Fusion: the word conjures up culinary experiments of ginseng and cream, raspberries and horseradish, new combinations served in boutique restaurants created by star chefs. In its best incarnation, the new tastes delight and surprise; in its worst, they sicken. Avalon Theatre of e/Motion’s Movin’ Macbeth, billed as “a theatre and dance fusion,” is flavorful and piquant. At times inconsistent, it is always intriguing. Nobody who loves Shakespeare should miss it.

Though its title suggests a pop kinship with Billy Joel’s Broadway review Movin’ Out, Avalon Theatre of e/motion’s Movin’ Macbeth doesn’t include tap dancing soldiers in Birnam Woods (though that might be interesting). Movin’ Macbeth would be right at home at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s the kind of avant-garde experimental piece that is easy to mock. But its endeavor to blend theatrical forms evokes the work of such theatre and dance visionaries as Pina Bausch, Tadashi Suzuki, Martha Graham and Ann Bogart. Its director, Andrew T. Carter, recently assisted auteur director Ariane Mnouchkine at her Thé âtre du Soleil (not to be confused with the Cirque du Soleil, another animal altogether).

Shakespeare’s language lends itself surprisingly seamlessly to chants and dance, and the movement in turn underscores the powerful inevitability woven into Shakespeare’s plot. The music, often incidental but occasionally in the forefront, is by Yugoslavian composer Ljiljana Jovanovic (Jovanovic is participating in a workshop at HERE on July 16^th to discuss using dance composition principles in composing music, and in a post-performance discussion on July 17^th).

Macbeth is a particularly good choice as a platform for this experiment since it is Shakespeare’s shortest play, one of his darkest, with a story of treachery, murder, guilt and fate that includes witchcraft, prophecy and madness. In this dark world, repetitive movements and undulating walks add seasoning to the story without overwhelming it. Verdi discovered this when he adapted Macbeth into an opera, as did Vasiliev when making the play into a ballet for the Bolshoi. Director Andrew T. Carter and Dramaturg Celia Braxton’s creation is not so much adapted from Shakespeare’s play as built upon it. Shakespeare’s language is present, if at times delivered unconventionally.

The moody space is set as you enter the performance space at HERE arts center: red apples sit inexplicably on the chairs. Percussive clicks and discordant chords emanate from backstage, and occasionally a woman’s voice, also from backstage, lets out a musical sigh. The apples’ significance is clarified later in the show, but the quixotic presence of a piece of fruit on one’s chair exemplifies Avalon Theatre of e/motion’s thoughtful attempt at creating a whole theatre experience for their audiences. Ellen Blum’s scenic design is wonderfully creepy and lovely; twisted cloth columns double as trees and pillars, and abstractly painted backdrops add depth and color yet allow shadows to appear behind them. The three witches first appear hunched over and covered with green painted cloths; they move along the floor like strange speaking rocks. Their first “All hail Macbeth” is spooky without gothic cliché. They chirp and shudder on the ground, making percussive noises with their mouths, and blend into the abstract canvas walls of the set, evoking the fierce power and terror of the natural world, and something of its beauty too.

This eerie mood is interrupted by Duncan (Laura Walczak) whose soldiers report the outcome of the battle in which Macbeth became a hero. When the witches reappear , they stand and remove the cloths, revealing three dark-robed young women (played by Rachel Scott, Krista John Astarita, and the particularly sinuous Bricine Mitchell) who advance on Macbeth (John Patrick Higgins) slowly and menacingly (to the backstage accompaniment of Ljiljana Jovanovic’s piano). They then perform a dance in a red light. Macbeth and Banquo (Tyler Moss) are drawn into this dance, and when the men answer while continuing to move, the play achieves a real fusion of drama and dance. Music punctuates the witches’ most important pronouncements about Macbeth’s fate.

The following scene is the evening’s best. Lady Macbeth is one of the greatest roles in literature, and in Amanda Barron Avalon Theatre of e/motion has found a really dynamic and haunting dark queen. Tall, red-haired and striking, she is as strong an actress as she is a dancer. Her Lady Macbeth resists the temptation to make the audience like her, the result being that we do anyway—her strength and joy in her own will are that seductive. She carries off the exultant, odd gestures in reading Macbeth’s letter stylishly and naturally. Her incantation to the spirits to shake off her natural womanly aversion to cruelty, “Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;/Stop up the access and passage to remorse,” achieves the power of a demonic spell. The chanting repetition of “unsex me here” and the solo dance that follows are exciting and illuminating. This energetic, violent dance flows as naturally as any heroine from Rodgers and Hammerstein breaking into song because the emotion is too full for words. Here, Andrew T. Carter’s work as a director and choreographer really achieves something fresh.

The production is always interesting to look at. All of the actors have extreme, Kabuki-like makeup (inspired by maskwork), designed by Claudia Porcelli. Juliet Chia’s lighting is colorful and bright and illuminates the dance perfectly. The use of fluttering cloths, mostly employed by the witches, and oversized fans, along with language that is repeated and distorted before it becomes recognizable give the atmosphere a sense of something alien and strange. However, it helps to be familiar with the play before you go (though this is no doubt also true when seeing the opera or ballet). The use of doubling and cross-gender casting is occasionally confusing, especially when the faces are all wearing similar makeup.

The blend of elements in the second half is less holistic than in the first, almost as though there was less time and opportunity to develop these later acts. Dance and music punctuate rather than exist as codas to the scenes. Though none of the cast of Movin’ Macbeth are less than competent actors, many are more expressive with their movements than with their speech, and when their dance is intermittent the sense of their character gets fuzzy. Higgins’ Macbeth is convincingly angry and fierce, but it isn’t always clear what drives him. And the acting style is a little inconsistent—Robyn York is actually cute as Fleance and a timid servant, but her humorous mugging seems to come from another theatrical universe. Shakespeare’s lines are funny here, but Carter’s vision of the play hasn’t so far included humor, and it’s jarring. Act II also includes more obvious dramaturgical innovations, and while all are well thought out, they don’t all work. Macduff’s writhing over his speech “All my pretty ones? Did you say all?” after being informed of the slaughter of his family (Act IV, scene iii) has the same “ outpouring of emotion” logic as Lady Macbeth’s dance, but unfortunately it competes with the text for sense and exposition (the slaughter itself, Act IV.ii, has been cut). It’s also a bit confusing to delay Lady Macbeth’s mad scene and death, because Macbeth’s soliloquy “ to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” when put into Act IV, scene ii (rather than its usual appearance in Act V, v, as a rumination on when his wife should have died) is now not prompted by anything in particular.

But Barron’s mad scene, when it does come, is enlightening—she chooses to portray not guilt but repression, a guilt so buried that when awake this Lady Macbeth would honestly deny its existence. This is a fascinating choice. Juxtaposed to the final battle, her madness is also haunting. And the final battle of Birnam Wood is a gloriously weird spectacle. Director Andrew T. Carter writes, “why should a theatrical experience be controlled and refined for easy swallowing?” No reason—theatre should be provocative and free, and this is. Movin’Macbeth may be unevenly cooked, but it does have raw power.

Presented by Avalon Theatre of e/motion at HERE ARTS CENTER, 145 Sixth Avenue through July 19th

Tickets & Info, www.here.org , 212-868-4444