Distorted guitar, garage-chic costumes, and New Wave synthesizer music helped to capture the different eras of Stephen Petronio’s career Tuesday night at the Joyce. Dubbed in press kits “vintage Petronio,” the program spanned most of his company’s 20-year history. He uncorked old works such as “MiddleSexGorge” (1990) and “Lareigne” (1995), as well as the more recent “Prelude” (2000). He also introduced a work in progress, “bud,” a collaboration with Rufus Wainright.

Have his works aged well? The answer depends largely on whether you are a connoisseur of the particular cultural milieu from which they arose. I am not. With his signature corsets, skintight skivvies, macrame outfits, and pulsating electronica, Mr. Petronio has fixated on the androgynous everyman. He strives to elevate camp to a high art. Only on occasion does he produce picture books of mordant make-believe that will make anybody squirm.

Mr. Petronio has always aimed at being edgy. Even before the performance began, the lobby had the giddy atmosphere of an afterparty. The crowd was loaded with fashionistas. Pop music played on the sound system. No doubt at the behest of Mr. Petronio, people took their seats to songs by Jay-Z, the Notwist, and Klaus Nomi.

Mr. Petronio’s insistence about remaining hip and current is also his biggest liability. Repeatedly, he has aligned himself with high-profile designers (Manolo, Tara Subkoff of Imitation of Christ), art celebrities (Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor), and musical icons (David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed) to deliver robustly experimental works meant to appeal to a wide audience.

His highly attuned sense of current trends has enabled him to remain a perpetual “it” boy in the world of postmodern dance. Yet, seen in the light of today, his earlier works seem to have gone the way of most trends: from shocking and innovative to ironic and passe. His industrial-strength iconoclasm threatens to become merely trite glam.

Mr. Petronio seems aware of this danger. In his world premiere of the lower-cased “bud,” he introduces an introspective element into his trademark non-expressive and rapid-fire combinations of classical postures. Tara Subkoff’s costumes achieve a tantalizing visual equivalent to the internal ambivalence of a single person: Thang Dao and Gino Grenek share a suit jacket divided evenly between them.

Together they interact with a mixture of aggression and sensitivity. To a chorus of voices, and then a harrumphing tuba, the two strike energized poses. Rufus Wainright’s cindery voice drones about being “A Straight Man,” while the two halves catapult each other in a homoerotic frenzy. Though they support each other, they also bear grudges – one forcibly holding back the other’s ankle as they execute a turn. The piece concludes in a reluctant embrace.

It was enlightening to see this inclination toward reconciliation set beside Mr. Petronio’s earlier works. Both “MiddleSexGorge” and “Lareigne” were reconstructed with the helpful memory of senior dancers Kristin Borg, Ori Flemin, Ashleigh Leite, and Gerald Casel. In “MiddleSexGorge,” they presented anew the landmark work in which Mr. Petronio first introduced his own physical language of sharp pelvic thrusts and breakneck execution of classical steps.

Mr. Petronio intended “MiddleSex-Gorge,” originally performed at the height of the AIDS epidemic, to reflect the debilitating toll of the disease. The dancers depict the slow loss of physical control. They slowly accede the power of movement to outside forces, each lets the ensemble take turns lifting them up and twisting them in circles.

Mr. Petronio takes pains to minimize the expressive impact of movement. We see phrases assemble mechanically; different parts of the body operate independently to create grotesque contortions. Throughout the work, Mr. Petronio takes common gestures – shrugs, pecks on the cheek, zipping garments, dancers waving their hands over their heads to rock music – and abstracts them into pure formality.

“Prelude” is the product of a real physical impasse suffered by Mr. Petronio: After breaking his foot, he explored the physical restrictions that resulted from the injury. To the raucous guitar rock of Placebo, eight dancers move in a line without stepping out of place. Their movements are restricted, but they paw, pray, kneel down, and jut side to side in distorted poses. They bite each other like vampires, look up in unison, and spit out a white powder.

Individually, these gestures don’t add up. But the four works taken together provide a coherent vision to Mr. Petronio’s radical style of freewheeling improvisation. At moments, the evening even achieves an energy both exultant and disturbing – something we can hope to see more of as “bud” flowers into a finished work.

Until March 27 (175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, 212-242-0800).