“Shrimp on the Barbie!” This archetypal cry of Australian patio life echoed in my head as I watched the Australian modern dance company Chunky Move perform “I Want To Dance Better at Parties” at the Joyce on Tuesday night. Indeed, middle-class Australian life provides the context for the piece’s taped testimonies from five men who talk about their individual participations in social dance.

The piece originated as a series of interviews that Gideon Obarzanek, Chunky Move’s artistic director, conducted for an Australian television documentary. The men give voice to a wide range of attitudes about dance and their own dance prowess. Dance is almost as much a fulcrum of some of their lives as it is for the actual dancers onstage.

One man fancies himself an ace rug cutter and boasts of his Terpsichorean skills. One man has never felt anything but awkward and ungainly on the dance floor. One man is proud of his hard-won prowess, achieved through lessons he began in midlife. One man tells of meeting his male partner at a dance event, reminisces about their frequent attendance at line dancing and clog dancing meet ups, and recounts how their relationship ended after his lover met someone else at another dance party.

The men’s tales — which can be rambling, halting, or painfully earnest — play throughout “I Want To Dance Better at Parties,” projected on an array of small screens above the dancers. Juxtaposing such personal testimony with an ensemble of professional dancers is a risky business, establishing as it does two different sets of expectations in the audience. Mr. Obarzanek is only partially able to surmount this quandary.

“I Want to Dance Better at Parties” upholds the internationally subscribed to 70-minutes-without-intermission format. Chunky Move’s roster, made up of Kristy Ayre, Antony Hamilton, Jo Lloyd, Lee Serle, Delia Silvan, and Adam Wheeler, is likeable.The dancers present themselves as regular guys and gals rather than slick professionals, but they are indeed slick, working with brisk efficiency and enthusiasm that seems quintessentially down-under.

As the piece opens, the dancers appear one by one and align themselves with a video counterpart. The dancers don’t really tell the stories; rather, they converge with them, supplying bytelength illustrative vignettes and providing freeze-frame captions to the men’s unfolding narratives.

The piece stalls somewhat as the two vectors — formal composition and personal recollections — start to diverge. The stories on the soundtrack continue, and the five interview participants become recurring motifs.The dance elements, which at first consisted of short takes and frequent blackouts, now start to expatiate. The dancers continue to illustrate or comment upon their video and audio accompaniments, but they increasingly engage in rather long duets or full-cast scrums that create a more tenuous connection to the soundtrack that is the real raison d’etre of this piece. Yet the dance segments remain cued by the audio recollections. One man’s audio description of the “shallow breathing and hyperventiling” following the death of his wife is echoed by a knot of dancers rhythmically defined by their distressed exhalations.

In the early portions of the piece, we see a whirlwind tour of social dancing: Here are brief samples of everything from the Latin samba to the Israeli hora. But at a certain point, Mr. Obarzanek becomes less concerned with vernacular.The dancers spend an excessive amount of time standing with arms stiffly outstretched and lurching forward on relevé, like kids playing “I’m a Monster!” (No one says “Boo!” but you expect them to at any moment.)

There is also a contentious encounter between two dancers that is perhaps meant to provide a slamdance parallel to the feelings of alienation that social dancing visits upon in the interviews. In dance terms, the highlight of the piece is an interlude of chaotic collisions, a demolition derby of stumbling, falling, near, and actual collisions.

The conclusion to be drawn from this? That Aussie men are people, too, and that dance is too inextricably entwined in our social fabric, too much a barometer of self-image and interpersonal engagement, for almost anyone to be completely immune to it.

Until July 9 (175 Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, 212-242-0800).