Donna Uchizono’s dances are cerebral, funny, and a little aloof. I am avoiding the term “postmodern,” but they are that, too. She enjoys disassembling familiar gestures and asking the audience to follow along. In her Bessie award-winning “Low,” she deconstructed the Argentine tango; in her most recent work, “Approaching Green,” which was performed this weekend at Danspace, she turns her attention to the universal act of hugging. Scrutinizing this feel-good gesture in multiple vignettes, she looks to uncover some physical truth, in her words, of “our need for true, real contact.”

The house at St. Mark’s Church opens with open arms, literally: Six individuals are deployed as so-called huggers at the entrance to receive each member of the audience. Once safely inside on opening night, the close quarters concentrated the heat of an unusually humid evening. The dancers performed to a brood of fluttering fans.

The work begins with a matronly woman projected onto a round panel. Visibly overcome with joy, she looks at us, and in slow motion the camera shares our perspective as she shuts her eyes, leaning in for a big squeeze. Holding the panel, Hristoula Harakas moves steadily forward and back. She sounds off inexplicably different sets of numbers (this is the postmodern part).They appear to follow in a consecutive pattern, but are in fact arbitrary. This nonsequential counting recurs on several other occasions – each time in a scholarly drone, as if the dancers were suddenly aware of their status as illustrative examples in a book.

The mosaic glass and recognizable altar nave of St. Mark’s Church gave Wendy Winters’s bright pink set design the look of religious kitsch. Enormous valances dotted with circular cutouts hung down from the choir, including a large oval shadow wall, which allowed the audience to peer into the silhouetted secret lives of the four dancers as they grope, embrace, and pet in kittenish cuddles and playful bear hugs.

The cutouts resemble vanity mirrors, and the color pink carries associations of cosmetic artificiality. Each dancer wears a pink item of clothing or another: the diaper like tutu of Michelle Boule; Alex Escalante’s candy-striped trousers, and Luis de Robles Tentindo’s calf-length shorts and matching suit jacket.

Beginning with a self-hug, their movements quickly develop with scampering, pigeon-toed steps into childlike gambits for affection (Mr. Tentindo chases Ms. Boule around, followed by giddy tackling and spooning from all sides). Eventually, they become more adventurous, scaling one another, or else slowing down with their mouths wide open in mock terror, curling up or else rolling backward, out of sight. Individually, the movements are thwarted attempts at complete gestures, collapsible and idiosyncratic. As a group, they tend to be coolly associative in the manner of contact improvisation (especially one long rock-paper-scissors routine).

Guy Yarden’s score, an audio-collage of electric pings and blips, includes the sounds of someone learning to play the harmonica, a distorted guitar, and the ubiquitous sound of water, which rolls in the persistent theme of solitude.

The title, bewildering to anyone without a press release, comes from the scientific factoid that the human eye, looking at the color pink, will see green as it is exposed to natural light. But this explanation can just as easily be replaced by the title’s suggestion of jealousy, that “green-eyed monster,” depicted in the several love triangles that emerge along the colorful spectrum of sexual orientation between the four dancers.

Ms. Uchizono’s explanation for the title, however, echoes her long-standing artistic credo of “awkward elegance,” which she has captured in the past with the memorable image of a pelican’s gangly takeoff and subsequent flight. Likewise in “Approaching Green” the choreography (contributed by each dancer) attempts to reflect bodies in transition as they make the painful transformation from a contrived, narcissistic adolescence to a cooperative, mature group in which “true, real contact” is possible.

This is almost achieved toward the end, when the cast forms a social vehicle, moving in unison across the floor. They are packed closely together, shifting their weight in order to lift one another off the ground. When an individual falls away, an arm is extended out in an invitation to return. The episode concludes with each dancer separating off and resuming their random counting.

But if the irrationality of the direction soon grows staid, the idea behind “Approaching Green” – Ms. Uchizono said she was inspired to create the work after watching an Indian spiritual leader hug 5,000 people – still hums with some sweet potential. Too bad, then, that just when you want to hug them back, they recede once again into glib disinterest: an absorbed pucker, a frozen reach, and a conceptual grin.