As part of its third program at the Joyce Theater, Pilobolus unveiled a work that broke the company’s artistic mold. For “Contradance,” receiving its New York premiere on Monday evening, two former dancers choreographed a production without the assistance of one of Pilobolus’s artistic directors.

Matt Kent and Renée Jaworski (the group’s rehearsal director and artistic associate) tell a story of two misfits who find a connection one soulful night. “Contradance” also features music by Dan Zanes, who leads a family-oriented, Grammy-winning band. While the work doesn’t herald a fresh choreographic voice within the Pilobolus family, the pairing of Mr. Zanes’s music and Liz Prince’s costumes lends a certain dreaminess to the production.

The dance for six — it was created in collaboration with Winston Dynamite Brown, Eriko Jimbo, Jun Kuribayashi, Nile H. Russell, Annika Sheaff and Christopher Whitney, as well as others — focuses on an outcast (Mr. Kuribayashi, who is never too far from his rocking chair) and a demure young woman (Ms. Jimbo). Her friends, who clamp kazoos in their mouths like cigars, try to prevent her from getting too close to the stranger. The couple nevertheless find love: as Mr. Zanes puts it, “two misfits on the endless sea, drifting so easy and free.”

Eventually, the boy-meets-girl routine grows tiresome; often Mr. Kent and Ms. Jaworski don’t have enough material to fill the music. Poised on the rocking chair — which, at one point, becomes something of a boat — the couple sway back and forth. Ms. Jimbo holds a tattered umbrella and suddenly, held aloft by the other dancers, she and Mr. Kuribayashi soar through the night.

In the end, “Contradance” is too naïve for adult consumption. (There’s also something about the dance that resembles a Kindle commercial.)

Far more enthralling is “Gnomen,” a dance for four men choreographed in 1997 by Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken, in collaboration with the original dancers. On Monday Mr. Brown, Mr. Kuribayashi, Mr. Russell and Mr. Whitney — as if linked by strands of silk — moved through rigorous, sculptural positions with a startling airiness. The theme of an outsider is present, but here the result has weight.

Pilobolus continues through Aug. 7 at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org.

HOBOKEN, N.J. — John McCauley, gaunt and scraggly, clutched an electric guitar at Maxwell’s here on Monday night, finger-picking a lone song, “Houston, TX,” by himself. His band, Deer Tick, had spent the past hour digging into roadhouse country and rawboned rock ’n’ roll, with a bluntly effective fervor. This solo interlude seemed like an unscheduled detour, announced on the fly. But it was a clear, vital moment in an unfocused show.

“Houston, TX” comes from “Born on Flag Day” (Partisan), Deer Tick’s winningly ragged 2009 album, and in the original arrangement it’s a lilting shuffle, offered in tribute to the Bakersfield sound. Here, Mr. McCauley made it more desperate, nearly unmoored. His voice — tart, coarse, with a liberal pinch of twang — felt painfully exposed, adding weight to his lyrics about cutting loose from an exhausted love affair.

“There’s nothing left,” he sang, “and I am sure that it’s a sign/That maybe I’m about as good as gone.” The shift from “sure” to “maybe” in those lines felt awkwardly true to the song, and so did a later jolt of self-reproach: “I ain’t gonna talk like a gentleman, no/‘Cause I’m sick of always letting myself down.” Pulling back from the microphone as if repulsed, Mr. McCauley yelped that last word again: “Down! Down!”

Since forming Deer Tick in Providence, R.I., late in 2004, Mr. McCauley has been both its engine and its engineer. Last month brought “The Black Dirt Sessions” (Partisan), another album stocked with his cagey, questioning songs. But Deer Tick, whose current tour will end on Aug. 13 at Webster Hall in Manhattan, seems to be in some kind of flux: this show included just a handful of tunes from the new release, most of them tossed off or hurried through. And the band’s frontman often took a backseat.

He surrendered the wheel mostly to Ian O’Neil, the other guitarist in Deer Tick, and increasingly its other songwriter. “Hope Is Big,” one of Mr. O’Neil’s better songs, took the form of a heaving country waltz. Elsewhere he leaned more toward snarling honky-tonk, as on a stomping cover of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.” Mr. O’Neil was merely serviceable as a singer, which at least put him ahead of the band’s Amish-bearded drummer, Dennis Ryan, whose take on Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was pure stunt work, a floppy salute to Jack Black.

Stunts can be fine, and Deer Tick delivered a few that worked: a furious romp through ZZ Top’s “Cheap Sunglasses,” for one, and a perfectly smarmy alto saxophone solo by Rob Crowell, the band’s keyboardist, on “Ashamed.” That song had the crowd singing along with its chorus: “And oh, what a crying shame, what a crying shame/What we became.”

It would be wrong and too facile to apply that lamentation to Deer Tick, which has a lot going for it as a band. But with the way things are headed, Mr. McCauley might consider a side project: solo acoustic, perhaps, so he could move along without actually moving on.

Deer Tick will appear on Wednesday at Ottobar in Baltimore, on Thursday at the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington, and on Friday and Saturday at Floydfest in Floyd, Va.; deertickmusic.com.

Listen. Listen harder. That’s what the British playwright Howard Barker needs you to do during “Gary the Thief” and “Plevna: Meditations on Hatred,” his two short, dense plays produced by the Potomac Theater Project/NYC at Atlantic Stage 2.

Theater is elastic, he reminds us, and proceeds to stretch our definitions of it. Mr. Barker, also a poet, describes his work as a Theater of Catastrophe in which, as it says in the program, “no attempt is made to satisfy any demand for clarity or the deceptive simplicity of a single message.”

Indeed. These two pieces, written as poems and delivered as monologues, come at you in a rush and can be fragmentary and elusive. Don’t be surprised if you miss things. But also don’t be surprised if Mr. Barker’s blunt lyricism lingers in your mind.

“I hate the weak/And whimper in the presence/Of the strong,” says Gary the Thief. A working-class hoodlum, Gary kills a baby, goes to prison (with its “dirty glamour attaching to/Insane and paltry acts”) and is courted by powerful people. At the end — impossibility of spoiler alert — the “cold has riddled his youth/And the ice has quarried his teeth,” but he sets off to be a prophet.

Plot, obviously, doesn’t make “Gary the Thief” run. (Good thing: chunks of it passed me right by.) The poetry — slippery and impressionistic — does, and the play, receiving its world premiere in this production, directed by Richard Romagnoli, is lucky to have the actor Robert Emmet Lunney to deliver it.

Mr. Lunney makes visceral what might have been abstract. He varies the colors of his voice and his accent: he can be prim, even schoolmarmish when he narrates, but as Gary the Thief he has a Cockney swagger and impacted rage. Gary’s stare is ferocious. (Reader, he scared me.)

Mr. Lunney, in a dark suit, performs on a bare black set with only a hint of theatrical artifice: a wry proscenium arch near the back of the stage. It’s all very spare and tasteful — he seems like a pearl nestled in a velvet jewel case — but it creates a respectful hush that tames the play.

Still, Mr. Lunney carries the day, making “Gary” the more dramatically satisfying of the two pieces on this 50-minute program. In “Plevna: Meditations on Hatred,” receiving its New York premiere, Mr. Romagnoli also keeps the stage bare, save for a few chairs. But here he has a conceit, which might be trite if it were more insistent.

For this monologue about war and the nasty things civilians do, the actor, Alex Draper, wears a tux and brandishes a highball glass. He surveys and anatomizes the wreckage of battle as if pointing out the vomit after a drunken party.

Plevna was the site of a siege in 1877 in the Russo-Turkish war. Not that Mr. Barker tells you that and not that he means his play, with its shifting perspectives, to be restricted to one historical event.

Mr. Draper, though, doesn’t have Mr. Lunney’s range, and his slow build to anger seems a bit mechanical. Squint, and he’s just a guy reciting poetry onstage. But that poetry compels. Passages stick: “Who was drowned by the snow/Which rose to the mouth of the sleeping sentry/The thaw will show.”

“Gary the Thief” and “Plevna: Meditations on Hatred” continue through July 31 at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street, Chelsea; (212) 279-4200, ticketcentral.com.

With the possible exception of his invention of the orgasmatron, Woody Allen is not necessarily known as an early adopter of cutting-edge technology. Still, Mr. Allen has taken a bold leap into the 21st century and recorded audiobook editions of the four collections of humorous essays he published from 1971 to 2007, the digital agency ClearMetrics said on Tuesday.

Mr. Allen’s readings of his anthologies “Getting Even,” “Without Feathers,” “Mere Anarchy” and “Side Effects” — including his short story “The Kugelmass Episode” — can be purchased from Audible.com and iTunes; ClearMetrics also said that it had created a Web site for Mr. Allen at woodyallen.com, having wrested the domain name from two Icelandic college students.

From the set of his coming film “Midnight in Paris,” Mr. Allen answered a few questions by e-mail about his digital upgrade and the fate of one of his best-known literary creations.

Q. How were you persuaded to embrace the audiobook format? Do you own or regularly use any of the high-tech gadgets that play these files?

A. I was persuaded in a moment of apathy when I was convinced I had a fatal illness and would not live much longer. I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one, don’t own a word processor, and have zero interest in technology. Many people thought it would be a nice idea for me to read my stories, and I gave in.

Q. What was the recording experience like for you? Did you make any new discoveries about these pieces in rereading them? Did it take you back to the frame of mind you were in when you first wrote them?

A. I imagined it would be quite easy for me, and, in fact, it turned out to be monstrously hard. I hated every second of it, regretted that I had agreed to it, and after reading one or two stories each day, found myself exhausted. The discovery I made was that any number of stories are really meant to work, and only work, in the mind’s ear and hearing them out loud diminishes their effectiveness. Some of course hold up amusingly, but it’s no fun hearing a story that’s really meant to be read, which brings me to your next question, and that is that there is no substitute for reading, and there never will be. Hearing something aloud is its own experience, but it’s hard to beat sitting in bed or in a comfortable chair turning the pages of a book, putting it down, and eagerly awaiting the chance to get back to it.

Q. Are you of the opinion that the printed word is dying out? Will your conversion — literally and figuratively — to digital audiobooks lend credence to these depressing forecasts?

A. I can only hope that reading out loud does not contribute to the demise of literature, which I don’t think will ever happen. When I grew up, one could always hear T. S. Eliot, Yeats, S. J. Perelman and a host of others read on the Caedmon label, and it was its own little treat that in no way encroached on the pleasure of reading these people.

Q. Did Kugelmass ever escape from that irregular Spanish verb?

A. As far as Kugelmass goes, he’s being chased by the same obnoxious verbs that still chase me.

GOLDENDALE, Wash. — Here in the high desert east of the Cascades, where towering windmills quietly whir overhead, skaters hurtle downhill along a ribbon of blacktop six at a time wearing helmets and motorcycle leathers, hay bales stacked along switchbacks for the inevitable wipeouts.

But in the garment district in Manhattan, it is a slightly tamer story. One day in the spring, Todd Brunengraber stepped from his office on West 39th Street. Hearing a distinct hum from newly repaved Seventh Avenue, he turned and watched a commuter on a supersize skateboard whiz by.

The board was similar to the type he built in woodshop while growing up, but with big, candy-colored wheels. Soon, Brunengraber, a 62-year-old grandfather who had not set foot on a board in more than 25 years, spent $50 for a lesson and joined a growing legion of longboarders.

This summer, he has been pushing to and from Penn Station, and each night after work cruising a hill on his Bay Shore, N.Y., street.

“It’s a rush to get on it,” he said.

Whether on a hair-raising rural road in the Pacific Northwest or in teeming Midtown traffic, longboards have become the fastest-growing segment in an otherwise sluggish skateboard market. In recent years, they have lured new participants to a pastime traditionally dominated by teenage boys and young men performing perilous stunts.

“There’s a real neo-hippie, everybody-welcome kind of vibe to longboarding,” said Adam Goldstein, 43, who skates with his 10-year-old son around Manhattan.

Goldstein, who directs commercials, says he takes a longboard to commute while working in Los Angeles or Toronto. “You can just go anywhere,” he said.

With decks usually 34 inches or longer; trucks (axles) adapted for easier turning; and big, soft wheels, longboards provide a smoother skating experience than boards designed for performing tricks. Their size and stability make longboards well suited for cruising streets and college campuses. The price of a good longboard starts at about $150.

“There’s no stigma,” said Larry Peterson, who made 2,500 boards in a dairy barn in Salem, Ore., last year under the brand Longboard Larry. “It’s one of the sports where someone who’s 40 can go skate with someone who’s 13 and nobody thinks it’s weird.”

With an inclusive, do-it-yourself ethic, longboarding has grown as a grass-roots movement mostly outside the established skateboard industry and spread from Southern California to places like Brooklyn and Bend, Ore.

Begun in a San Diego backyard in 1993 by a group of surfers, the longboard maker Sector 9 has led the way. In 2008, the surf apparel maker Billabong bought Sector 9. Sector 9 is part of an increasingly crowded market that 10 years ago was not much more than a scattered collection of small entrepreneurs.

While working at a skate shop in the 1990s, Brian Petrie began making longboards from broken snowboards out of his Brooklyn apartment. The result: Earthwing Skateboards. In 2002 a group of friends in Hagerstown, Md., began building longboards for themselves. By 2004, they moved to New York and settled in Brooklyn as Bustin Boards.

Zak Maytum, 19, a champion downhill and slalom skater on his longboard, began a business making wheels and bushings from his parents’ garage in Boulder, Colo., three years ago. Today, his company, Venom, employs two salespeople. “Every year is bigger than the last year,” he said.

A former professional street skater, Marcus Bandy is the team manager for Orangatang, a wheel company in Los Angeles that is popular with longboarders.

“It’s really all new,” Bandy, 37, said about the longboard culture. “It’s like when punk rock or hip-hop first came out. It’s a whole new thing, and the kids are loving it.”

He added: “People are always going to create their own stuff and that’s what’s happening here. These guys are creating skateboarding and reinventing skateboarding.”

PAU, France — In the closing moments of Tuesday’s stage of the Tour de France, just as in the old days when he dominated this race, Lance Armstrong tried to win.

Pierrick Fedrigo celebrated his stage 16 victory of the Tour de France.
He rose from his seat and began to sprint to the finish line, churning the smooth, muscled legs that helped him win seven Tour titles. But this time, unlike so many times in the past, there was no happy ending for Armstrong, the most successful rider in Tour history.

In what Armstrong says will be his final Tour, he was just not good enough.

Armstrong finished sixth on Tuesday in Stage 16, the Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo outsprinting him to the finish line. Afterward, Armstrong spoke briefly before remounting his bike and riding to his hotel, initially with a police escort — and a grimace.

“It was hard; it’s been a while since I sprinted,” Armstrong said, his face still sweaty and covered with a film of dust. “Just not quick enough.”

Armstrong — who at 38 is one of the oldest Tour riders — had hoped to win a stage as consolation for not winning the whole race.

With four stages left, though, his chances are running out. His best opportunity for a victory was very likely on Tuesday, when he made it into an early breakaway along the 124-mile route, which included four grueling climbs. In the final stages, he will probably not be able to keep up with better climbers, sprinters and time-trial specialists.

Armstrong’s hopes for an overall victory vanished about eight days into this three-week event because of bad luck and crashes.

Several times, he was caught behind riders who had crashed. Twice he fell, including once in Stage 8, when he hit the pavement going about 40 miles per hour. That day, he finished nearly 12 minutes behind the stage winner, an example of how tumultuous this Tour has been for him, on and off the bike.

Earlier this week, Armstrong — who has 25 Tour stage victories — said he did not want other riders to let him win one final time just because they felt sorry for him.

“Back in our heyday, we didn’t give anything away,” he said. “So I don’t want anybody to say, Hey, let’s let the old man have one.”

And no one did. No matter how much power Armstrong once wielded in the peloton, there was no mercy Tuesday.

Fedrigo, the sixth French rider to win a Tour stage this year, saw his fans and family along the route and was motivated to win for them.

“I wasn’t afraid of Armstrong in the sprint,” he said.

The Belgian rider Jurgen Van de Walle, who finished seventh, sensed how much Armstrong had wanted the victory. But at the Tour, every rider wants to win, he said.

“He was a great champion and he has a strong head, and I think he didn’t want to leave the Tour without success,” Van de Walle said. “Even with the bad luck he has had, he still stayed in the Tour to prove something. But there are no gifts in the Tour.”

The overall race leaders were unchanged after the stage. The defending champion, Alberto Contador, is still eight seconds ahead of Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck, who was the Tour runner-up last year. Spain’s Samuel Sánchez is third, two minutes back.

Though Armstrong finished third last year, he lags in 25th place, 33 minutes 46 seconds back. But that is by design, he and his RadioShack team manager, Johan Bruyneel, said.

Once Armstrong’s podium hopes disappeared, he and Bruyneel decided that Armstrong needed to save his energy for a possible stage win. So after plummeting in the standings in the first eight days, Armstrong proceeded to take it relatively easy. He finished way back nearly every day — in 70th, 114th and even 130th.

On some days, Armstrong acted as the Tour’s cruise director, laughing and chatting with fans, and thanking them for coming as he pedaled to the finish line.

“Once you know you’re not going to be the best guy, then I’m going to, like I said in the beginning, sit up and enjoy it,” Armstrong when asked about his deflated effort. “Look around, look at people, listen to people. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not going to win the Tour.”

Armstrong took some flak for it. In an article in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe last Sunday, a reporter wrote that Armstrong had started the Tour as a professional cyclist, then became a tourist on a bike, then was simply a tourist.