Hold a conch shell to your ear, and you can hear the ocean. In the palm of your hand, spindrift crashes on distant shores. The gimmick continues to give pleasure long after you learn it is all in your head. Both responses – a sense of giddy dislocation, as well as a heightened awareness of your own subjectivity – can be found in Merce Cunningham’s “Ocean,” the evening-length work that opened at the Lincoln Center Festival on Tuesday.

“Ocean” marks the final collaboration between Mr. Cunningham and the musician John Cage, with whom he shared an artistic conscience for most of his career. Until Cage’s death in 1994, the two men adopted experimental forms that challenged the orthodox relationship between dance and music. In many ways, “Ocean” represents a culmination of their work together: Both choreography and score follow chance procedures independent of one another, clocked by digital timers positioned around the stage. The work captures a deeper unity very much in line with their aesthetic credos.

The ocean provides a potent symbol for any artist interested in redefining the audience’s relationship to a work. Primordial, deeply mysterious, and Allen compassing, it exhausts our imagination, curving under our perspective, eventually meeting the sky in the distance. Part of this experience of elemental grandeur is reproduced in the staging of the work, which is presented in the round.

A circular panel replaces the square stage, which is surrounded on all sides by the audience. An orchestra of 112 musicians, seated in the upper mezzanine, lines the periphery of the entire theater. As soon as the tenor saxophonist walks onto the stage to make sure everybody is in tune, the audience is submerged in a tumult of horns, woodwinds, strings, and percussion. An electronic recording of ocean sounds – sea mammals, foghorns, and sonar blips – emerges just behind the orchestral music.

The choreography resembles an enactment of sorts, based on specific limitations (in this case, 128 movement phrases), more than it does a formal performance. Exactly 90 minutes long, the piece is the same duration as Mr. Cunningham’s one-off “Events.” Many of the individual movements – curled spines, slightly bowed legs, flapping palms – bear a resemblance to marine life. As the work progresses, much of the abstraction gains a behavioral status. We recognize communication taking place, as through an aquarium glass, even though we do not understand it.

Indeed, some familiar with Mr. Cunningham’s work may even be annoyed by the degree to which the many parts cohere. In 19 sections, the dancers move with poise and expert balance, either singly or in a group. They show a deep commitment to each phrase, moving with deft attention to the physical line. Although they hold rigid postures, they transition between them with intuitive grace. Essentially, they are spelling out a ballet language that has been translated for the modern stage.

The placement of theatrical elements “in the round” shows, among other things, our tendency to view things flatly. Even dance, obviously three-dimensional, favors a particular vantage point. By placing the dancers in a circle, a merry-go-round effect is created. Although the stage itself does not move, the dancers revolve their bodies, intensely conscious of the space around them. Mr. Cunningham accentuates the circle even more in group compositions, sometimes using more than 15 dancers, each facing in different directions as they perform. The pacing and blocking varies between rapid and ponderous passages, solo and group compositions.

In one tableau, five dancers stand erect, pointing one foot in a radial pattern toward the center, while a single dancer slowly unfolds in a long devellope, gazing upward into a beam of light. They wear leotards that cover the body like wet suits, washed in different topazes and glints. An hour into the program, the entrance of dresses lends an expressive feminine possibility to the ensemble patterns.

David Tudor’s soundscape, which trades noises between three sets of speakers that hang from the ceiling, simulates moving quickly through the current. It achieves the acoustic impression of encountering different environments: barrier reefs, tropical atolls, arctic hideaways. Andrew Culver’s orchestral score, “Ocean 1-95,” is really a complex set of instructions for each instrument. Importantly, the random quality of the music and dance raises our awareness to other chance elements. It awakens our innate sense of rhythm, which teases out an organic tempo between the action onstage and in the orchestra above.

The result is a captivating excursion through time – the biological pulse of marine life, or even millennia of evolution – in which we watch ourselves as much as the stage.

Until July 16 (Lincoln Center, 212-258-9999).