Ira Glass, the oh-so-personable creator and host of public radio's “This American Life,” is voluble in warning us, on stage and in print, that dance and radio—the two components of his live show “One Radio Host, Two Dancers”—really “have no business being together.”

Of course, he and his Terpsichorean confederates, contemporary dancer/choreographer Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, from Barnes’ company—are out to prove otherwise in “One Radio Host, Two Dancers,” a multi-faceted, multimedia 90-minute confection that had its second incarnation ever at Power Center Saturday evening, where it closed the Ann Arbor Summer Festival’s main-stage productions.

Glass tells us it’s the participants' shared sensibility that makes possible the artistic meeting of these two unlikely bedfellows. And to be sure, there’s a common exaltation of the everyday in all three artists’ work that lets Glass, Barnes and Bass click and bond in the stories they tell in words and deed.

But if you’re looking for commonalities or a through line in this variety-show-like production, it’s that good dance, like a good radio show or a good life, has a beginning, middle and end. Without that, each is incomplete. And that, more or less, is the subject matter that this threesome explores, in stories and dances, poignant and funny, about starting out, soldiering on and finishing up: in love, in life, in work, in play. How did you become a dancer? How did I get started in radio? How’d this show come about?

And what’s it like to do the same thing over and over? Bo-ring, says a touring Riverdance ensemble member in a TAL clip; along with her fellow dancers, she is hoping the Mega Millions lottery will free her from tedium. Wonderful, counters Glass, host of a public radio show that’s now up to 500 or so broadcasts.

How does love start? Awkwardly, is the answer, in the words of kids Glass interviewed for TAL on the eve of a middle-school dance. Barnes and Bass illustrate just how so with a dance in which there’s “petting,” as in, I’ll pat-you-on-the-head, and by calling on stage six perfect strangers from the audience for a “slow dance.”

How does love continue? In a great segment, a marketing man explains to Glass how he takes on the project of marketing himself—to his wife.

How does love end? Sometimes with life itself. Glass features TAL clips of Donald Hall reading poems about the last days with his wife Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia. With the poems as score, Barnes and Bass, wrapped in oversized coats, dance their own precarious, slow, sweet good-bye dance on a tabletop. (A side note: In introducing this section, Glass made no mention of Hall and Kenyon’s deep Ann Arbor connections, which would have been a nice customization. Kenyon was an Ann Arbor native and a University of Michigan graduate; she met Hall at U-M, where he taught for 17 years.)

Later, Glass talks about and incorporates material from a dear friend: the late David Rakoff, humorist, essayist and frequent TAL contributor. Rakoff’s last book, a novel in verse that receives posthumous publication next week, has a title that could almost be that of Glass’s show: “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish.”

Layering of media and materials abounds in “One Radio Host, Two Dancers.”

Glass, live, sets up and comments on Glass recorded interviews, so that present meets past. In more recent clips, he interviews Barnes and Bass—the latter reluctant, like so many dancers, to let words speak for her dances and dancing. And Barnes and Bass comment on and enlarge the stories in Barnes' almost-vaudevillian dances that are vernacular, moving and sometimes goofily off-hand even as they are carefully set. Like most abstract dances, they are stories in themselves. Loping, then trotting, then walking in endless clockwise loops in spangled dresses, for example, the pair tell their own story about beginnings, middles and ends and running life’s course.

Sometimes Glass joins them in their dances, doing well and poorly, for the humor of it all. You can see who’s trained here, and who’s not. But as important as the dancing is to the conceit of the show and to the actuality of it, I always felt a little like Barnes and Bass were there as second bananas to Glass, illustrating his points (about art and life), helping him with his show, his slant, even in the interviews he conducted with them.

Maybe that’s inevitable; somebody’s gotta be the boss. But in that guise, or that of host, Glass is still, in these early days of this production, somewhat too self-referential and self-conscious in the treatment of his material. We can see the wheels turning a little too much as he moves from story to story. And some tightening wouldn’t hurt.

“One Radio Host, Two Dancers” is neatly framed, though. There’s a mini-proscenium theater on the stage (by set/costume designer Kelly Hanson) at the work’s start, a theater within a theater. After a dance intro, Glass arrives with an old tan leather suitcase, which he unpacks of stand and notes. The show begins.

And it ends with a rewind: He departs after packing up and disappearing behind the curtain of this jewel-box theater. Barnes and Bass unplug its lights, dust it off and tote the stage away. We can just see Glass’s feet as he moves off stage along with it.