On Tuesday night, the modern dance troupe Complexions Contemporary Ballet opened a weeklong run at the Joyce Theatre with Dwight Rhoden’s “Hissy Fits.” Together with Desmond Richardson, Mr. Rhoden is a founding artistic director of Complexions. He has a voice and a style, but “Hissy Fits” seemed repetitious and kinetically circumscribed. Performed to a wonderfully varied Bach score, couples and solo figures twist, squiggle, undulate, and spin, and almost everything is frenetically fast and jabbing, as if the dancers are indeed having hissy fits. Mr. Rhoden varied the stage picture with frequent exits and entrances, and constantly morphing clusters and multiples of dancers, but nevertheless it became monotonous. It almost looked like a dancer’s audition piece, because above all it showcased the fusion technique the dancers employ with assurance and panache. They flip instantly between turned-in and turned-out, between spatial alignment that is off-balance and plumb-line vertical, and handily negotiate a gamut of fast-and-furious partnering acrobatics.

The middle section of Tuesday’s program contained four short pieces. First came the world premiere of Jodie Gates’s “Barely Silent.” Ms. Gates danced with several ballet companies in America as well as with the Forsythe Ballet in Germany, and is now the rehearsal director of Complexions. Her choreography for two couples put the women on pointe, and dwelled on quintessentially Forsythian pressure points in the body, which she mixed with some gestural color that was meant, she explained in a program note, to explore the parameters of body language. The accompaniment was a Forsythian overlay of text and music by Alan Terricciano. Ms. Gates is a choreographic novice and very much under the influence of Forsythe, but her ideas are worth pursuing.

“Loose Change,” a solo choreographed by Taye Diggs last year for Mr. Richardson, was a kind of “I’m Every Man” proclamation, in which Mr. Richardson moved effortlessly between reference points. One moment he had his ear to the ground, and then next performed a balletic jump. There was frug, yoga, and gymnastics, all performed to “If I had a Dime,” by David Ryan Harris.

“This Heart” was a duet choreographed by Complexions dancer Matthew Prescott. It was a short exercise in company style, performed to music by Sinead O’Connor. Then came an excerpt from Mr. Rhoden’s “B. Sessions,” performed to Beethoven. “B. Sessions” is a characteristically Rhoden landscape, peopled by four dancers and made multitiered by the inclusion of chairs over which the dancers cavort. Their legs launch aerobic assaults on space, seeming at times capable of firing missiles.

The third segment of the program was Mr. Rhoden’s “Chapters,” which looked like a concert stage version of a jukebox musical, set here to Marvin Gaye. It was described in the program as a sheaf of excerpts from a full-length workin-progress, and was perhaps an inner-city gloss on Twyla Tharp’s “Movin’ Out.” It is meant to illustrate the plight of four men returned from overseas combat, and the program notes contained a detailed dramatis personae in which each character was given particularized attributes. But watching the onstage action, one was more aware of repeated confrontations rather than the through-lines of individual characters.

Although all of Complexion’s dancers are superb, I could not help but focus on Monique Meunier, who joined the company this year, and is one of the world’s greatest dancers.

Ms. Meunier has spent most of her career at New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, and it was strange for us, and probably for her, to appear in “Hissy Fits” wearing a maillot and dancing with bare legs in parallel position — a far cry from the opportunities for length and decorative silhouette that she has enjoyed in ballet. But she and Rubinald Pronk were fascinating together in their fleeting and enigmatic encounters.

Ms. Meunier vindicates the truism that ballet training is the technical foundation for dancing in any style. This is usually less apparent on ballet stages, where ballet dancers are superficial and selfconscious when they try modern or popular idioms.

But Ms. Meunier is a completely different story. In “Chapters,” most of her performance consisted of flat-out disco. I knew she could do it, because I’d seen her in ABT’s “Within You Without You: A Tribute to George Harrison,” in which Ms. Meunier had made almost all the other ballet dancers on stage look stilted by comparison. In “Chapters,” she once again startled me with her expressiveness and originality in every movement modality.

Until January 14 (175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-691-9740).