Moses Pendleton, artistic director of MOMIX, wakes up each morning to a field of sunflowers. In the backyard of his Connecticut home, he cultivates them in well-ordered rows. Inside the barn where his company rehearses, he cultivates similar arrangements with human bodies: acute, geometric, and reverently imitative of the natural world.

In “Opus Cactus,” the evening length work that opened the company’s run on Tuesday at the Joyce (the company is celebrating its 25th anniversary season), Mr. Pendleton draws his inspiration from the deserts of the American Southwest. With his trademark athleticism, he curates a slideshow of images from the region: saguaro cacti, tumbleweeds, predatory reptiles, and desert roses.

“Prickly Pair,” one of the work’s 19 vignettes, depicts the 12 dancer-illusionists on one another’s shoulders. They vibrate their arms like heat waves across the desert sands. The image is mesmerizing to behold. But for the regular dancegoer thirsting for anything more substantial behind the movements, the visual tricks in “Opus Cactus” can be deceptive.

At his best, Mr. Pendleton builds physical analogies with the world around him, delighting in its organic forms and the possibilities they open up for human movement. Too often, however, elaborate prop devices and an abracadabra lighting design eliminates the body altogether. The physically honed performers accomplish their feats in near darkness, covered head-to-toe in spandex. They are deliberately transformed by the choreography to look as inhuman as possible.

Nevertheless, the performers accomplish astounding feats of strength and balance. We catch sight of a giant Gila monster, four humans in length, slowly palpitating as it creeps along the stage in “Gila Dance.” Samuel Beckman leads wearing a spiky helmet, and making the most ugly face imaginable to the growls in Brent Lewis and Peter Wood’s music “Outback Attack.” In “Desert Blossoms,” Spanish-style dresses slowly emerge from bulbs of spotted fabric to become mature flowering shapes.

Other sections follow a single movement theme. In “Cactus Wren/Morning Star,” the silhouettes of each woman scoop their necks like exotic birds. A deep crouch unites the male dancers in “Black Mesa,” suggesting sand crabs and other scuttling insects.

An array of props assists the performers, transforming movements into gymnastic gambits that include dollies (“Tracking the Earth”), gyroscopic jungle gyms (“Dream Catcher”), and trapeze swings (“First Contact”). In “Fire Walker,” Sterno pots are lit on fire and attached to the soloist’s feet. Twice the men perform long pole-vaulting exercises, distributing their weight individually and as a group to form different configurations, erecting primitive housing or a stylized canoe.

“Opus Cactus” is most successful when the movements go beyond merely visual representations of flora and fauna, and incorporate the larger, almost mystical connotations of the desert. In the opening section, “Sonoran: But Not Asleep,” a woman lies in a hammock, lazily dreaming beneath a starry sky. Soon the hammock transforms into a chrysalis and then elongated wings. Dilating wheels glow as they bounce through “Desert Storm.” Eventually these shapes begin to exhibit behavior. They are pulled to one another by a kinetic allure, forming an animated body that literally loses its head.

It comes as no surprise that Mr. Pendleton infuses nuance most skillfully in his portrayal of sunflowers. The six women reproduce the radiant fractals in “Sundance,” set to a piece of music by Joanne Shenandoah and Tom Wasinger called “Prophecy Song.” Large fans double as skirts for six women. They soon hold their fans vertically in pairs to resemble sunflowers blooming in the high desert sand dunes. The flowers open and close under the quivering heat, like time-lapse photography. When each woman spreads the fan between her legs, we glimpse the potent symbol of earth’s fertility in even the most arid climes. For only the second time, men enter to support the women. They stand as blackened stalks beneath the wilting fans.

The development of each image comes with its own music, generically blended into a propulsive mix of electronic world music. We hear the Harpsichord Concerto by Bach, funneled through an electronic arrangement of the Swingle Singers. The sounds of the didgeridoo go through Johnny “White Ant” Soames’s atmospheric production.

Originally the name of cattle feed, MOMIX has come to designate a collection of multimedia collaborators who team up to deliver a highly polished aesthetic: acrobatic movement based theater in the tradition of Cirque du Soleil and Mummenschanz. Mr. Pendleton is joined by 10 assistants, two lighting designers (Joshua Starbuck and John Finen III), costume designer Phoebe Katzin, the puppeteer Michael Curry of “The Lion King,” choreographer Brian Sanders, and sculptor Alan Boeding. On Tuesday May 17, this same team will deliver a new work at the Joyce, “Lunar Sea.” Utilizing the aerial arts in black light, the troupe will continue to defy gravity, leaving the terrestrial sphere of “Opus Cactus” to imitate the phases of the moon.

“Opus Cactus” will be performed again May 12 & 13 at 8 p.m., May 14 at 2 p.m. & 8 p.m., and May 15 at 2 p.m. & 7:30 p.m. (175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, 212-242-0800).