comment below] in a double bill with Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos’s “A Light Conversation,” a duet set to a BBC radio show about the philosopher Kirkegaard. Where “Conversation” explored the duality of mind and body — two bodies moving together and apart as the philosopher contemplates love and ethics — “Shelter” demonstrated the relationship between body and technology.

What are the abilities that allows us to dance? Can they be enhanced by wheels? Deepened by abstract notions? Both pieces relied largely on spoken text in place of music, suggesting that, however able, the dancing body represents and exceeds what words convey.