I frequently glance at my watch while watching Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room,” and not because I’m bored. Rather, I am visited by recurring disbelief that having laid down her basic movement statements early in the 40-minute piece, Ms.Twarp will be able to keep tweaking them enough to sustain the audience’s interest. She can’t introduce too much new material without setting herself at odds with the minimalism of Philip Glass’s score, which she commissioned especially for this piece. But Ms. Twarp surpasses my expectations at every performance: Whatever monotony “In the Upper Room” accumulates as it accelerates is constructive, and contributes to a sensation of tidal inexorability.

American Ballet Theatre, which wrapped up its three-week City Center season yesterday, revived “In the Upper Room” after a long absence. Ms. Twarp made the piece for her own group in 1986, and it was taken into ABT’s repertory two years later, when Ms.Tharp disbanded her company and folded it into ABT. The piece reflects not only the infatuation with ballet that grew increasingly to determine her work of the 1980s, but also her intense identification with boxing, aerobics, American vaudeville, and vintage popular dance. Some of the dancers are on pointe, some are in sneakers, and she continually engages the audience’s interest by the way she juxtaposes the two camps. The legs dribble and the arms jab in a way that polymorphously suggests both pugilistics and soft shoe.

One of the less attractive aspects of Ms. Tharp’s ambition when working with the big ballet companies during the 1980s was her insistence that the highest-ranking members be cast in ensemble roles. It was impossible not to imagine her deriving some satisfaction from humbling some of the biggest names in ballet of the period. But this agenda provided an all-star payoff to the audience, and this season’s spectators could see in a single performance of “In the Upper Room” the likes of Stella Abrera, Herman Cornejo and his sister Erica, David Hallberg, Paloma Herrera, Gillian Murphy, and Ethan Stiefel.

Most of “In the Upper Room” focuses on group movement that is sometimes synchronized in unison and sometimes deconstructed into myriad independent units. Ms. Herrera’s role is something of a star turn by virtue of its isolation. Her ballet sequences are pumped out with a single-minded intensity that doesn’t often pause to sample the locker-room camaraderie pervading much of the piece. Ms. Herrera whipped through her role with scorching energy and determination.

Mr. Stiefel, by contrast, was very much one of the guys, first among equals in a three-member posse that hunkered and loped and leapt with deliberately unaffected mojo. His catapulting contribution here made me think back to “Known by Heart,” in which he starred when Ms.Tharp created that work for ABT in 1998. The ballet had some great things in it, but the final movement was unnecessarily prolonged to the point where one feared for the dancers’ health. Ms. Tharp has never known when to stop, and “In the Upper Room” is relentlessly pummeling, with barely a moment of repose.

But there is also a slickness to the work that reminds me of an expertly assembled music video from the same period. From first to last the stage is engulfed with dry-ice smoke.Are there no mirrors? No, but the dancers change into one Norma Kamali costume after another, allowing an increasing display of sinew and skin.

Ms. Tharp’s own obstinacy finds its personification in the two gal jocks who open and close the ballet, danced in the revival premiere by Ms. Abrera and Ms. Murphy. A thrilling yet chillingly indefatigable pair, they looked like they would insistently perform their reps until the apocalypse – not that they would notice when it arrived. The two dancers delineated a contrasting imperviousness: Ms. Murphy was a playful coquine, while Ms. Abrera’s workout ethic evinced a more neurotic compulsion.

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ABT’s City Center season was one of the most eventful of Ms. Abrera’s career. She performed with imagination and intelligence and a new authority. In “Afternoon of a Faun” she used a provocative stillness to transform into a topical Melisande. The second “Les Sylphides” I saw her dance with Mr. Hallberg this season was much more persuasive than their first. When they make their entrance in their duet, she is descending from a lift, as if she had been plucked out of the sky. Together they did indeed suggest that illusion.

Kristi Boone also demonstrated the American ballerina’s temperament at its best. In the second cast assembled for “In the Upper Room,” Ms. Boone essayed Ms. Abrera’s role with devastating nonchalance. In “Dark Elegies,” dancing the solo Michele Wiles had performed at the revival premiere, Ms. Boone was able to be emotionally moving without demonstrating any overt emoting.

Ms. Boone had not been originally scheduled to dance the “Les Sylphides” Prelude, but ultimately did get to dance one performance last Wednesday night. American dancers are not trained to step effortlessly into a ballet like “Les Sylphides.” It was instructive to watch Ms. Boone successfully seek the breathing quality that is essential, so that when she is poised on pointe, she has not reached an end stop but has aligned herself to a pantheistic reverberation.

The night of Ms. Boone’s Prelude was also Anna Liceica’s single performance of the Waltz this season. Ms. Liceica seemed nervous, but her occasional moments of strain were as interesting as the way she brought a haunted, almost Gothic quality to the stage. She seemed at times to be testing her arms’ tactility by measuring the air’s resistance to them.Ms.Liceica is always compelling to watch because she never seems empty.

No two performances of any ballet are ever identical; but the repeat performances by ABT’s dancers seemed particularly fresh this season.The company did not descend into complacency and remained well worth watching at all times.