When looking at a dance performance, the viewer may be tempted to make up a story about what is happening. One can also simply absorb the shapes and movements for what they are. It is like looking at the Mona Lisa: You might pretend to know where she came from or what she is smiling about, or you can merely appreciate that she is.

In Tere O’Connor’s full-length dance work, “Lawn,” presented at Schaeffer Theater as part of the Bates Dance Festival last weekend, the choreographer combines film, dance and sound to create a strange world that fascinates on its own. But he also introduces images and visual commentary about our own habitat, and how we treat it.

In O’Connor’s realm, movements are often frantic and repetitive, initiated in the hands. The dancers’ hands jab and flutter and manipulate the space. Hands push and pull the other dancers, intent on their tasks. Exaggerations of these gestures create sweeping spins, falls and partnering.

The dancers come together in ways that are more perfunctory than supportive. Stillnesses are more exhausted than peaceful. At the end of the piece, the dancers look directly at the bodies they have just stepped on, finally aware.

The film, which runs concurrently with the dancing, is more grounded in familiar images of blue sky and fields, contrasted with urban environments and torn-up building lots. The occasional humor in the performance is best exemplified by the image of O’Connor as a grizzled, gap-toothed Father Nature, who is clearly not happy with us. He blithely gathers up stray plastic grocery bags, which are later eaten by a serene Adam-and-Eve couple.

It is the film that draws us into the underlying commentary in the dance: We have become caught up in the business of doing, and have forgotten the world that sustains us. A lawn can be a place where things get done, but it is not a meadow. “Lawn” demands that we not only look at the sad and frantic society created by Tere O’Connor Dance, but that we also look at our own.

The production was impeccable, often riveting, and warm applause and cheers capped the company’s performance. O’Connor’s choreography will again grace the stage at Alumni Gymnasium on Aug. 14, when students of the summer program will perform faculty choreography at the Festival Finale.

Sharon Hawkes has a degree in dance from New York University, and more than 20 years of experience performing and teaching dance in Arizona, New York and Connecticut. She lives in Auburn.