In “Connoisseurs of Chaos,” Karole Armitage maps the stage, charting nodal points and hot spots. She keeps the audience in suspense, looking for the centers of the dancers’ bodies and the center of the entire movement field. The work, now at the Joyce Theater, pays tribute over the space of an hour to instant obsolescence, as well as the inevitability of recurring patterns.

“Connoisseurs of Chaos” is performed by six barefoot dancers to Morton Feldman’s 1981 “Patterns in a Chromatic Field,” which was played live at the Joyce by cellist Felix Fan and pianist Andrew Russo. It’s an unusual piece of music — sometimes it sounds like cool jazz or new-age chamber music, and sometimes it gets almost gutbucket earthy. Frequently there are lulls prolonged to the point of expiration. Ms. Armitage divides the score into “plunk” and “twang.” Beats and clusters of piano notes bring everyone on; mewling cello bowing is for solos and duets, where she sometimes seems both to sink and take up a slack released by the music. It’s stimulating to watch the way music triggers an instantaneous or slightly delayed response.

The black holes of silence or emptiness, from which the music as well as the dance seem periodically to be emerging, are effectively echoed in the rear projections by David Salle that provide the décor. Vortical, gyroscopic voids morph and merge. And there are more familiar glimpses of actuality: outside as apprehended from inside.

Ms. Armitage is five years younger than William Forsythe, and she began choreographing a few years later in the 1970s, so it’s perhaps unfair to claim a Forsythian influence in her work. But there are striking deployments of Forysthian devices in “Connoisseurs of Chaos,” as the dancers walk out or walk off brusquely. Mr. Forsythe’s abstruse sign language of tapping and knocking makes fleeting appearances.

Both Ms. Armitage and Mr. Forsythe look to Balanchine’s modernist vocabulary as a departure point. Hips swivel, joints are loose, movements are big and aggressive. Balletic punctuations become the tonic notes in her phrases. The movement is, for the most part, high-strung and restless, but sometimes Ms. Armitage lets the dancer’s legs stretch with relative leisure into arabesque fondus; yet she keeps the unfurling more clipped than it would be in ballet. She also dilates upon the split-second mutability of a pose or position. A neutral attitude extended in space becomes a nudge or nuzzle. There’s a schematic divide between ballet’s traditional interest in line — and its current over-concentration on line — and modern dance’s traditional preference for shape. She contrasts the swelling distension possible in a suspended line as opposed to a more surgically clean slice through space. Like Balanchine, Ms. Armitage sometimes choreographs extensions into space not as important expansions but instead as a shaking out, an afterthought.

Ms. Armitage danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company between 1976 and 1981, and we see in her work Mr. Cunningham’s democratic distribution of spatial priority, his rhythms of arrest and collapse, of reciprocal tilts and cantilevers. There is the dancer rising up in a quick relevé and using her partner as stanchion — a fleeting moment of symbiosis.

Ms. Armitage’s motival repetition gives balance to her “Chaos” and only occasionally seems needlessly reiterated. Early in the piece there’s a duet between Megumi Eda and William Isaac that establishes several of the parameters of the piece. These two dancers continue to mix it up at regular intervals throughout the piece, while Leonides Arpon frequently pops up as the sparky hub of a circle.

There is, throughout Ms. Armitage’s kinetic universe, a perpetual, implicit threat of some rupture or violence. Whether faster or slower, kicks and extensions are somehow belligerent. The dancers seem to want to knock some sense into each other. Dancers push their partners down to the ground in a grand plié. Duets are interrupted routinely, and sometimes they’re disrupted aggressively. Whatever is achieved can be quickly undone or abandoned. At one point, Frances Chiaverini carefully bonds Mr. Arpon and Mei-Hua Wang together in a bridge formation that is artfully constructed but not long for the world. The two dancers sink to the floor, and Ms. Chiaverini walks off disinterestedly.

A spiky test of wills seems to unfold onstage. Power struggles play out as they do in boardroom, bedroom, and sandbox. “I won’t play with you anymore,” Mr. Arpon seems to tell his colleagues when he walks offstage unexpectedly.