Pilobolus, which kicked off a four-week run at the Joyce on Monday night, is both timeless and a product of its time. Formed in 1971 by several young men just out of Dartmouth, the troupe clearly channels the earth culture of the late 1960s, but it’s not difficult to envision the dancers as court acrobats in ancient Crete.

The seven-performer company, which is currently led by three artistic directors — Robby Barnett, Michael Tracy, and Jonathan Wolken, whose association with Pilobolus goes back to its start — appears to understand this and to enjoy both widening and narrowing the lens of referents and associations. Indeed, Pilobolus continually parlays its most irreducible unit, the two-member balancing or tumbling act, into innumerable multiples and permutations.

A drawback to a collaborative directorship is the lack of a single voice with the authority to say “No.” Almost every piece on Monday night’s program had to some degree the flavor of improvisatory exercises that are allowed to go on too long. And yet even shy of its best, Pilobolus is a genuine theatrical experience.

The most significant offering was the first: a revival of 1971’s “Pilobolus” (which was named for a “sun-loving fungus,” according to the program notes). Choreographed by Steve Johnson, Moses Pendleton, and Mr. Wolken, “Pilobolus” lays out the tropes that have defined the troupe’s work since its inception.

There’s thunder on the soundtrack as the piece begins, and the audience sees what looks like two silhouetted penguins, nose to nose in the darkness. As the image separates and clarifies itself, limbs alternately distend at different angles; discreet pairs of limbs emerge, but then are arrayed in serried ranks so that they resemble a single silhouette.

Sleight of hand has been central to the troupe’s aesthetic from the start, and it finally emerges that there are actually three distinct organisms clasped together onstage, rather than merely two. The three men respond to musical cues — Pilobolus’s aural accompaniments are typically collages — with cantilevered and counterweight conglomerations, before being overtaken once more by primordial darkness.

“Pilobolus” is the taproot from which everything else on the program could be seen to descend from. The pieces that followed, all made since 2000, showed the inevitable working out and elaborating of a statement that was fresh and startling when first introduced.

Next shown was the New York premiere of “Momento Mori,” danced by Andrew Herro and Renée Jaworski and choreographed by Mr. Wolken. (Like almost all the pieces on the program, co-choreographic credit is given to a host of individuals, presumably dancers on whom the piece was first worked out.) The performers seem to be enacting the “Seven Ages of Man” (and woman) as they enter, hobbling. Then they steadily regress to their youth, all the way to children playing “doctor” — at which point Mr. Herro moons the audience. There is an in-the-buff motif running through the Pilobolus aesthetic that is charming, redolent of the Woodstock generation. But age overtakes Ms. Jaworski and Mr. Herro once again, and they exited huddled and stooped.

The next piece, “Tsu-Ku-Tsu,” was created by Alison Becker Chase, who taught dance at Dartmouth to Pilobolus’s founders and was an artistic director of the company from 1974 to 2006. “Tsu-Ku-Tsu,” puts the Pilobolus duets into a tribal context. The piece begins with three men crouched each supporting the women standing upright in their arms — a classic Pilobian image and an astonishing one. But they soon tumble to the floor, and for the balance of the work they cling to the ground as often as they ricochet into the air. Drums throb and sticks rattle on the soundtrack, while the ensemble is alternately soporific and agitated.

The second half of the program opened with Mr. Tracy’s “Symbiosis,” in which the lifts and holds executed by Jenny Mendez and Manelich Minniefee made the Pilobolus vocabulary seem like a body-sculpting parallel to the pas de deux of classical ballet.

The evening closed with Mr. Wolken’s “Megawatt,” which begins with six dancers dragging themselves onstage, nodding their heads frenetically, and sprinting off the ground by means of twitches and thrashes. The stage floor is a mat to cushion the crash landings of dancers, who at other times are caught or scooped up in midair in splayed positions. The spasmodic, plugged-into-an-electric-socket movement turns the dancers into kinetic personifications of overloaded circuity.

The techno soundtrack and the frenetic disorientation are quite a journey from the placid primitivism of the introductory “Pilobolus.” Yet Monday night’s performance showed that the company has negotiated a clear evolution along its own readily identifiable path.

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