Benjamin Levy's latest dance was inspired by an increasingly common experience: He changed his "relationship" status on Facebook only to realize that he'd just broadcast his private pain to the world.

In "Everyone Intimate Alone Visibly," which opens tonight at Theater Artaud's Z Space after a week of "flash mob" performances all around San Francisco, the audience is invited to share the space in which Levy and partner Aline Wachsmuth dance. Web cameras pick up movements to trigger animated projections by new-media artist Mary Franck. As in the new social network reality, personal exchanges become public chain reactions.

Levy's movement style has a chain-reaction quality, too: His steps are swift and hyperkinetic, the torque of a hip or an elbow moving through the whole body like an electrical current. Not yet 30, he founded his company LEVYdance as a UC Berkeley senior in 2002, after his first piece of choreography won the top award at the American College Dance Festival, going on to performances at the Kennedy Center. Levy quickly won press acclaim and notice as one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch."

Q:"Everyone Intimate" wasn't prompted only by your "relationship update," though it seems that was one spur.

A: I've had a lot of shifts and transitions in my life in the last year. It made me curious about how I react to change and how people generally react when they're uprooted and threatened, and how that's changed. How do you express heartbreak in a status update? How do you write about a five-year relationship ending in an e-mail?

Q:This is your first evening-length work, and the first time you've collaborated with a new-media artist.

A: Yes, the way I was thinking about relationships expanded to the relationship between performer and audience. I was asking myself, how can we not transfer the experience onstage to the audience, but integrate the audience into the experience we're having? I was at the Djerassi residents program (in Woodside), speaking to sculptors and other artists where the interaction with the spectator is so different than in concert dance.

Q:Why did you choose to dance in this work?

A: The growth of the company happened quickly and early in my dancing career. And I was happy with that, to focus on creating and developing my choreographic voice, and keep off the stage.

But recently, I'd seen a slow atrophy of the artistry in my own body. And I started wondering how the work would be different if I could know it from the inside. I was longing for that aliveness.

Q:In addition to heading LEVYdance, you also run a dance space, Studio Gracia, south of Market. Why take on that extra responsibility?

A: It's a gift to have a home where the administrative and artistic side of the organization merges. We have salsa, samba, hip-hop, tango classes. We have quarterly salons, and give the participants 10 hours of free rehearsal space. We set up couches and chairs in a circle and have beer and popcorn while we watch: burlesque dancers, writers, musicians. Everyone gets five minutes.

I always wanted LEVYdance to be a community organization. It was kind of crazy to take on the space, and some people thought it was premature. Maybe it was, but that was when the opportunity presented itself.

Q:You've danced "Everyone Intimate" in New York and D.C. How were the reactions there?

A: At the end, every audience came together as an intimate tribe. In New York we had a man so tickled by the interactive video that he danced the whole time, a normal dude just shaking and bopping with us, and it was fantastic.

LEVYdance: "Everyone Intimate Alone Visibly." Tonight through Sat. Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida St., S.F. $20-$25. (800) 838-3006.