“Let’s dance.” In natural theater, the body rules.

It started with a dance. This is not unusual for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Pavol Liska, who runs the company with his wife Kelly Copper, said: “Dance becomes a kind of cell that contains the complete DNA of everything.”

In “No President,” which is primarily set to Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” the dance that Liska and Copper did is not performed until the very end. It is a distillation of the movement and gesture material seen throughout the work, its “vocabulary,” Liska said. “You’re stealing from the dance.”

There is no Land of Candy or Sugar Plum Fairy in “No President,” which has its North American premiere Thursday at the NYU Skirball and runs through Saturday. But the show, subtitled “A Story-Ballet of Enlightenment in Two Immoral Acts,” is choreographed—humorous, violent, crude, tender—within an inch of its life. For Nature Theater, a spacious, playful experimental theater company in New York City known for its risk and rigor, dance serves a very specific purpose.

“I’m always nervous,” Liska said. “I’m always anxious and the best way to relax into the process is to do a dance. Even when we’re teaching a class, the first thing I say is, ‘Okay, let’s do a dance.'”

Copper said, “Dance is like a way of insisting that the core of the thing is going to be some kind of pleasure, because for us it’s a joy to work in dance. It’s the most fun we have.”