Even by New York standards, she's shocking.

No one at Hollins University was surprised to read in Sunday's edition of The New York Times that Ann Liv Young -- the dance student who once painted herself red and paraded around the Hollins quad nude -- is making headlines again.

The 2003 Hollins graduate is premiering her latest adventure in boldness to sell-out crowds at the Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea this week.

Asked in a phone interview to describe "Michael," the 55-minute show that comes with a for-mature-viewers-only warning label, the 24-year-old choreographer used words such as "pornographic" and "provocative," and yet "oddly de-sexualized."

Plot? None to speak of.

Set? A sofa she found in the trash and a background of Waverly wallpaper -- "probably the only thing my mom will like about the show" -- all of it crammed into a 42-foot-long trailer.

Opening scene? Kids, better cover your ears.

Four topless women in white underwear dance to a song by Eminem. Meanwhile, a man in a white suit masturbates while watching them through a window -- live and on stage -- and, no, he's not faking it.

"I have no idea how he does it, but he's very talented," Young said, adding that she ditched the first guy playing that role because he refused to, um, perform.

None of this shocks Young's mentor, Hollins dance professor Donna Faye Burchfield -- not the nude woman solo-dancing with peanut butter on stage, not the New York police arriving nightly at Young's apartment, where her dance company rehearses.

"Pushing the boundaries; that's really what modern dance is," Burchfield said. "Ann Liv has this way of making visible things that are complicated and maybe even frightening.

"People say she's outrageous, she doesn't know what she's doing. But I have to tell you: She knows exactly what she's doing."

Burchfield, who's also dean of the American Dance Festival, realized that the moment she met her. Eighteen at the time, Young had 90 seconds to stand out from a crowd of 300 ADF scholarship applicants.

Burchfield thought she'd seen it all before, but the second Young began moving, "I was like, 'What world is this child from? What is she doing?' "

By her senior year at Hollins, Young was performing original choreography at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. -- a piece that featured a television stand, heads of broccoli, lemonade and body parts that her dancers occasionally inserted into plastic pitchers.

When she couldn't get into the Hollins dance studio, she rehearsed in the hallway. If the hallway wasn't available, she sat in her car going over her lines.

By 22, Young had conquered the New York Dance Theater Workshop's young choreographers' series with a piece she'd created at Hollins called "American Crane Standards" that featured . . . pastel-colored toilets. The New Yorker raved that her "madcap choreography mocks strip-club routines, cheerleading and feminine demureness with dancers that know how to flout the male gaze while flaunting their stuff . . . It's endlessly inventive, tacitly confrontational, as fun to discuss as it is to watch."

Young's next splash, a dance called "Melissa Is a Bitch," earned her -- and three other Hollins dance alums in her troupe -- an invitation to Vienna's Impulstanz, a festival that's described as the Cannes Film Festival of modern dance.

That show featured naked dancers on swings, the music of Lionel Ritchie and green ice cream, and was such a hit that organizers had to add performances to satiate the standing-room-only crowds.

Young is clearly at the knife point of the cutting edge. On Monday she had just been interviewed by New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella ("It was Joan somebody. I can't remember her name, but she asked pretty good questions.").

Yet she is amazingly down-to-earth and polite. "I miss Roanoke a lot," she said, especially the mountains, the Goodwill store on Williamson Road and Gene's Trading Post in Cloverdale.

Her dog, Lydia, was a pit bull puppy when she adopted her from the Roanoke SPCA. While most vets refused to treat Lydia because she had kennel cough, Young tucked her in a Snugli and wore her around campus, feeding her with a bottle and nursing her back to health.

Lydia now accompanies Young to New York street corners, where she supplements her income by selling her hand-sewn wares -- purses, jewelry, skirts and dog collars (for humans, natch). Information on her crafts and choreography can be found at annlivyoung.com.

"Even though she's hotter than most people realize, she's not making much money, not that she really cares about money," Burchfield said. "There's a real persistence that's driving her genius."

Her upcoming dance residency in France, spurred by the success in Vienna with "Melissa," is "the kind of gig the mainstream choreographers would just die to get," Burchfield added. "If she were in visual art, she'd be so big she'd be in the Whitney Biennial."

In France, Young and her dancers plan to interpret the story of Snow White. (Look out, Dopey.)

"People think I'm this crazy troublemaker, but all I do is rehearse, really," Young said. While she hasn't been arrested since the 2001 indecent exposure incident at Hollins, the police do routinely show up at her Brooklyn doorstep to tell her dance troupe to quiet down.

Do they know they're often rehearsing naked?

"No. They just tell us to shut up through the door," she said. "If they came in, they'd probably be into it."