Never work with children, animals — or sculpture. They’ll all steal the show.

Case in point? “Connected,” by the Australian contemporary troupe Chunky Move. (None of the dancers is chunky, but their moves aren’t smooth.) It has a humdinger of a set by sculptor Reuben Margolin. A large square of wire cables hangs ominously over the stage, the cables attached to a rack and wheel. It looks like a diabolical loom.

For the next hour, three women and two men try hard to turn your attention from the set to themselves — racing and tumbling along one side as one of them crosses the stage, takes small bars and inserts them between the wires to form a lattice.

But once the lattice is done, the dancers attach themselves to the cables, and as they move in a slow wave, the grid does the same. It’s a great effect.

All the wires get attached to one man, who does an almost-love duet with a woman lying face up under the grid. He lies face down across the stage and slithers as the grid moves softly above her in response.

The second half seems like a different show. The grid is hooked up to the wheel at the side, which keeps it moving.

To dialogue scripted from actual statements of museum security guards, the dancers come out in drab uniforms and march in lockstep as the voices talk about the boredom of the job. The narration ends with the story of an unidentified stolen artwork recovered by the cleaning staff, who almost threw it out because they didn’t realize it was art.

Like Chunky Move’s other works, “Connected” is good theater, even if it relies heavily on special effects. It’s at its best when the choreography and the construction look as if they belong on the same stage.