The Israeli choreographer Sally-Anne Friedland creates thinking responses to the geopolitical and social-sexual realities of the world in which she lives and works. When her Tel Aviv-based company made its American debut Wednesday night at the Ailey Theater, as part of the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, Ms. Friedland’s works and the dancers who performed them demonstrated not only theatrical and kinetic skill but a keen awareness of enduring and topical discords.

Ms. Friedland was born in South Africa and danced there before immigrating to Israel in 1976. After dancing with Israel’s Bat-Dor and Bat-Sheva companies, she began to choreograph and founded the Sally-Anne Friedland Dance Drama Company in 2002.

Her company’s debut program clocked in at that now-talismanic 70-minute-with-no-intermission length. The first piece, “Borders,” was 15 minutes long, and the second, “Red,” hardly flagged at all during its 55-minute duration. I enjoyed parsing the symbolism and imagistic allusions in Ms. Friedland’s work without feeling a need to “understand” everything. The formal invention and the ever-shifting tableaux were continually absorbing.

The sound collage of “Borders” begins with stomps and heartbeats and concludes with astral xylophone, all courtesy of Philip Glass’s soundtrack for the “The Hours.” The dancers tunnel through time and range across a landscape that is home to spatial disjunctions as well as continuities. They stand behind individual scrims that seem to mist them in the veils of time, then take on the flavor of revenants as they slowly turn, sink, clench, and unspool in a posed plastique style that, oddly enough, recalls the work of Soviet choreographer Leonid Jacobson.

Ms. Friedland knows how to populate and animate space. Her feeling for complementary shapes and utterances between performers constructs dialogue even without physical contact. The dancers can seem distant from one another when standing side by side; sometimes they are clearly linked even when physically separate. The scrims keep lifting until finally everyone moves onstage together, swinging, sliding, subsiding through time and space.

The company’s five dancers – Lola Fishbein, Nava Yaacobi, Oren Lazovski, Shay Haramaty, and Shimrit Golan – are heterogeneously built, but all are technically skilled and gifted with a vivid sense of theatricality and irony. When they move in unison, their synergy makes them seem like a larger ensemble than they are.

As the lone male in the group, Mr. Lazovski accepted with celerity the burden of personifying his entire sex in “Red,” a piece concerned with women’s issues and historical identities, and performed to a sound collage by Hugues le Bars, the Tiger Lillies, and Astor Piazzolla.

The first music in “Red” is recognizably that of the Middle East.The cradle of Western civilization as well as the wellspring of the human lifespan are acknowledged as a dancer in a black lace dress holds onto a stage flat and does a backbend to the floor, followed by a series of graceful birth contractions.

Throughout “Red,” Ms. Friedland’s medium becomes its own subject by virtue of a two-rung set piece resembling a ballet barre at the rear of the stage, over which the dancers clamber and pose. Jewish identity also seems to be acknowledged.Sitting at the front of the stage, the women don aprons they’ve retrieved from two ceremonial tablecloths redolent of a seder or other liturgical rite.They pull out wine glasses and Mr. Lazovski comes onstage to fill them, now held by the women on their heads. “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” is heard on the soundtrack. The women put the glasses on their bellies, and the wine spills as the women experience tremors or contractions. Then they perform a dance with their elbows across the tablecloth.

Ms. Friedland’s work evinces an adroit understanding and manipulation of theatrical appurtenances as well as shifting tones and attacks. Having also choreographed for opera productions in Israel, she is certainly versed in the cynicism, burlesque, and nihilism of Dadaist cabaret and Brechtian theater. She is not afraid to traffic in overt polemicism in her depictions of male-female relations, but she doesn’t let this diminish her work’s entertainment value.

Indeed, Ms. Friedland’s wit rings some fresh changes on the now-venerable theme of reciprocity between gender-specific stances. In “Red,” she parades before us a woman tied in puppet strings controlled by her male lover (and oppressor). But she follows this with a more playful folie a deux, a back-to-back tango in which man and woman exchange support roles. He piggybacks on her and she evades his kisses while he chomps on a rose.

Hostilities between the sexes become hostilities between populations, when the putative ballet barre is pulled apart and its dismembered halves become firearms. Therein ensues apocalypse, followed by rebirth.

The Sally-Anne Friedland Dance Drama Company will perform again February 18 & 19. The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival continues until March 12 at the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater (405 W. 55th Street at Ninth Avenue, 212-415-5500).