The stage floor itself seemed to assume a different character in each of the two works performed by Grupo Corpo, the Brazilian dance company, Tuesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Of the two pieces, the first one, “Benguelê,” was more visibly rooted in native rhythms and vocabulary. The floor seemed to be lending a spongy, trampoline-like resilience, an elastic give as the company — 21 dancers strong — bounced and swayed and skated across it. In the second dance, “Breu,” however, they made an entirely different contact with the floor, as it seemed now to unforgivably break the dancers’ frequent falls, crashes, and flattened-out full stops.

Both works were choreographed by Rodrigo Pederneiras, whose brother Paulo founded Grupo Corpo in 1975 and is its artistic director. “Benguelê” used guitar music by João Bosco, and it was a festively laid-back, feel-good sort of exhibition. Rodrigo Pederneiras here used a core group of steps over and over again, while achieving variety by constantly varying the number of dancers onstage, changing their costumes, or overlapping and cross-weaving different strands of dancers in kaleidoscopically morphing stage pictures.

The choreography was an ongoing dialogue between taut and pummeling, or loose and shambling, but it was the softer and rounder ambulation that took precedence. Rhythmic walks and runs were the through line of the piece: The dancers walked with knees loosely bent, their hips swinging or shambling. They walked on their heels or the balls of their feet; they strode forward and back. They marched and paraded and sashayed, and they ran in dribbling-leg flurries. At times, the spirit of sympathetic magic led them to emulate primates of the rain forest, as they hopped and swung their arms, tree-dweller style. An underpinning of ballet training and ballet articulation shone through the evening, lengthening the bodies’ positions even as the dancers’ limbs stayed loose and relaxed, Brazilian style. Yet at other times, the movement turned bristling, the dancers’ hands whipping furiously and their torsos concave in contracted jumps. The assault impact of capoeira was present. There were frequent short duets: A woman flew into a man’s arms, and he held her positioned as if in a kangaroo’s pouch. Two men engaged in mock combat, then exited with one carrying the other wrapped around him like a belt.

Procession was evoked when the dancers appeared, walking rhythmically on a ledge high upstage. Long-range vista and panoramic depth were now factored into the spatial equation. As dancers continued to file across the ledge, others traced a parallel path onstage. As infectious and dynamic as “Benguelê” was, it didn’t provide quite enough variety for its more than half-hour length. At times, it seemed as if Mr. Pederneiras was aiming for the epic repetition of minimalism or trance dance, at others that he simply wanted to exhaust every possible permutation of personnel rather than develop the material as far as it could go.

“Breu” began with growling and inhaling-exhaling on the soundtrack, with all the dancers impacted together on the floor in jackstraw configuration. The musical score by Lenine was a collage of found as well as composed sounds. Synthesized and electrically amplified effects mixed with ambient sound to create a din that suited the nihilistic world that Mr. Pederneiras created. The set by Paulo Pederneiras was a confined habitat paved with black tiles. The dancers wore handsome unitards with pebbled patterns, designed by Freusa Zechmeister.

Rodrigo Pederneiras wove together contrapuntal lines of dystopia or deconstructed the stage picture into anarchic melee. The splayed and swiveling bodies of the first piece were there, but they were harsh and disjointed. The piece meant to suggest an urban or jungle scrum. The dancers were frequently on their haunches, scuttling in shoulder rolls and slithers. They thrashed and flipped around like fish out of water. When upright, they walked every which way, but now their walks were disoriented, without the softer lilt we’d seen in “Benguelê.” They draped themselves over each other contact-improvisation style, or the men partnered the women en masse, supporting them as they reclined in tilts that kept their feet on the ground, before letting the women slam down to the floor.

Grupo Corpo’s dancers showed that they could fall hard and rise up again almost as fast as does Paul Taylor’s troupe. “Breu” evoked the disaffection it was meant to; it was a dazzling display of punishing virtuosity.

Until Saturday (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).