Julie Atlas Muz is on her back in a bare Chelsea rehearsal room, toes stretched over her head and touching the floor, ass in the air. She is demonstrating the closing concept of her new show.

"The space shuttle lands on me, see, and these astronauts get out and they're walking all over me. Then one of them plants the American flag in my asshole, and that's the end."

To hear Muz so matter-of-factly describe it, it all sounds rather everyday-ordinary. She is, after all, playing the Moon in her latest dance performance piece, I Am the Moon and You are the Man on Me at NYC's PS122. But there is nothing ordinary about Muz and her work. And while "genius" is a term over-applied to near-meaninglessness by every other movie blurb and Oprah book-club review, Muz' intricate weaving of gender and power, of tenderness and violence, of the relentless female-male dynamic layered over with humor by turns bawdy and wistful, comes perilously close to dismissing all lesser descriptions.

Asked to describe the forces that inspire her work in general and Moon in particular, Muz seems a bit at a loss and more than a little baffled that anyone would even ask.

"I am the Moon," she says simply. "The Moon has been claimed like a woman, like a trophy wife."

Of course, it goes much deeper than that. Muz's Moon is, at its core, about America's plundering, male-dominated culture of conquest and consumption, about a society's relentless need to commodify everything -- to pursue it, consume it, use it all up, then discard it. The Moon was once America's ultimate prize: viewed, pursued, "conquered" and then forgotten. As Muz notes, "no one visits the Moon anymore."

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A 2004 Whitney Biennial artist, the prolific Muz has cultivated a fervent, almost reverential following with her "underworld of nightlife" performance pieces at such cutting-edge downtown bastions as PS122, Chashama, HERE, La MaMa and The Kitchen as well as her burlesque gigs at the Slipper Room, Galapagos, and the VaVa Voom Room, among other venues where she might be found, as one memorable description put it, "covered in fake blood in the basement of a gay bar."

"Burlesque," she says with fondness. "Ah, I love it. Small scale stories, one costume, you get paid."

In Moon, Muz is supported -- often literally -- by a stellar, all-male ensemble of virtuoso dancers -- Adrian Clark, Jon Guymon, Angelo Iodice, Luke Miller, Matthew Morgan, and stripper-librarian James "Tigger!" Ferguson -- in a production shaped by director Katherine Valentine. In rehearsals often made chaotic by the sheer kinetic energy of the group, Muz alternates between den mother and cheerleader, diffusing the tension of one near-performance impasse by suddenly calling a group hug and proclaiming,

"It's all gonna be OK. No one's gonna die. Now let's rock ... the fuck ... ON ..."

Muz' investment in camaraderie pays off in performance. Bonded by her sensuous, serpentine choreography, Muz & Co. fuse onstage with the elegant fluidity of a multi-limbed, nimble hermaphrodite. From the show's opening vignette -- a mystical vision of an ethereally nude Muz encased in a giant bubble, caressed by the delicate strains of a "Clair de Lune" gradually overtaken by the caustic rumble of a moonshot countdown -- Moon portrays the inevitable pursuit, possession and ultimate abandonment of not just the female by the male, but of the feminine lifegiving force trampled by the masculine drive to acquire, dominate and destroy, with a brilliance nonpareil. The male-female dynamic is as constant and relentless as the pull of the moon on the earth's tides, and this Moon essentially says everything there is to say about this timeless struggle, all without ever saying a word.

And laughs. There may not have been a funnier show on a New York stage all season. Aware that political theater is often more palatable dosed with humor than with harangues, Muz and director Valentine infuse this lithe, 50-minute sprint with everything from frenetic slapstick to a particularly memorable slo-mo brawl set to lilting waltz time.

And sadness. Beneath the guffaws and belly laughs lies a persistent ache of loss. Sadness that comes not only from witnessing the co-opted destruction of that which is natural and beautiful but that, even after an acquisition has been drained of its use, greed and possessiveness prevent its ultimate release.

"I've been thinking a lot about this Oscar Wilde quote," Muz says in a rare moment of reflection about her work. "He said, 'there are many things people would throw away if they were not afraid that another might pick them up.'"