SINGAPORE — What’s with all these things being lowered down from the ceiling at M1 Contact shows? During last week’s THE Dance Company piece Organised Chaos, it was a newspaper-covered mic. Last night, it was an Ultraman toy for the first piece and a lightbulb for the third one. Next thing you know, they’ll be lowering down a sofa!

Kidding aside, it was time for THE’s Second Company to be in the spotlight, performing at the Asian Festival Exchange triple-bill of works done in collaboration with choreographers from Malaysia, Japan and South Korea.

Things coming down from the ceiling wasn’t the only similarity between the two pieces that bookended the night. Both were also permeated with a sense of angst and had a rebellious edge.

Malaysia’s Wong Jyh Shyong, bringing a few of his dancers from the Damansara Performing Arts Centre, offered a classroom production, literally: Dressed up as students, performers evoked growing up pangs and the confusing range of emotions young people go through. There’s youthful swagger and defiance, the occasional cheeky gesture, the wide-eyed mocking grins and hysterical laughter. Teenage awkwardness was manifested in how performers would support a leg gone limp. At some point, they took off their uniforms, a stripping away that signaled — with assistance from the sound of a baby laughing — a reverting back to younger days as they crawled like worms and bit themselves in the arms. It was, in a sense, an end to innocence when they gestured an offering of toys to the audience.

There was more of a snarl in the third piece, Absence, a collaboration between Marcus Foo and Jin Byoung Cheol for Seoul Dance Collection. It was, for me, too “loud” a piece in its critique of, as the synopsis says, the “selective blindness… of first-world societies.” Its metaphors tended to be quite overstated — the very physical stripping down of Foo by Jin, who attached a chain around the former’s neck like a dog, for instance — but the piece’s main highlight was admittedly driven by that seething anger: A full-on monologue by Foo that began with him sitting to one side, a paper bag over his head, and ranting about social media before mocking middle class pretense.

“Be more like Beyonce,” he spat out, while standing in front of the wall on which a series of images of destruction were shown — before the “stage manager” dragged him away.

It was the comparatively quiet and contemplative middle piece, however, that was the most solid of the three. Lee Ren Xin and Miwa Okuno of Yokohama Dance Collection’s The Body Speaks looked at body politics, beginning with projected close-up images of various sections of a woman’s body that contrasted with the sight of four women slowly and sensually writhing on the floor, their individual space determined by a square light.

It seemed pretty straightforward, this whole idea of women’s identities being “boxed up”, but it was also consistently and satisfyingly elaborated upon and expressed in the group’s shifts between sharp angles and lines, and fluid curves. Here, too, the performers’ bodies rose and collapsed, shrank and grew, convulsed and stiffened, with their audible exhalation signaling release.

A brief black out provided the most intriguing moment, where we could not see the bodies but heard the sound of these being hit and slapped — the aural equivalent, perhaps, of the defamiliarised and fragmented images of the female body that was projected earlier — before it all, literally, came together in a singular image of a naked woman in a foetal position.

M1 Contact 2014 runs until Dec 13. There’s one more Asian Festivals Exchange show tonight at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. For more information, http://www.the-contact.org/