The body doesn’t lie, said Martha Graham, famously. Baloney, says Victoria Marks, quietly but no less firmly, “I think we can lie pretty effectively,” says Marks, 52, a choreography professor at UCLA.

Marks has a big beef with concert dance—all of it, ballet, modern, jazz—and its complicity in keeping us dumb and silent. Entwined with dance since she fell in love with ballet as a child, Marks condemns what she sees as its prevailing shallowness, its preoccupation with making effort look easy, with masking pain, with seducing and soothing its public into a state of bliss.

“This dance was a series of rescue attempts,” she says of her probing, quarrelsome new piece, “Not About Iraq,” “I wanted to rescue it from my own contempt.”

Of course, some of us happen to like the sweet seduction that dance offers, thank you very much. The youthfulness and vitality it celebrates. What’s wrong with a little escapism? Better than thinking about politics or, uh, the war...

We’re not thinking enough about the war, Marks say—and we’re not doing enough about it, either.

“I feel very critical of myself, because I don’t know how to act as a citizen,” she says. “How do I really know what’s going on? What is the truth? If you don’t think you understand what’s happening, how can you act?”

To find out how art and civic duty mix, Marks did what you won’t see the higher-profile dance-makers do: She plunged into the thankless, largely forsaken arena of political art. But the marvel of “Not About Iraq” is its ringing clarity. This is a work of quiet fueled by the way it raises disturbing questions, pared-down and unsentimental.

... contd.