Central Park’s Summer Stage played host Friday night to a double bill of the Camille A. Brown and Philadanco dance companies. Ms. Brown danced with Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence troupe and started her own group last year, while Phildelphia’s Philadanco was founded in 1970. The two groups certainly aren’t identical, but on Friday night their performances were complementary to the point of making a seamless whole out of the two halves of the program. Programs weren’t provided, but the entire evening sampled a mix that is potent in contemporary dance: a blend of hiphop, capoeira, and African dance, with some traditional modern or balletic base.

When dance events come to SummerStage, the audience’s own choreography becomes a contributory factor to the performance experience. While people sit in rows of seats and bleachers behind them, there are also people standing, watching from the periphery. There’s a constant back-and-forth of people changing positions to get a better view or getting up to do something and then coming back to the show. It distracts from what’s happening on stage, but it’s also a show of its own. Indeed, it becomes a way to simultaneously contrast and compare movement in its most practical applications with its transformation by theatrical organization and fantasy.

On Friday night, this duality was particularly interesting because the dance vocabulary onstage harked back to a participatory origin in village, nightclub, or urban street. Rites of pleasure or religious propitiation were here put into a theatrical context, and the choreographers sought to stay within the demotic while giving the work a theatrical complexity and legibility.

In the opening piece, some of Ms. Brown’s dancers crawled to New Age sounds while others walked around with arms wrapped around their heads. Floor and air were equally important in both Ms. Brown’s and Philadanco’s repertory, as was the ability to shoot into space or down to the ground instantaneously.

Here there was a peaceable kingdom of ambulation: jogging, hinged-back layouts, sudden slam-on-the-brakes stops, and equally sudden strikes out into space. Dancers often took to the air with a flurry of flailing legs that suggested a “Say what?” double take. Sometimes it was used to comic effect.

Dancers walked single file, forming cordons and processional lines, their slow retraction offstage a recurrent movement motif. This went hand-in-hand with a sense of violence, the threat of combat, and the presence of spiritual possession frenzy.

As the first piece on Ms. Brown’s program wound down, the dancers appeared to be penitents, with some like shamans, swaying in deep plié.

The repertory offered by both Ms. Brown and Philadanco on Friday included a good deal of spoken-word, and the words being spoken were frequently inspirational, whether grounded in religious doctrine or secular self-affirmation. Ms. Brown’s second piece was a solo danced by a woman to a hubbub of aspirating exhalations on the soundtrack. The first woman dove into arabesque pitches with flexed feet, and then another woman joined her onstage and read exhortations into a microphone.

It was a singing voice that was next heard: what sounded like Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of “Lover Come Back to Me.” A dancer in slouchy clothes and a derby hat suggested the jabbing paces of eccentric dance that took black dancers into the Broadway mainstream a century ago.

The next piece was performed to a South African jazz fusion. The dancers jammed, loping, vaulting, pressing together in conga-line formation, landing from jumps in Martha Graham floor position. Their arms pinwheeled, and their legs swung out and shut again.

Ms. Brown’s program closed with live onstage drummers who provided rhythmic encouragement as the dancers took the floor one by one before being reabsorbed into the enveloping circle of dancers.

Philadanco began the second half of the program with its own contrasts drawn between dancers moving frenziedly and walking slowly. Performers walked onstage, rather casually supplanting their colleagues; ever-shifting splinter groups took the spotlight, spiraling in corkscrew brace against the polyrhythmic beat. The spirit seemed to enter and leave dancer’s bodies unpredictably. Dancers walked slowly offstage; left onstage was a lone thrashing figure. In a moment, she was still, and a new delegation arrived and churned furiously, with stag leaps, barrel turns, and drubbing feet describing sawedoff, blunted lines and shapes. The bodies rippled and slammed while the arms stayed limp and scrabbling. “To dream is to realize,” a soundtrack voice announced.

Philadanco’s second piece included more sustained partnering than was evident earlier in the program. The women cycled in cartwheel lifts, and men and women struck balletic poses and held them insouciantly. They chased each other onto and off of the stage to minimal music patterns. Throughout the evening, the performers were unfazed by the balmy weather and performed indefatigably. The audience called out its encouragement, and the loosening of inhibitions encouraged by the outdoor setting became here the perfect context for the repertory of the night.