Things measured in one hundred: 100 degrees Celsius (the boiling point of water), 100 yards (the length of a football field minus the end zones). Centuries and centenarians. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez chose to measure out his treatise on love, sex and loss as One Hundred Years of Solitude. And who can forget the feverishly dissected first hundred days of Barack Obama's presidency?

Something feels important, yet also quantifiable, about the number 100. Perhaps deceptively so. In her new dance piece 100 (First Draft), writer and choreographer Letty Bassart resumes a long-held fascination with the delineation and exploration of time and space. In an event billed as Dois Mudons/Two Worlds, Bassart presents 100 and an excerpt from her 2008 piece Salt at Miami Beach's Byron Carlyle this Friday and Saturday alongside the work of Miami-based, Brazilian choreographer Augusto Soledade.

Bassart calls 100 a ''Googlesque exploration of beginnings.'' As the Miami native explains, ``100 actually started when I was thinking about how each beginning involves stepping into the unknown.''

One unknown that intrigues Bassart is the 21st century. Whereas Salt utilized heavy physical movements and the utterance of poetic lines laced with despair, 100 skips, pulsates and spins into the unknown of a new century. As Bassart affirms: ``We're in the early part of the 21st century, and we're still speculating what it's going to be about. 100 is a straddling of the past and the present. I think that happens when centuries turn the dial.''

Two Worlds offers audiences a unique opportunity to witness distinct aesthetics and complimentary passions, and is the fruit of numerous conversations between Bassart and Soledade. Both feel the idea of local choreographers sharing a stage should not be a rarified event.

''We think this kind of exchange should be going on throughout the dance community,'' explains Soledade, artistic director of Brazz Dance Theater. ``We all have a great passion for dance even if we have different ways of interpreting movement.''

Soledade will showcase work from his company's repertoire, including the widely praised Diaries of an Outlaw, which follows the life of Brazilian renegade Maria Bonita. ''This is a piece about relationships,'' Soledade explains. ``It's about always having to be on the run.''

In addition to other signature pieces, Inspiraciones Melancolicas and A Foot For Samba, Soledade will give audiences a 10-minute peek at his latest project, Cordel, which incorporates Argentine tango, hip-hop and the poetic structure of Cordel, a literary tradition from the northeast of Brazil. What do these seemingly different forms have in common? ''I'm interested in hip-hop and tango,'' Soledade says, ``and how movement becomes a very important way of expressing a story and history.''

As Bassart explains, she and Soledade are very different choreographers: ``Augusto's work is grounded in African roots, although it has contemporary thought, and mine is grounded in visual concepts and writing.''

PerformanceJournalism.com is an online media bureau for the arts in Miami-Dade County funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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