The Pennsylvania Dance Theatre commences a week-long residency at the Palmer Museum of Art this week with lectures, workshops, demonstrations and performances.

The dance company's residency will explore how the work of avant-garde artists of the early 20th century, who used the written word in visual art, relates to modern dance movement. The week will culminate with the company's performance, "The Avant-Garde and the Text: An Exploration Through Movement," at 8 p.m. Friday in Eisenhower Auditorium.

During the residency, the company will conduct four workshops, a lecture / demonstration and two performances.

"Our plan is to do four workshops with four groups of students," said LaRue Allen, PDT director. "We have different projects planned for each group."

The dance company will work with two groups of arts and architecture students, a movement theater group and a visual arts group. In the various workshops, the dancers will help students design an outdoor theater, develop the idea of spoken text in dance and help create a textual piece compatible with dance.

"We'll be meeting each group of students twice for a period of about three hours each time, and some of them will be involved in the performances as well," Allen said.

Charles Garoian, assistant director of the Palmer Museum of Art, said this is the second time the dance company will work with the museum in an interdisciplinary exchange.

"This year I wrote a grant and received some support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to bring them here again -- this time for them to do an interpretive program of The Avant-Garde and the Text.

The Avant-Garde and the Text is a Palmer Museum exhibit on display from Feb. 1 to March 11. It includes documents, posters and manifestos by the leading avant-gardists of the 20th century, Garoian said.

"(The artists) were at the point at the turn of the century when there were some radical changes going on in society," Garoian said. "Mechanization is . . . taking over and the artists are forced to deal with it."

Garoian characterized the artistic movement as provocative art, employing chance, laughter and shocking images or perspectives to free the mind. This consequent freedom allows the viewer to gain a new way of looking at things, Garoian said.

PDT will examine this new way of looking at things by performing modern dance styles dating back to dance pioneer Isadore Duncan, who lived about the same time as the avant-garde movement, Garoian said.

Duncan danced barefoot and in loose fitting tunics in an attempt to free the body beautiful. Her movement was abstract, avoiding conventional dance story lines.

"Many of the dances they do will have to do with abstract movement in general and some of them will (employ) the spoken word," Garoian said. "The shape and the movement and the vitality of the dancer is juxtapositioned with a word. The relationship may be totally out of context, but nonetheless the word forces you to think in relationship with the movement."

At 8 p.m. Thursday in the museum, the company will present an informal lecture / demonstration to talk about the goals of the residency, Allen said.

"We're going to talk about two different aspects of our work," she said. "We're going to talk about the kind of things we'll be doing in the residency itself, and how this has developed our thoughts on dance in the text and how it relates to the exhibit." She said the lecture will also help prepare audiences for Friday's performance.

In addition to Friday's performance, another show will be held at 2:30 p.m. Sunday in the museum. PDT will present a more formal, theatrical lecture than Thursday's and will perform a work designed for the museum space.

"Our hope is that it will involve spoken words and also that we'll be able to involve visual arts students in actually developing a set at the same time the dance is being presented," Allen said.

Allen said the set will resemble graffiti and will develop a dialogue between the artists -- something, to her knowledge, that has never been done before.