When an American repertory company works with a visiting choreographer, the process tends to be regrettably quick. But Cedar Lake Contemporary Dance has spent the past three months working with the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and his assistants to absorb Mr. Naharin’s idiosyncratic movement language, which he calls “Gaga.” So the company’s début in Mr. Naharin’s “Decadance” on Thursday night was hotly anticipated.

Among other things, the performance offered a chance to see how far Cedar Lake’s ballettrained dancers had traveled in developing Mr. Naharin’s signature style. The answer? Quite far. Cedar Lake’s dancers gave a mesmerizing rendition of “Decadance,” a piece that has been performed in numerous iterations since Mr. Naharin first conceived of it as a sort of perpetual remix of excerpts from his longer dances. Cedar Lake’s “Decadance” may lack the heat and full-throttle attack of the work as performed by Mr. Naharin’s own company, Batsheva Dance Company of Tel Aviv. But it is no weak imitation.

Arranged in the powerful lines and formations of Mr. Naharin’s elegant designs, Cedar Lake’s dancers moved powerfully, but with striking economy of movement. They dug into the floor. They twitched and yelled and barked with naked primal energy.

The impression that came through most indelibly was that of a group long accustomed to making presentational pictures with their bodies, now dancing from impulse and sensation. One could see this most vividly in the unison sequences. The dancers abandoned absolute symmetry for the movement that — while maintaining the same timing and general shape — clearly expressed the personality of each dancer. Within the line, one could make out individual people, each one flinging back his or her shoulders in the same basic pattern, but in a way absolutely unique to that dancer.

These rich possibilities within unison are something “Decadance” allows us time to see. Over and over again, a pattern will appear and then reappear, allowing the audience time to see it, see it again, and look at it another way. Sometimes, as in a striking dance using folding chairs, the unison movement is staggered, allowing the eye to follow it as easily as it follows a round of “the wave” at a football stadium. Sometimes, as in the opening number, the unison sections — dancers pounding the air with fists, in profile — bracket cryptic improvised solos, each unique to its dancer, yet each unmistakably fashioned from the same slinky, slithery, almost spastic body language.

This version of “Decadance” has thrilling moments — that glorious opening formation in which the dancers march into the floodlights, which hit their faces with eerie resonance; a somber Vivaldi duet between a man and a woman, both dressed in fierce Goth outfits yet somehow tender, in which she performs a stunning backbend that curves with the music. There is a wonderful sequence of flying leaps, light and swift, in the allmale quintet “Black Milk.” And you can’t tear your eyes away from an awkward, geriatric boogie at the top of the second half of the show.

But there are also sections that feel like miscues — namely, the ones that reach away from pure dance toward text, sign language, props, and audience participation. These sections have always required a very deft touch; it’s all too easy for these fragments of Mr. Naharin’s work to come across as gimmicky.

Part of the difficulty seems to lie in the equipment of the performers themselves — these pieces have been tailored to the specific performance qualities of Mr. Naharin’s own Batsheva dancers. (One of them, Shani Garfinkel, is in the cast here, and you can see that everything looks different on her — less showy, more direct, utterly convincing at every moment.) Not surprisingly, it takes more than three months’ immersion to create the conviction so evident in Ms. Garfinkel’s movements — after all, it is not every day a ballet dancer is asked to drag an audience member onstage and dance to the mambo beat of “Sway.”

Some of the fault lies in the choreography itself. It is perplexing to see Mr. Naharin, who is so prodigiously talented, turning to a Charles Bukowski voice-over, for instance. Given the scope and sweep of his dances, their extraordinary intuition for using space, their flexibility, rhythm (those unexpected counts!), and mood, one wants to watch his dancers move to music all day long. Putting text over his dancing feels like having a guy with a megaphone blare over a live concert.

There are other unsatisfying aspects, too, to “Decadance” — a slightly campy feeling that creeps in to the pop numbers, an abrupt ending. But overall it is an evening of dancing so rich and full, so evocative of moods, personalities, eras; so different in its very nature from any modern dancing you have seen before, that “Decadance” is an experience far more stirring than any accounting of its component parts can suggest. Mr. Naharin has a rare gift for making dances, and the members of Cedar Lake have gone far in their efforts to inhabit those dances. The results are deeply satisfying.

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