Tess Dworman is rarely just Tess Dworman. This choreographer and dancer is a shape-shifter with a biting wit. She inhabits other people as if she were flipping through sketches and bringing them to life. You grasp who they are through Dworman’s delivery, an endearing mix of sharp and guileless.

In the opening of her oddly engrossing dance-theater work “Everything Must Go,” her voice — sounding like Linus of “Peanuts” fame — is heard in the distance before she arrives onstage at the Chocolate Factory Theater. She suggests that we try a thought experiment by imagining that “everything the light touches is yours,” as she puts it. “Everyone the light touches is yours. Everything beyond these walls belongs to you. And everyone beyond these walls is on your staff.”

It’s calming, even though Dworman’s universe is a wry place. The performer is not just at the mercy of the audience; the performer belongs to the audience. But her intention is purposely murky (even absurd) as she hopes that we will “revel in the honoring of you in my performance, which is yours.”

In “Everything Must Go” — at least in parts of it — the role of an artist is selfless, altruistic. But is it really? Dworman can spin anything. In meditation-teacher mode, and in other transformations, she has more than her language down. It’s her appeasing tone that gives her personas believability.

The satirical “Everything Must Go,” first presented last year at Pageant, a space in Brooklyn, uses experimental performance as a way to dig under the surface of what makes something good or desirable. When Dworman does arrive onstage, she is covered in a knitted striped blanket and crawling on all fours. If, during her voice over, she was a meditation guide, now she is an ottoman. Because she is able to glide with such acute body control, she says, “This is a person who knows how to behave like an object.”

Dworman, as the ottoman, parks herself sideways along the front row, where an audience member stretches out a leg on her blanketed back before she transforms again. The shifts are sudden in “Everything Must Go,” in which Dworman and two other performers, Ned Riseley and Sonya Gadet Molansky, take turns diving into character explorations. In them, improvisation is intertwined with carefully planned choreography.

There were shaky moments. But Dworman, whose body and mind are the main material, is brazen in her fearless, offbeat humor. It’s hard to predict what will come next as she switches characters, becoming a dancer with no discernible life skills or a woman who has a breakdown because the tiny woman living inside of her — she measures out a couple of inches with her hands — yearns for some ease in life.

As Dworman’s arms scoop raggedly at the air, the sound of her voice is soothing; even when she is spewing nonsense, her earnest eccentricity is gripping. And no matter how jaggedly she moves — her upper body can be a frantic sight, especially as she suddenly cranks her elbows forward and back — her dance training is apparent, somehow grounding the work.

To a recording of a drum solo, she cuts across the stage, advancing in more formal positions guided by graceful arms and turned out feet that give way to delicate turns. Her shapes are sculptural, almost baroque. In another moment she brushes the floor with her feet, practically skating an image amplified by Shana Crawford’s icy blue lighting, which gives the stage a winter spirit. (It’s also nippy in the space. Bring some down.)

For the final act, Dworman approaches an audience member: “Can I make you something?” she says. “You look hungry. Do you feel hungry?”

They land on a carrot cake. Dworman uses her arms to stir and to shake wildly as she talks about the preparation of the carrots and how speaking nonsensical words over stacks of them “imbues the carrot with language and poetics.”

Suddenly she stops talking and stands before the hungry-looking audience member to hand over an invisible carrot cake. The lights go out and there is a sweet sense of peace — the kind that falls like a hush on a room when a crowd finally leaves.

Gia Kourlas for the New York Times, October 18, 2024.