Dre. dance generated considerable attention when it arrived on the downtown scene two years ago, mainly because the actor-singer-dancer (and sometimes choreographer) Taye Diggs was lending his celebrity to a modern dance venture. With his childhood friend, the choreographer and electronic composer Andrew Palermo, Mr. Diggs has since developed a company with its own discernible style — no easy feat — and an intriguing future. Thursday’s concert at the Joyce SoHo, however, was about the troupe’s past: Of the 15 short pieces on the bill, only one was a premiere.

The evening started off well, with a quartet of hard-driving works performed with good attack by the muscular company of seven women and two men. (Neither Mr. Diggs nor Mr. Palermo was among the dancers.)

The fit, coolly contemporary young dancers wore frill-free, American Apparel-like clothes and performed to loud rock music that felt appropriate, given their youth. In “Id,” by Mr. Palermo, the propulsive choreography took unexpected risks: hard, rough turns and falls that forced the dancers into organic motion. There was no hope of posing or being perfect given the difficulty and the pacing of these slides and hard drops to the floor. Even dances set to more muted music (Alexandre Desplat, Rufus Wainwright) contained irregular accents by way of strange bent knee extensions and jumps from a push-up position.

These first pieces were genuinely fresh, with a pleasing abstract aesthetic built of sharp angles, odd counts, deliberately rough edges, and limited horizontal motion, and danced with an intentionally crude athleticism.

By now, however, the best part of the evening was over. The remaining pieces on the program ranged from listless to simply unfinished. Part of the problem was Mr. Palermo’s spate of electronic compositions — techno beats mixed with ambient noise and lines of recorded text. The texture of these remixes was uniformly muddy and uninspiring. And the sameness in the scores was reflected in the dances.

Clad in an array of costumes, many of which resembled basic underwear, the dancers were pushed from one breathless scenario to the next. A woman charged onstage and stood gasping for air; others panted audibly and displayed panicky faces to the audience. The heavy breathing was clearly part of the aesthetic, and Messrs. Palermo and Diggs went to lengths to telegraph exertion through the choreography. Their strategy worked in its initial stages, but grew stale after an entire evening of short pieces starring frenzied young people.

In Act II, two dances set to dramatic orchestral music attempted to deploy some of the same body language — twitching, athletic jumps, labored breathing — to allegorical effect. “Ballade,” choreographed by Mr. Palermo, found a tribe in black shifts with eerily long sleeves hovering around two black scarves that seemed to represent abandoned babies. Mr. Diggs’s “Agnus Dei,” set to the well-known choral arrangement of Barber’s Adagio for Strings, featured a priestlike fellow in a clerical robe and shorts crawling toward an ensemble of waiting women. Both pieces employed heavy-handed metaphors and struggled to incorporate their solos with their ensemble dancing.

“Henk Feyn,” the jointly choreographed new piece, came last on the long bill. Men and women in suits marched around the circumference of the stage, were blown against the walls by invisible winds, formed a football huddle, and let out silent screams — all to a score by Mr. Palermo that sounded like the soundtrack to an arcade game.

Throughout “Henk Feyn,” one could feel the choreographers burning to make a statement — about office drones, or competition, perhaps. But judging by this retrospective, dre. dance is at its best when it isn’t trying to make statements. The company’s abstract aesthetic speaks well for itself, when Messrs. Palermo and Diggs allow it to do so.