Robert Battle is only 33, but he’s already showing signs of becoming a great choreographer. It’s not only that he has strong instincts, and interesting ones; he also trusts them and renders his ideas and impulses with absolute clarity. Somehow, the movement feels fresh as the moment it left his bold imagination. Mr. Battle makes an audience sit up and take notice, marvel, even laugh. His work reaches over the edge of the stage and communicates with people.

On Wednesday night at the Joyce, Mr. Battle’s sleek company shared a bill with Paradigm, the troupe created by Gus Solomons Jr. to showcase the abilities of older dancers. (For the rest of the Joyce engagement, the companies will take turns staging a full bill.) It’s no disrespect to Paradigm — an interesting company with innovative choreographers — to ask why Mr. Battle should not have his own week at a major New York venue, when he is one of the most exciting modern choreographers now working in America.

Mr. Battle comes out of the David Parsons company, where he danced for seven years and seems to have picked up his showmanship. Yet that showmanship is of a different hue than Mr. Parsons’s — more modern, less pop. Some of this modern quality, no doubt, comes from his years of study at the Juilliard. It’s this thoughtful, rigorous modern dance orientation that makes him one of the few active choreographers who looks at home making dances for the Alvin Ailey company.

Mr. Battle’s four-year-old company, Battleworks,consists of a group of highcaliber dancers who also dance for other people.Their training and bodies are reminiscent of any number of good modern companies, but their sizzle is all their own. They have a flair for drama without being phony, and they have the fearlessness of actors; if Mr. Battle asks them to mime cannibalism or hurl their bodies at the floor,they don’t even blink.

Both activities figured prominently in “Primate,” a world premiere with an original score by Philip Hamilton. The percussive music, based on Indonesian monkey chants, had a trancelike beat and a primitive creepiness, which Mr. Battle used to fashion a triptych of tribal ritual.

In the first section, as the music thumped and the five dancers (in unisex spandex) quivered like Jell-o, the tribe gathered. Their eyes were circled with eerie makeup.Their basic posture — hunched, slavish — had a strange, abstract effect. They bewitched with primitive motions: crawling, convulsing, stamping. It was fascinating to watch their curved, outstretched wrists tapping out rhythms on the air, their heads flopping on slackened necks, their needy hands stretching toward gaping mouths.

By the second section, the tribe had turned on one of its members, who lay prostrate on the floor before the others. Slowly, a single arm snaked its way up into the air, its hand clenched like a claw. Then it dropped like a deadweight, ripping into the prone body. The others recoiled, but soon they, too, were clawing at the corpse and feeding off it. This section, lit far too dimly by Burke Wilmore, lost a good deal of its drama as it played out in an inscrutable downstage corner.

The return of the tribal rhythms signaled the final section, a mesmerizing orgy of purging. A simple shift from hunched-over, flat-footed jumps to bolt upright leaps with arms overhead was breathtaking, illustrating that it’s not just Mr. Battle’s unexpected movements, but the unexpected sequence of them, that animates his dances.

Nowhere was this more true than in the 2005 “Promenade,” a dance boiled down to its essence. Danced by a group of eight (four couples) in muslin skirts and suits, to a remarkably good score by John Mackey, “Promenade” had the air of a Viennese waltz performed by the neurotic patients of Dr. Freud. As they danced, the couples’ tics broke the surface — a convulsion here, a hand fidgeting at the mouth over there.

It takes a burgeoning imagination to produce this range of movement, but it also takes a strongly individual eye to harness it into coherent dances, as Mr. Battle does. That individuality was starkly evident in “Takademe,”Mr.Battle’s signature 1995 solo, a wild array of motions — martial arts slices, spine undulations, quick pedaling steps, long sinuous arms — that finally seems to be the only possible fit for the music, a curious brand of Indian scat-singing.

Three new works for Paradigm rounded out the bill. Mr. Solomons’s “Royal Court Museum,” not his best work, felt a bit like Halloween, with a lot of black-robed figures posing while Chris Lancaster coaxed screechy noises out of his electric cello. Much lighter (and more successful) was Carmen deLavallade’s “Sam’s Party,” a goof on “Waiting for Godot” that featured a marvelous trio of older ladies in drapy blue pantsuits and wide-brimmed hats, sashaying around like Cinderella’s fairies in Palm Beach.

“Nowaday” was a new solo performed by Mr. Solomons and choreographed by Wally Cardona, who lived up to his reputation for provocative, quirky use of space, sound, and lighting (by Roderick Murray). Mr. Solomons, dressed in a short-sleeve button-down shirt and slacks, used his lanky, muscular limbs to mimic the fits and starts of Mr. Cardona’s minimalist soundscape, which utilized everything from turntable scratches to birdsong. As always with Mr. Cardona, the overall effect — by turns agitated and tranquil — was more than the sum of the parts.

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