Tero Saarinen’s “Westward Ho!,” which was performed Tuesday night at the Joyce, tells the story of three men, dehumanized in the Soviet gulag, who escape and flee across the frozen Gulf of Finland. They stagger into Helsinki and start a modern dance company.

Just kidding.”Westward Ho!”doesn’t actually have a clear storyline, but the three men do give the impression that they are at the end of their tether, trapped in a perpetual treadmill of repetitive movement. The title of the piece,on the other hand,gives the sense that they are undergoing some type of migration. And there is the suggestion of an austere and bleak landscape, at the top of the world. An abominable snowman would not be out of place.

Mr. Saarinen founded his company in 1996 after dancing with the Finnish National Ballet. He has since studied Japanese Butoh theater, and its influence was manifest in this, the first of three pieces of his choreography performed by the company on Tuesday night.

The aural discomfort of “Westward Ho!”brings home the reality that Butoh is not concerned with inducing sensuous pleasure in its spectators.Instead,it assails them with mutant post-apocalyptic imagery and extremes of compositional device and duration that test the audience’s responsive endurance.

In “Westward Ho!” what sounds like a toothless geezer repeats “Jesus’s blood never failed me yet” interminably.The audience is also subjected to the cacophony of a phonograph needle swishing across eroded grooves.

The piece’s movement suggests Frankenstein by way of “Song of the Woodsman.” The three men – Henrikki Heikkila, Carl Knif, and Heikki Vienola – are frequently stiff-legged as they swing, hop, hobble, and stagger. Occasionally the restricted movement stream debouches into something more expansive, like jumps.The three usually move in unison, but sometimes not. At times, the three men break out of their lockstep, and one of them wanders off to move independently. They seem to be hungering for a destination.

Locked in the coils of perpetual reiteration, I found myself looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. “Westward Ho!” lasts only about 25 minutes, however, which makes it bearable. And since it was not meant to entertain in the conventional sense, I cannot hold against it the fact that it tried my patience. Conclusions have not been reached by the time the piece reaches its conclusion: At the end, the three men are simply left standing, or rather lurching.

“Wavelengths,” the next piece on the program, was a lot easier to take. It seemed to manifest the more ingratiating side of the Finnish temperament.

“Wavelengths” is a duet for a man, Mr. Heikkila, and a woman, Sini Lansivouri. They are on opposite sides of the stage as the piece begins. He starts to shadow her; she undulates. They dodge each other. They are intimates, adversaries, autonomous wayfarers.

Their movement is spongy, Tai chi style, with an intimation of a gravityliberated lunar surface. Riku Niemi’s score rattles sticks in incantatory rhythm. There are swooning pullaways between the two dancers. She tumbles over him. Prowling, skulking, slinking, they come together at the end. Mikki Kunttu, the lighting and stage designer, shines a spotlight through a wall of fabric, recalling the classic cool Finnish chic of blond wood bent into biomorphic shapes.

The program closed with “Hunt,” a solo performed by Mr. Saarinen to Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Although this soundtrack includes the piece’s full orchestration, the world-colliding sonics don’t overwhelm him as he keeps his attention hewed to the rhythmic figurations. He deploys inverted arms and inhumanly slow, twitching movements, evolving from quadruped to biped to human.

The piece becomes increasingly techno as it progresses. From the flies, a many-layered skirt descends on Mr. Saarinen like an alien mothership, and he is subsumed in it. Flickering projections turn his face and body into the walls of the Electric Circus discotheque, c. 1967.

Mr. Saarinen is a magnetic performer. He succeeded in holding the stage and he succeeded in retaining my attention until the final few minutes, when a battery of klieg lights shone at the audience – at which point I cried “Uncle” and closed my eyes.

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