A presentation of the Contingency Plan. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Thursday, January 11. Continues January 13 and 14

The Contingency Plan proved this week that it isn’t just versatile; it’s verging on a split personality. In its full evening of work at the Firehall, it tackled two pieces that could not have been more different: a whacked-out riff on the Virgin Mary by way of standup-era Steve Martin (yes, you read that right) and a meditative exploration of being alone.

The emerging dance troupe has shown its talent for physical comedy before, and this night provided a lot of spoken laughs as well. It says something that TCP’s Vanessa Goodman and Jane Osborne, along with guest dancer Lina Fitzner, could channel the warped humour of dance-theatre choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s Las Tres Marías.

As difficult as it might be to picture, the result here was the three performers playing devout Catholics possessed by the spirit of the Wild and Crazy Guy. They wore ’70s-style pants and vests over jewel-toned dress shirts; their backs were emblazoned with the iconic Mexican imagery of la Virgen in all her different forms. The performance was an utterly original spaz-out of hilariously reimagined Hail Marys, maniacal laughing, nonsensical Spanish, and Shaft-like moves, plus mile-a-minute gibberish that sounded like Martin on warp-speed fast-forward. Marc Stewart’s soundscape—a pastiche of Mass sounds and music—nicely underlined the madness.

While TCP’s own piece, Adhere, used spoken text and theatrical elements as well, it was an utter about-face after intermission. The piece was a much calmer, poetic study on the idea of being alone. Its centrepiece was three clear polycarbonate boxes that were tall enough for the dancers to stand in, and acted as vivid visual symbols for isolation. The ethereal-looking cubes, designed by Patrick Colgan, could reflect images of the performers, and could be moved around to stand up or lie on the ground. A dancer might lie in one, dreamily feeling its confines with her hands and feet, or lean her head to the side and stare off into space.

The idea here, it seemed, was to explore all the different moods of being alone—and to suggest that sometimes it’s not such a bad thing. Each of the artists—all strikingly good vocal performers as well as dancers—performed a monologue about memories of being alone. A highlight was Osborne’s opener, in which she described listening to Kylie Minogue over and over and dancing in her parents’ living room as a child; then she lost herself in a dizzying series of turns.

The piece was given a coolly hypnotic atmosphere by Gabriel Saloman’s heady electroacoustic score, but it was hard to hear the few pieces of prerecorded text by Samantha Mehra. And in the end, Adhere felt like a series of studies, an experiment in moods that was stronger in its lone bits than its final section of group work when it began to lose its simple, clear focus.

Still, you’ve got to give props to a company that can morph into that meditative state after exorcising their inner wild and crazy gals.