NEW WINDSOR, NY.- Dance is notoriously impermanent. Perhaps as a reaction to that, more dancers have recently been making installations, viewable for days or weeks and only occasionally brought to life — “activated” is the usual term — with performances in situ.

There is, however, another tradition of interplay between dance and visual art. A choreographer responds to work by someone else, creating movement around something static, less to blur categories than to create a conversation between artists and mediums. Last week I saw two veteran postmodern choreographers mount stimulating examples of this: Jodi Melnick at Carvalho Park in Brooklyn, and Annie-B Parson at the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley.

Melnick was responding to “Spirit Playground,” an installation by Swedish textile artist Diana Orving. It’s a room-filling, semi-translucent web of organza silk and jute, nebulously suspended from the ceiling at many points and shaped like cotton candy stretched and twisted by the fingers of a giant. The work’s form appears organic, especially since long seams give the fabric a vascular ribbing, increasing the resemblance of parts to tulips or roses.

Sara Mearns, the New York City Ballet star, danced alongside Melnick. As in their previous duets, there were intimations of a teacher-student relationship, but amid the two-toned textural duality of Orving’s silk and jute, the two dancers’ contrasting qualities took on dynamic equilibrium.

Melnick is essentially micro, her small motions absorbing in their subtlety. Mearns is gloriously macro, her tiniest movements somehow magnified for opera-house distances. For audience members hugging the gallery walls, watching the line of her body tip in penché arabesque felt like looking though a telescope at something right under your nose.

Rarely touching the installation, the dancers moved around, through and under it, together and apart, to a sound score by James Lo. Was it in reaction to Orving’s forms that Melnick’s arched, languorous posing approached the curvature of Odissi dance? Beneath Orving’s clouds, the dancers’ side-by-side swaying seemed more wavelike. At the end of the 30-minute dance (to be reprised on Aug. 8), they were splayed across the concrete floor, faces down but holding hands, as if woven together.

Upstate, Parson was working on a vastly different stage. This one grass rather than concrete, not inside gallery walls but out on the rolling hills of Storm King’s 500-acre sculpture park, around monumental works made of welded metal: Arlene Shechet’s “Girl Group.”

Shechet’s six sculptures (on view until November) are easy to spot. In contrast to the sober grayscale throughout Storm King, they are brightly painted in blue, pink, green, yellow and orange. Free-form and complex in shape, each sculpture has a distinct character, but even separated by distances, they belong together, reveling in their color in drab company.

Parson met this ensemble with one of her own: an excellent cast of six women. Shechet designed the costumes — gray outfits with socks and shoes matching the hues of the sculptures, and apronlike skirts with her plan drawings printed on them. The performance happened in the golden-hour light of dusk (and will repeat Sept. 27-28).

Next to the sculptures, the dancers appeared more sculptural. As they lounged on the bases and stood gazing into the distance, their stasis converged with the implied motion of Shechet’s structures. But, as Parson did in her recent work “The Oath,” she also emphasized the ritual associations of group activity — most effectively as the women walked in procession from sculpture to sculpture, holding their aprons up. They did a five-minute dance around each work: a folklike circling and braiding, or a more obscure sign language of chopping and pointing arm motions.

The wittiest moments played with distance, such as when the performers, having slowly paraded from the first sculpture to the second and the third, suddenly sprinted down a hill to the fourth and hid themselves behind it. When viewers caught up, the dancers emerged in a formal arrangement of fainting spells, one dropping to the ground and the others picking her up. Where earlier they had leaned on the sculptures, they now leaned on one another, affectingly, head-to-head.

Around the fifth sculpture, up a curving hill from the fourth, the dancers channeled a different kind of girl group — the Shirelles or the Supremes — doing ritualized versions of 1960s social dances. A soundtrack by Tei Blow, fed through portable speakers, colored the movement as much as the setting did, its electronic manipulation of steel sounds and choral voices summoning sci-fi or supernatural associations that were distracting and limiting.

Shechet’s sculptures aren’t spaced equally. One — called “Midnight” though it is bright orange — sits far from the others at the end of a long allée, an outcast or the avant-garde. As the dancers finally headed in its direction, spectators were held back to watch them walk slowly down the path, stopping briefly to acquire metallic capes.

As they receded into the distance, their shapes merged into one, a smudge that shimmered like a mirage. You could call this a coup de théâtre, except the effect was more cinematic. Their protracted exit would have been a perfect image over which to roll the credits.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.