Twelve years ago, a gaggle of experimental directors working at Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater asked choreographer Annie-B Parson to conduct a choreography workshop for non-dancers. Ms. Parson, the Bessie, Obie, and Guggenheim Fellowship–winning co-director of Big Dance Theater, had trained several waves of rising directors and performers at New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing. But very few people outside of the program had ever seen her teach. That long ago workshop, in which she taught the likes of Sophie Haviland, Ken Nintzel, and the then unknown Richard Maxwell, was a blip.

That is, until Maria Goyanes, an artistic associate at the Public Theater, cornered Ms. Parson and demanded a class. Ms. Goyanes, thrilled by an account of the earlier workshop, put out the call on arts networking sites such as Culturebot.com, advertising a three-day intensive called “Choreography for Creators.” The classes sold out in 10 minutes. Last week, Ms. Parson held her latest intensive at the Public.

“I love interdisciplinary theater. But incorporating choreography for someone untrained like me is tricky,” a participant in the workshop, Brian Rogers, said. “I can envision the results, but not the starting point.” So for nine hours, 18 directors, playwrights, dramaturges, and actors focused on that starting point, scrambling to create small pieces shaped to Ms. Parson’s punctiliously structured exercises, accompanied by everything from German circus music to the chatter from Chinese talk radio.

Ms. Parson’s choreography is cool-headed, a blend of the thrown-away and the scrupulously precise. Her work, often based on dances from other cultures or everyday movement, may seem casual, but it is actually a devilishly complex blend of her work and rubrics “solved” by her collaborators.

About half of the participants had had some movement training. Some hailed from the Columbia MFA program, where they studied with Anne Bogart and learned the Viewpoints exercises, which help performers generate gestural work. But no one in the room selfidentified as a dancer, and Ms. Parson’s encouraging comments (“It doesn’t mean you’re a good person if you’ve got flexible hips!”) were intended for those who could scarcely touch their toes.

Communicating the choreographic process can be tricky. “I have my own process! I don’t want to copy hers,” the artistic director of the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Mr. Rogers, said.

A workshop attendant and scholar of the Viewpoints, Alexis Poledouris, spoke of the danger of raw directors overidentifying with training methods. “They are a great toolbox, but too often students copy the style as well,” she said.

Ms. Parson played her aesthetic close to her chest, keeping her teaching objectives monastically simple. Not once in three days did she mention “meaning” or name an emotion. Echoing the manifestos of Yvonne Rainer (whose “Trio A” could be a distant auntie to Ms. Parson’s work), Ms. Parson eschewed narrative gestures. Her assignments were brainteasers: Nascent choreographers constructed dances around a chair, which Ms. Parson then removed. They created and rewound movements, many of which could not logically work in reverse. Strongly influenced by the freedom and rigidity of poetics, she had them plug gestures into pre-determined patterns, which unveiled kinesthetic “rhymes” through repetition and scheduled unison.

Sometimes the attendees seemed thrown by her demands. “I’m so sore, it’s shocking,” a performer, Rebecca Lingafelter, admitted after three hours of jump combinations. Ms. Parsonencouraged a nonjudgmental atmosphere, but her coolness came as a surprise in the room. For creators used to talking exhaustively about their choices, three days without discussing their own practices seemed like a shock.

But then, Ms. Parson wasn’t so much teaching as she was unteaching, drawing attention to widespread clichés such as reversions to predictable rhythms and neutral body positions. “Everywhere I see so much facing front, downstage center that it makes me sad,” she said, “I’m trying to get them to notice that they have a back, that their bodies spiral, that there are more than two planes available.”

Her job, besides this heightened awareness, is to provide a matrix. “An imposed structure, like the sonnet, unlocks the process by making it a smaller task. I don’t tell you to make a dance about your parents divorce; instead, I ask you to do something as concrete as filling out a form,” she said. Sometimes these “scores” consist solely of punctuation, or a series of letters that cue dancers to initiate actions either “externally” or “internally.”

Ms. Parson studied under Robert Ellis Dunn, a major early teacher in the Merce Cunningham studio, and, even now, she quotes the Cunningham reliance on chance, prompting the others to make choices (“Should I face right or left?”) with the roll of a die.

But her methods seemed like a sure bet. Despite a lack of training, the rookie choreographers were making sequences of surprising sophistication by the end of the workshop. And the day after the final workshop, the leader of the viBe Theater Experience, Dana Edell, taught a teenage student one of Ms. Parson’s sequences. “It unlocked her. Now she’s making these amazing movements she never would have done before,” Ms. Edell said with delight. And so the transmission continues.