By Kathy Valin
Enquirer contributor

The Contemporary Dance Theater's annual "Choreographers Without Companies" event at the Aronoff Center's Jarson-Kaplan Theater Friday was a terrific lineup of six engaging modern dance works and plenty of fine dancing.

The annual season-ending production featured works by local choreographers with casts assembled for the performances.

Judith Mikita's "At Martin's Suggestion" drew an appreciative roar from the crowd of 300.

Set to Samuel Barber's "Summer Music for Wind Quintet," the piece was a humorous and imaginative interaction between a live woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn and bassoon) from the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, and seven dancers, including Mikita. They were dressed in tunics and tights in pastel hues of purple, lilac, green, blue and red. At first the dancers held to their side of the stage, but by the end of the piece, they were swarming over and around the musicians, who played blithely on. Mikita's movement ideas abounded. Turns, jumps, handstands and runs occasionally coalesced into jazzy, carefree partnerings and formations. This piece is a winner that deserves to be seen again.

Ashli Eiseman's delightful "Pushing Limits" featured seven dancers (including Eiseman) who brought the Latin rhythms of a selection of recorded Brazilian music to life. To the notes of an accordion, the dancers, in black and hot pink, began to interact, activating each other one by one. As every part of their bodies, from feet to hips to head, swayed in time, they formed harmonious patterns and partnerships that assembled and reassembled seamlessly. A whipping head or a spin into and out of the floor had a soft ease to it. Handstands and somersaults came and went in the blink of an eye, so naturally were they incorporated into the stream of movement.

Poets Karen Carcia and James D'Agostino alternately shared the stage with three lithe dancers in Carrie Rohman's "About Beginnings." The dancers, in simple pants and halter tops of yellow, orange and red, moved through graceful jumps in attitude (one leg bent behind), weight-sharing partnerships, and details like a foot caressing the floor. Though the language of their movement was not as explicit as the text, it evoked its own mood of retrospective exploration.

"So Little Time," a three-part work from Diane Germaine, Jason Hatcher and Cheryl Wallace had haunting onstage singing in Greek and English from Betsy Lippitt. Mikita and Renee McCafferty, as a dying woman, enacted the most emotionally wrenching dancing of the evening, in Wallace's choreography.

Two more light-hearted dances rounded out the program: Susan Moser's "Matisse Speaks" (with Henry Cepluch reading as Matisse) and the wild program closer "Peleton" by Jeri Deckard Gatch, in which a pack of racing bicyclists, in mime and reality, filled the stage.