BECKET ---- The Doris Duke stage at Jacob’s Pillow was initially conceived as an intimate exposure to new and experimental dance forms. Its unreserved seating space is deliberately more limited than the Ted Shawn Theater, offsetting box office pressure to pack a full house for works that might generate a cautious consumer response.

But this week at Jacob’s Pillow, both stages showcase such work, and it is the Ted Shawn that spotlights the diminutive, while the Duke production by the Taipei Crossover Dance Company, which runs through tomorrow afternoon, might qualify as epic.

Founded in 1994 by Lin Keh-hua, Taiwanese lighting and set designer par excellence, the company takes on material of heroic proportions, whether real or legendary, and depicts it through dance in the Chinese court and opera traditions, influenced by modern elements.

Keh-hua, with the other members of the troupe, was affiliated with the Cloud Gate Dance Theater, one of the oldest modern dance companies in Taiwan. As they entered their 40s, they launched Taipei Crossover as a vehicle for continuing performance, for the sheer joy and creativity of it.

All of them bring multiple performance talents to the work, and strong U. S. training in modern and ballet (as well as Master’s degrees). The result is a multidimensional experience that transports the viewer into another space altogether, where dream and imagination enlarge and confuse relity.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The program’s liner notes provide a thread through the sometimes mystifying narrative of the two works presented. “The Dark Side of the Moon” is a retelling of “Rashomon” about four quite different accounts of a rape and murder, and “The Covered Picture” is about, well, “illusion” (and I quote). But these works can stand on their own without interpretation. While a bit too convoluted and redundant, that does not detract from the extraordinary presence of these performers, or from Keh-hua’s ingenious design and lighting.

“Rashomon,” a short story by the Japanese Akutagawa Ryunosuke, remade as a film by Akira Kurosawa in the ‘70s, is as much about witness unreliability as about a front-page murder. It is a classic case of projection by three tellers ---- the supposedly violated wife (played by two women), the dead, and a bandit who may or may not have committed the deed. Fear, desperation, guilt and rage all thke the stand, vying for survival. But at the end, we know no more about truth than at the beginning, one man lies dead, another at large, and a wife alone in shame and misery.

The players respond to the demands of these differing versions with unstinting fierce drama, giving the work a stylized largesse in kiiping with the masked Noh Theatre tradition. Keh-hua gave us dramatic black costumes and drapery that would make both Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham weep with pleasure, and brilliant spot-lighting that seems to illumine the guilty while leaving it all in shadow.

Perhaps even more adroitly managed was the staging of “Covered Picture,” a door frame stage left hung with glittery strips as though a mirror, at times reflecting stagefront movement, or cloudy with images that want to emerge from behind. A gurgling soundtrack and the use of large white wings as a disembodied prop suggestive of estuary birds or angels transform the “covered picture” into a rippled reflection, and seem to plunge the dancers into a watery grave.

Again multiple women dominate the drama. Are they three personalities in one? From the same or different time periods? Simply embodiments of longing? Wd don’t know and it doesn’t matter.

Just the juxtapositions of fantasy and surrealistic elements the ever-changing picture/mirror, the strange imprints that seem to emerge and recede in the surface of a platform bed centerstage, the stillness at the center of the movement, no matter how slow or fastfully engage us.

Whoever these women are, and whatever role the rogue figure labeled “Fox” plays in their lives, they inhabit only themselves, oblivious to the powers that lurk in their world and also taking them for granted. Mesmerized by their intense narcissism, we go along for the ride.

Taipei Crossover can be seen today and tonignt at 2:15 and 8:15 and tomorrow afternoon at 5.