The five performers, along with images of their families -- both conjured through words and projected on the screens -- provide the meat and the muscle of the show: recollections of the small humiliations and imaginary crimes of childhood, of the teachers that made a difference, of the tiny details that make a life unique.
The most ''dancerly" of the lot is Rachael Jungels (Dorothy's daughter), who tells of her voyage from teenage vamp (her boyfriend from the clubs turned out to be a pimp) to Juilliard graduate with jazzy vigor intermingled with classical steps and an occasional Martha Graham-style contraction. Her brother Aaron Jungels (also credited with the video production) is a lanky, bright-eyed raconteur who bikes around the stage as he tells of the 300-mile cycling trip he (at age 10) set off on with his brother (just 13) with his parents' blessing, and the pet chickens that he and his siblings gleefully decapitated for dinner, once they realized how much fun chopping heads off could be.
Marvin Novogrodski, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, swings from pathos to comedy with impeccable timing, now reciting the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, as he hails his ''Bubby," now recalling dozens of classmates by name as he auditions for the school play or makes a perfect catch on the baseball field.
Sokeo Ros, whose family fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia for a refugee camp in Thailand and then life in America, is a compact, graceful hip-hopper who recalls abject poverty and beatings for multitudinous transgressions (cutting his hair without permission was one). Yet he beams when describing his father's love of his baby girl.
And Bravell Gracia Smith, the son of an African-American artist who had to take on his father's responsibilities when the latter became ill, wrenches your heart with the story of his family's bankruptcy, which put their house on the auction block and left no money for his father's funeral.
Yet what makes ''Home Movies" work is not so much its content as the juxtaposition of its fragments. It is Dorothy Jungels's arrangement of the pieces -- the way she butts a spoken tale up against a celluloid snippet, the way a foxtrot resonates against locking-and-popping behind a fiery scrim, or the facility with which one performer picks up the recollection of another and transports it to a distant place with unfamiliar names -- that makes ''Home Movies" sing.
That melody continuously changes pitch and key as the voices and bodies of the five performers intertwine. The movement vocabulary itself is not terrifically inventive, but it doesn't really matter. It's the movement of the piece as a whole that strikes you where you live.
