“Sourcing Stravinsky,” a sampler program that opened Wednesday at Dance Theater Workshop, offered parallax views of Igor Stravinsky’s life and music.

The marquee name on the program was Yvonne Rainer, a one-time bellwether of 1960s experimental antidance whose “AG Indexical, With a Little Help From H.M.” was given pride of place as the program’s closer. This is only the second dance she has made since leaving the field 30 years ago, and it is a fitting postscript to her career.

“AG” is an impious gloss on George Balanchine’s ballet “Agon,” which was acclaimed as an epochal work almost immediately after he created it to Stravinsky’s score in 1957. Ms. Rainer renders long stretches of Balanchine’s choreography virtually verbatim, but the way they are pronounced is, as it were, Balanchine gibberish.

The dancers were four women, three of them – Pat Catterson, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers – choreographers of all shapes, sizes, and ages. They were visibly much less adroit than the fourth dancer onstage, Emily Coates, a former member of New York City Ballet.

Ms. Rainer’s latest work seems a direct inheritance of her famous admonition in a manifesto from 40 years ago against the decorativeness and virtuosity of ballet. But she also seems to be admitting here that yes, ballet legitimately belongs to the sleek and elongated. And the bodies performing Wednesday night could never, even if more youthfully pliant, do justice to the attenuated, insouciant elegance of Balanchine’s original choreography.

For most of the ballet, Ms. Coates wore pointe shoes, while her colleagues were in sneakers. The three older dancers were relatively stiff and foreshortened, and danced with a pokerfaced diligence that sat oddly on the flights of Balanchine’s fancy.Further deformation was provided by the dancers’ singsong rhythms, which ironed out the taut articulation of the original.

Much slapstick makes Ms. Rainer’s piece a worthy heir to the long tradition of ballet parodies. It reminds us that balletic grace depends on fragile equilibrium and synchronization, and can easily tip into farce with the slightest hitch or flub. At times, “AG” in effect becomes a parody of a parody, as when it mocks the finicky affectations of hands in “Agon” – the Balanchine choreography already something of a send-up of Baroque manners.

Ms. Rainer’s evident ambivalence toward Balanchine’s original is to some degree an outgrowth of the debates on gender roles that dominated the cultural landscape of her prime years in dance. When she satirizes the contrapposto showgirl poses that Balanchine used, she seems impatient and dismissive of his female iconography.

The principal duet in “Agon” was rendered here as a female quartet, in which Ms. Coates more or less took the ballerina’s role while her confederates spelled the support of her erstwhile male partner. Sometimes one woman directed the other three as if guiding furniture movers. Hovering in the air was the question, once intensely debated, of whether, in the neoclassical pas de deux, we are seeing a snapshot of power asymmetry and psychic manipulation when a ballerina’s limbs are intricately arranged by a male partner.

In true 1960s fashion, Ms. Rainer’s choreography encompasses the dancers’ ostensibly impromptu time outs and warm-ups. Sometimes the dancers performed original choreography by Ms. Rainer – in a characteristically quotidian movement language – while a television set broadcast a per formance of the real “Agon.” The “H.M.”in the title of Ms.Rainer’s piece refers to Henry Mancini, whose “Pink Panther” theme made up an oxymoronic coda to the Stravinsky. This gave the dancers a couple of minutes to shake out the knotty entanglements they quoted from “Agon.”

“Sourcing Stravinsky” opened with David Neumann’s “hit the deck. (studies and accidents),” an anarchic romp performed by the Advanced Beginner Group. This piece was rife with amusing sight and audio gags. Next came Ronnie Harris’s “Heaven,” performed by the Collective, which tied Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” to the demotic. In it, a pack of prowling street girls vanquishes a male who falls into their clutches; this suggested the tribe of Bachantes who destroy Orpheus, a legend that Stravinsky and Balanchine turned into a ballet in 1948.

The first half concluded with Dayna Hanson and Linas Phillips’s performance of their “Track 11,” a send-up of the adoration of celebrities and the trivialization of great artists, and by extension, important subjects of any kind, by shallow contemporary new outlets. A video trailer showed footage of Stravinsky conducting, facetious paeans to his work on behalf of the homeless, including an interview with an apparently indigent man who recalled hanging out with him. “People were like – ‘Whoaaa …’ ” when they heard Stravinsky, Mr. Phillips informed us as he brandished a microphone and launched into something of a stand-up comedy monologue.

After the intermission, Cynthia Hopkins offered her “Tsimtsum,” a performance piece that is mostly solo, in which she assumed the persona of an outlandish poete maudite. Dressed in a “Lost in Space” robot carapace, she intoned in a piping, childish voice ironic and mournful ruminations on the plight of humankind. The message was so somber, and the pace so deliberate that “Tsimtsum” was a welcome and important change of pace on a program that often provoked laugh-out-loud hilarity.

Until April 22 (219 W. 19th Street, 212-924-0077).