The star of Laurie Berg’s “The Mineralogy of Objects” is an inflatable sex doll named Tanya. She appears midway through the 55-minute dance, which made its debut on Thursday at Danspace Project, in line with Ms. Berg and the three other female dancers who make up the cast. They toss Tanya around and try to keep her aloft like a beach ball. They engage her in an absurdly acrobatic ballroom duet. They roll with her on the ground as she deflates.
This is amusing fun, as is the satire in Tanya’s program bio and the moment when the dancers replicate the sunburst image from George Balanchine’s “Apollo,” including Tanya’s limbs in the array of arabesques. But much else about the show is less clear in tone.
There’s a lot of dance in it. Karl Scholz’s score lays down a heavy, metronomic beat that changes texture but rarely relents. After the beat goes quiet, the women pick it up again with their footfalls, and throughout they worship it like dancers in a club. There’s something funny, though, about their manner and their moves. They reminded me of Pee-wee Herman or Devo. (Was it a melodic hint of “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads that made me think of the 1980s?)
Even before Tanya shows up, the nerdiness suggests a joke — Ms. Berg has a good deadpan face — and yet the dance is constructed intricately, with a sophisticated interplay of independence and unison. It’s hard to know what to take seriously.
It seems likely that Ms. Berg has the objectification of women on her mind. Tanya mutely raises that issue, as perhaps do the jumpsuits the dancers wear, reminiscent of prison garb except for the individualization of their striped prints.
Less evident is what any of this has to do with “Variétés de Minéralogie Object,” the 1939 assemblage by Joseph Cornell from which Ms. Berg takes her title and which she reproduces in the program. In that box and in this dance, female figures are set in a line. In all of Cornell’s boxes and in this dance, curios are arranged with care. But Cornell’s work effects a magical alchemy missing in Ms. Berg’s. Tanya steals the show.