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Years ago, in New York City, dancer and choreographer Beth Corning staged “Fill These Shoes,” a work for three dancers in which Ron Fowler portrayed the mother of Corning’s character while wearing a pink ball gown.

After one performance, an audience member told Corning this choice baffled him. When she asked the man what he thought casting Fowler meant, he said, “To a kid, mothers are bigger than life.”

“That was more articulate than I could have put it,” Corning says today.

Audiences willing to be puzzled and even challenged by what they see, and then dig deeper, remain a crucial component of Corning’s practice, including her company CORNINGWORKS’ latest production, “Foolish Assumptions.”

The moving 45-minute show features Corning and frequent collaborator Evan Fisk in a series of duets and solos about connection, disconnection and misunderstanding on a stage mostly bare except for two straight-backed wooden chairs. It premiered last week and gets four more performances Wed., May 20, through Sat., May 23, at Downtown’s George Rowland White Theatre.

Corning has been a fixture on Pittsburgh’s dance scene since 2003, when she came to town to head Dance Alloy, then Pittsburgh’s flagship contemporary troupe. She was already more than two decades into a professional career that included stints in Sweden, New York and Minneapolis, where her work was acclaimed for its insight and inventiveness. She continued in that vein with the Alloy until parting ways in 2009.

She founded CORNINGWORKS largely as a vehicle for her Glue Factory Projects, a platform for her original dance theater works created on nationally and internationally known performers over age 45 (though the troupe has also staged works including 2022’s ambitious “The Tipping Point,” which evoked the global refugee crisis).

She’s worked outside Pittsburgh, too: In 2021, Corning was commissioned to create and perform a work by the SNF Foundation/Nostos Festival in Athens, Greece. In April, her 2025 Glue Factory work for seven performers and one puppet, “STAND BY — an allegory,” got two performances as part of New York’s prestigious La MaMa MOVE SERIES.

“Stand By” — Corning’s first New York show in decades — made it to La MaMa indirectly because the company had to rehearse there to accommodate acclaimed puppeteer Tom Lee, who is also an artist in residence there. A LaMaMa curator invited them, she said.

“I didn’t think we’d have any seats sold,” said Corning. But the show packed the 110-plus-seat theater both nights.

Rehearsals for “Foolish Assumptions” resumed immediately on her return to Pittsburgh. Corning set the work on herself and Fisk, known for portraying Macbeth and Banquo in PunchDrunk’s epochal immersive work “Sleep No More” (and who performed in three earlier CORNINGWORKS shows, including “STAND BY”).

“Foolish Assumptions” opens with Corning and Fisk seated on stage, their backs to us, and not moving for an unusually long time. The quietude is no less eloquent than the movement that follows, ranging from subtle gestures and playful hops to a passage where Fisk removes and dons Corning’s outer garments.

“I really felt I was taking a leap with this work,” says Corning. She worked to excise any sentimentality and keep things sparse. “Every breath counts, every gesture counts, every look counts,” she says. “There is no hiding here.”

Corning has written that her works seek “to shine some light in places where we often think we are the only ones sitting in the dark.”

“The work that I do, I make because I don’t want to feel alone in what I’m feeling,” she says.

“If I did a good job sharing my questions, … I hopefully turn the light on and say, ‘What’s that?’”