A decade ago, Johanna Wininsky might have been appalled with the modern dance work "Ecotone."

In the piece, which will be performed Thursday through Saturday at Slippery Rock University, the dancers roll from side to side, sometimes over each other, lurch like giant slugs, then sit bolt upright in jarring bursts of rigidity.

Hands are extended like tentacles, sometimes cradling another dancer's head.

The dancers rarely get up on their feet.

But it was Ms. Wininsky who choreographed "Ecotone," which bears little resemblance to the ballets she honed her dancer's legs on.

A Sharon native, Ms. Wininsky, 26, started dancing at 13 with Ballet Western Reserve, Youngstown.

"I didn't really like if that much," she said of modern dance. "I thought it was weird. There is so much freedom in modern dance and I liked the structure of ballet. When I came to Slippery Rock, I was a total ballerina."

Her thoughts on modern dance started to change at Slippery Rock, whose dance program focuses on modern dance.

As she learned about modern dance, the 1997 SRU graduate embraced its freedom, but found an underlying structure that was familiar.

"It felt much better on my body to dance in modern, rather than ballet," she said. "In modern, you use the floor a lot."

And in "Ecotone," the dancers use the floor almost exclusively, transforming it from a stage surface, to a forest floor teeming with insects and animals.

The title carries the dictionary definition of "the transitional area between two or more habitats or ecosystems," and Ms. Wininsky wanted the movements to remind people of animals struggling through the mud and life forms emerging from the primordial ooze.

She thought of evolution as she created the piece, not just in the sense of the evolution of life, but her own evolution from a ballet dancer wanting someone to tell her what to do, to an artist searching for ways to move the human body that no one has ever thought of before.

"I think with this piece I've really found my choreographic voice, if you will," said the resident of Pleasant Gap, Pa. "It's a turning point for me."

The dance world is starting to take notice.

She created "Ecotone," whose music by Russell Clark features a bass-heavy drone of the Australian aboriginal instrument the didgeridoo and dissonant violins patterned after a work of modern classical composer Henri Gorecki, as her thesis project at the University of Illinois, from which she graduated in May with a master's degree in dance.

The work earned her an award at the university, and was one of 13 dances picked from 53 submissions to be performed at the American College Dance Festival.

Three professional choreographers, Donald McKayle, Elizabeth Streb and Doug Varone, selected "Ecotone," and McKayle said the piece took him "to another world, not human but amphibian," according to Dance Magazine's July issue. "It was as if they were on a precious journey, moving on flippers."

Dance Magazine's item caught the eye of one of Ms. Wininsky's former teachers, Nora Ambrosio, who invited her to have Slippery Rock dancers perform it.

In April, the Slippery Rock dancers will perform the work at a concert of the Pennsylvania Dance Theatre, State College.

Ms. Wininsky is a company member of the professional non-profit PDT, where she dances, choreographs, teaches and assists the artistic director. She also teaches at Pennsylvania State University's Altoona campus.

"In the dance world, you have to be a teacher, you have to be a dancer, you have to be a choreographer," said Ms. Wininsky, who has performed with the James Hansen Dance Assemblage and Linda Lehovec and Dancers. "The more you can do, the more jobs you can find."

Staging "Ecotone" at Slippery Rock will afford Ms. Wininsky's family members and friends the opportunity to see her work.

"When I tell people, 'I'm a dancer,' they don't know what that means," she said. "They think Broadway dancing or something like that. They don't know modern dance."