Dance takes audience into the darkness

“Nox’’ (Latin for “night,’’ and evoking other darknesses) takes you out of this world, and then back into it — bruised but oddly ebullient. That’s because it reverberates with layers, scattering light as in a hologram. It tells the story — in words, music, projected drawings, and movement — of the troubled life and “unexpected’’ death of Carson’s older brother. He’d run away from home to avoid jail, lived under assumed names, and married more than once. The text shuttles between Catullus’s elegy, in Latin, and Carson’s quirky English, slapping definitions of each word in the elegy against her glistening thoughts about her brother’s fate.

Central to Carson’s modus operandi is how she sees translating: She says she has come “to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. . . . Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person. . . .’’ And just as she translates the classics to English, Mitchell, a leading dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, translates her now searing, now plain, now made-up words into movement that bridges past with present.

Choreography here is translation through inhabitation: Mitchell and Silas Riener, also a Cunningham dancer, crawl into the words, the spaces between the words, the rhythm of the lines. Riener as the brother, once a “starry lad,’’ scrabbles against the theater’s glass walls, frantic to escape. They both flop their chests to a side wall, then flip and flop again, while Carson and collaborator Robert Currie scribble under a projector and flash red gashes across their faces. Later, Riener lies supine, and then up against the wall, as Mitchell pumps his chest — a metaphor for the impossibility of our inability to restore life. Only Riener, finally, can inflate/deflate his being on his own.