When dance troupes perform in the round, they proclaim the uniqueness of their art form because they ply an advantage that a drama troupe doesn’t have in the same situation. Spoken theater trains us to expect the face to be the primary conduit of expressive information; despite the eloquence of many actors’ bodies, the audience is a bit anxious whenever the performers’ backs are turned. In dance, the question of visibility doesn’t pose a problem: No angle is restricted or less privileged since dancers’ bodies are trained to be legible from all vantage points.

On Tuesday night, the Israeli-based Batsheva Dance Company presented Ohad Naharin’s 2003 piece “Mamootot” (“Mammoth” in Hebrew) under the aegis of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. This in-the-round – or rather, in-the-square – performance took place not in BAM’s opera house but in the nearby Mark Morris Dance Center. Not only the character of “Mamootot” but its actual subject might be the choreography’s adaptive response to the particular configuration of the wraparound performance space for which it is intended.

Watching “Mamootot,” the audience sits on several rows of bleachers arrayed on each of the space’s four walls. Inevitably, the bleachers refer us to the storied past of postmodern dance. The Judson Church events of the 1960s were frequently performed in school gymnasiums as part of their attempt to wrench dance out of its traditional theatrical parameters. “Mamootot” demonstrates a thorough versing in the interfaces between spectators and audience precipitated by the Judson Church movement.

An electrical problem delayed the start of “Mamootot,”and Mr.Naharin explained that the lighting would have to stay at pre-curtain brightness (it was designed to be higher-intensity, he explained). Thus separated neither by distance nor illusionistic lighting, the dancers proceeded to test performance boundaries and invade our space.

For much of the piece, however, they seem entirely remote. Retreating to empty seats reserved for them in each of the four tiers of bleachers, they stare ahead in almost autistic obliviousness. At other times, they engage in equally anti-social behavior by thrashing around to the Japanese rock music that is a recurring ingredient of the sound collage.

Sometimes “Mamootot”seems like an exercise in regression therapy.The piece begins in silence,and there are recurring patches of silence that seem to take us to the stillness of an isolation tank. The dancers frequently assume fetal positions.They perform in a chalky whiteface that suggests a mime troupe or the conventions of Asian theater.

Their bodies, too, are made up: When one man in the company takes his jumpsuit off, he is nevertheless garbed in body makeup that establishes his undress as stylized nudity rather than prosaic nakedness. During a duet with a supine woman, he kisses himself and spits while she lies in seeming rigor mortis on the floor until finally he picks her off the floor and tucks her under his arms. This episode, like much in “Mamootot,” is not shy about being offputting. Nor is the very last sequence, something of a mating dance between two women that ends with one woman’s elbow stuck in her colleague’s mouth.

Mr. Naharin has been Batsheva’s artistic director for 15 years. A note in the program acknowledges the creative collaboration of the company’s dancers as well as “house choreographer” Sharon Eyal. While the piece allows much room for anecdotal individualism, Batsheva’s dancers function collectively as an organic whole.

When the ensemble congregates in the performance area, it tends to move as a pack. The restricted space limits the dancers’ expansiveness.They move incrementally from place to place and then seem to react to where they’ve found themselves by thrashing or swiveling, rooted to their spots. Sometimes they seem to be foraging. Other times they seem to be struggling to break out of an invisible Alwin Nikolais-ish cocoon.

Eventually, the cast must engage audience members as inevitably as a nightclub singer wending her way through a thicket of tables. The dancers work the room when they walk slowly by, engaging viewers in prolonged eye contact that’s rather confrontational and chilly. Later, they shake hands with selected audience members, prolonging the handclasps beyond the point of politeness.

“Mamootot” will be performed again tonight, November 18, 19, 22, 23, 25 & 26 at 7:30 p.m.; November 19 & 26 at 9:30 p.m.; and November 20 & 27 at 3 p.m. at the Mark Morris Dance Center (3 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).