The Shakers originally got their name from the trembling and shuddering dances they performed in the pursuit of spiritual possession. By turns stringent, minimalist, and orgiastic, their culture finds a soul mate in Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen and his new show, “Borrowed Light,” which was given its New York premiere Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Borrowed Light” is named for the Shakers’ process of carving windows into interior rooms in order to maximize sunlight and take advantage of its productive capacities.

The work is performed by Mr. Saarinen’s company, which is based in Finland, and is performed together with the singers of the Boston Camerata ensemble, whose specialty is early music. After hearing their album of Shaker songs, Mr. Saarinen approached them about a possible collaboration.

The Shakers composed their own unaccompanied songs, which resemble plainsong chanting, sometimes featuring solo vocal lines but most often in choral unison. Throughout the work, the Camerata singers’ clear and piping voices intone lyrics that are full of doctrinal homiletics. Some of the music is pronouncedly rhythmic and some of it is not, and the singers and the dancers are alternately dominant throughout “Borrowed Light,” although at all times they are integrated in a single community.

The Shakers came to this country from England in the late 18th century and established many self-contained communities around the country. Since they were fervent believers in celibacy, they could augment their ranks only through conversion and the adoption of orphans; there are now only four Shakers left in the world. An awareness of this situation seems to haunt “Borrowed Light.” Sometimes the piece seems to be a caution against the dangers of self-willed rigidity. The influence of Japanese Butoh dance and its apocalyptic aesthetic is another major part of Mr. Saarinen’s style and subjects, and it seems particularly apt here.

“Borrowed Light” concentrates on points of disconnect: The juxtaposition of singers and dancers parallels a community whose lifestyle is self-sufficient and austere, but whose worship is uninhibitedly demonstrative. Frivolity is eschewed, and yet dance is central to the work’s creed.

In the last century, the Shakers’ movement attracted the choreographic attentions of Doris Humphrey, and it was her choreography that originally sparked Mr. Saarinen’s interest in the Shakers. His own movement style is readily identifiable — picture the drunken coachmen in “Petruchka.” Mr. Saarinen’s dancers characteristically lurch, stagger, shamble, and flail. Here, his style seems additionally indebted to folk dance: The dancers frequently slap themselves in the style of folk dancers. But here they also seem redolent of self-flagellation; they slap their sides, or the heel of their working leg, and sometimes the slap prods or initiates the movement of the body the way a Martha Graham contraction might. They sway and dip, they wend and thread their way among themselves. The dancers emphasize their connection to the ground through stomps and thuds. Feet not only pound the ground but come crashing with rhythmic insistence down to the floor.

The frequent repetition in the songs leads Mr. Saarinen to deconstruct his choreography so that individual sections frequently turn wilder, shaggier, more apparently improvised, more poised on the cusp of bacchanal. Yet strict separation between the sexes is part of the Shaker lifestyle, and the male-female dyad is the least explored configuration in “Borrowed Light.” There is, however, a lot of same-sex pairing. Sometimes the men are mock combatants engaged in recreational jousting. The men stagger and jump, they take turns twirling or dragging each other. Frequently a lone dancer or singer epitomizes the solitary seeker after spiritual revelation and rebirth. The lighting by Mikki Kunttu sometimes bathes the stage in a glow of baptismal purification. “Borrowed Light” is performed on a multilayered set that allows the dancers and singers gathering places, back channels, and private corridors. The dancers, and particularly the singers, are in constant migration around the periphery of the onstage topography, and their dispersals and regroupings become as much a subject as the actual dance movement. Frequently the performers line up in procession, as straight-backed as the furniture the Shakers make for their own use.