Last week the Lincoln Center Festival presented “I La Galigo,” Robert Wilson’s three-hour Indonesian epic that followed the actions of divinities through the millennia. Mugiyono Kasido, a Javanese performance artist who debuted in America on Monday as part of the festival, also invites cosmic comparisons. But whereas Mr. Wilson staged his spectacle using more than 50 actors, dancers, and musicians, Mr. Kasido had only himself in the Clarke Studio Theater, a black box on the top floor of the Rose Building.

Indonesian dance forms are renowned for their tautness and extreme coordination, especially among the eyes, hands, and feet. Traditionally, the torso remains bolt upright, nearly stationary, while the shifting glances of the dancers, floating above an impassive half-smile, can animate the space around them in a manner altogether foreign to most choreographers in the West.

Trained as a court dancer, Mr. Kasido retains close ties to traditional elements of Indonesian dance: gamelan music, shadow-puppet plays, and mask dramas. But he brings a contemporary twist: He removes the face makeup and ornamental costumes in favor of a regular pair of blue shorts and a T-shirt.

The first of three vignettes, “Searching for the Eye of the Temple,” begins with Mr. Kasido crawling into a square of white light, where he poises himself at a critical distance from traditional temple ceremonies. His movements provide discrete, shifting examples of religious art, but he frequently interrupts recognizable poses with idiosyncratic gestures of his own.

Taking two paper panels in each hand, he flutters them in anthropomorphic arrangements, covering his head to form a large beak on the rear wall and spreading them on either side like wings. The images are inspired in part by the bas-relief sculptures found in the Prambanan Temple, sacred to the goddess Shiva. Iskandar Kama Loedin’s lighting design replicates Mr. Kasido’s shadow several-fold, giving him the attribute the goddess’s multiple arms.

The effect is not meant to dazzle, and the grandeur of his themes is always kept in check by Mr. Kasido’s childlike body. In fact, some of the postures look downright scrappy, and he approaches them with crude informality that verges on violence to the classical forms. Adopting a stance, his arm will go slack, or else he will perfunctorily hurry through a combination.

But the work that best captures Mr. Kasido’s originality and sense of humor is “Rumors,” which confronts the anti-Chinese riots that rocked Indonesia in 1998. As he high-steps toward a red palette, his legs revolt, swinging at the knee. Once on the platform, he engages in all manner of pantomimic silliness, playfully disassociating one limb from another. He pumps his slack body up, or leans on an invisible post that falls out from under him.

Mr. Kasido, who comes from a family of puppeteers, is now a puppet himself. Representative of society at large, he iconographically fulfills social obligations with an eye-batting smile, military duties with a salute, and spiritual pieties with prayerful hands. But each gesture is precariously balanced. Internal forces constantly leave the body off kilter while he tries to retain stability.

In a memorable sequence, Mr. Kasido uses the shadowed contours produced by a large shirt to represent divergent voices clamoring for attention. His limbs constantly get caught up in the wrong holes as the truth struggles to emerge. Forced into absurd contortions, he continues to offer prayers and bright flirtatious smiles, literally putting on a good face amid chaos.

Tonight at 8 p.m. (West 65th Street, at Amsterdam Avenue, 212-875-5766).