Pilobolus opened its four-week Joyce Theater season with a customary selection of works culled from the different programs to be offered during the run. The earliest piece on the program dated back to the troupe’s beginning in the early-1970s, while others were created just this year. The company was formed by young men who discovered dance as undergraduates at Dartmouth College; they obviously discovered biology and sociology too. Monday night’s repertory embraced the scene on the street, the oddities and complexities of acrobatic sleight of hand, the psychology of performance and performers, observations of flora and fauna, and human alienation.

New this year is the opening ensemble piece, Jonathan Wolken’s “B’zyrk.” The company members were cavorting circus roustabouts striking poses and shouting, “Hey!” as they hogged the limelight and the curtain calls. They showed us what they could do by arraying themselves in human totems and pyramids. And they showed us their feet of clay, as they staggered and stumbled around the stage. They were as astonished as we when one from their troupe vaulted over the head of a woman both in seated and standing positions.

Free association lead the way when the score — a suite of quirky music that might be called Middle European crackpot — started to entertain clucking sounds, and turned two of the dancers into pecking fowls. All cast members twirled Indian nautch-style before “B’zyrk” took it from the top — briefly reprising the opening movement’s greetings by its band of acrobats — before the curtain descended.

“Pseudopodia,” choreographed by Mr. Wolken and Moses Pendleton, was created in 1973, two years after Pilobolus began. “Pseudopodia” is a solo movement study of a unicellular organism that cannot stand up for falling down. Here Jun Kuribayashi enacted a study of double-jointed locomotion. Tied up in knots, he somersaulted around the stage, displaying feats of physical control: Balancing on his haunches, he used his center to pry himself up from the ground.

“Gnomen,” the work of Mr. Wolken and Robert Barnett made in 1997, opens with a statement of Pilobolus’s enduring interest in the imagery of biological processes. Cell division might be illustrated in the way that four men — Andrew Herro, Mr. Kuribayashi, Manelich Minniefee, and Edwin Olvera — entered meshed together in a joint somersault, and then unraveled into separate beings. This piece seems to be concerned with the lot of the individual, the underdog, and its connection to the community. Each dancer is in turn placed outside the pack, made the runt of the litter. “Gnomen” might be seen as a perverse game of tag in which whoever is “it” is rendered helpless, left to the mercy of the remaining three dancers who may torment or console or toy with him.

After the intermission came Michael Tracy’s new duet, “Persistence of Memory,” performed by Annika Sheaff and Mr. Minniefee. Mr. Minnifee began posed on the floor, then Ms. Sheaf entered running backwards; circling the stage, she signaled that time was to be rewound. A film of memory enclosed the duet as it ran the gamut of Pilobolus’s trademark partnering devices, which never lose their power to surprise and astonish. Mr. Minnifee lay on the floor, his legs raised straight up in the air, and became the pivot over which Ms. Sheaf slung herself. She stood up and his feet straddled her neck as he dangled upside down. Eventually, the dancers fell into an embrace, a more conventional way of showing togetherness than the rolling cantilevers.

Monday night’s performance closed with Mr. Wolken’s “Megawatt,” an immersion in grunge performed to a soundtrack culled from Primus, Radiohead, and Squarepusher. Propped on their elbows, the dancers entered hobbling on all fours, dragging themselves across the stage, but it was soon clear that more important than the floor-work were the aeriel relays ricocheting across the stage. It was as if the performers had reported to a competitive meet in open-socket thrashing and twitching. Dynamic contrasts interspersed the hurtling: Spasmodic men on the floor were juxtaposed with women walking in trance pace. The dancers’ indefatigable exertions made “Megawatt” a rousing crowd-pleaser that felt somewhat empty, perhaps deliberately so.

In “Megawatt,” the dancers (perhaps “movers” is a better word for the hybrid vocabulary that the Pilobolus performers use) showed their teeth in flashes of belligerence. They could be from a species that has run amok, rendered soulless and mindless by decibel overload.

Until August 11 (175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-691-9740).