Drawing on his background in Chinese opera and calligraphy, Shen Wei creates arresting tableaux that defy the traditional boundaries among painting, dance, and music. In his celebrated “Connect Transfer,” presented last summer as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, dancers spread paint across a broad canvas as they moved, recording their ephemeral motions in swirling arabesques of black and red. On Tuesday evening, his company returned to the New York State Theater with a world premiere of “Map,” his ambitious new work that charts, in his words, “raw and pure movement.”

A map condenses space; it illustrates the relationship among bodies along a limited plane. Mr. Shen uses the term to describe individual movement studies. Each “map” emphasizes a different kind of rudimentary phrase. These “maps,” seven in all, trace the rotation of the joints or the full-bodied torque of buoyant swinging, as well as other repeated movements of his own devising (labeled with test-trial names like “internal isolation,” “internal singular,” “internal individual”). They are presented individually, developed, and put together at the end, reflecting the sonata structure of Steve Reich’s “The Desert Music.”

Mr. Shen goes to great lengths to mete out the physical equivalent of simple instrumental phrases that are combined in a symphony. In the first section, all the dancers in the company drag their bodies across a streak of light to the mechanical rhythms of the score. A humming chorus of voices whirs behind the strings as they pick themselves up, whipping their arms and swiveling their hips, or else dropping to the ground again in low-slung floorwork.

The backdrop, designed by Mr. Shen, is marked up with graffiti of different colors, mathematical equations scrawled beneath. Likewise, most of the movement is purposefully indecipherable, amounting to an elaborate, repetitive byplay. Dana Burkart’s costume design places the dancers in denim-colored nylon pants with different tops, either monochrome tanks, full-sleeved shirts or rugby-fitted camouflage. Their street-chic clothes emphasize a parallel between their collapsible, tricky balances and other forms of popular dancing: hiphop, break dancing, even capoeira. Except those forms are energetic and improvisatory, not coldly procedural.

Any viewer’s impatience is justified after scanning the nearly four pages of program notes, which recount each movement technique with the dryness of an instruction manual (“It is the second C of the CDC in the ABCDCBA form of the music”). Additionally, the dancers, who give committed performances, are forced to wear the same inscrutable expression throughout the piece, and stay in character even during the bow. For a better example of technique-conscious street dancing, one could go see the idiosyncratic, humorous, and engaging work of Victor Quijada’s Rubberband dance.

The program also included the New York premiere of “Near the Terrace, Part 1.” Created in 2000, the work is a painterly moonscape inspired by the surrealist Belgian artist Paul Delvaux and set to the atmospheric music of Arvo Part.

A sculptural quietude accompanies the slow perambulations of topless extraterrestrials in long tattered gowns, covered with gypsum white chalk. A lone figure somersaults gradually; two women lean at the center of the stage with interlocking shoulders. Deep chasms of rest divide each strike on a piano key or an ethereal melody on the violin.

The work achieves an impressive command of Mr. Shen’s singular artistry, which melds the plastic and kinetic into one theater. But seen together with the hermetically bland “Map,” “Near the Terrace, Part 1” seems to indicate that this choreographer-cum-cartographer is leaving behind his visually charged aestheticism in favor of a more rigorous abstract formalism. Disappointingly, he is headed in the wrong direction.

July 23 at 8 p.m. and July 24 at 7 p.m. (Lincoln Center, 212-362-6000).