Stephen Petronio is one of those choreographer-dancer types who define a certain sense of artsy cool. It’s not just I-wear-obscure-Japanese-clothing cool. (Which he does.)

He’s also I-study-the-kabala-with-Sandra-Bernhard cool. (Which he also does.)

As he tells it, though, he wasn’t always that way. His high school life was pretty much exactly the opposite. “I was a total nerd,” he told me. “I was the hippie, black sheep who was not physical at all.” But he left that all behind in his hometown of Nutley, N.J. He went off to Hampshire College to study pre-med, and one day found himself in a dance class. “I got that bang over the head,” he said. “I mean, my whole lower half of the body I didn’t really think about before.”

In August 1974, just a few months before taking the class, he had seen a performance by Rudolf Nureyev. It didn’t take long for him to switch over entirely to the study of dance. Though it was late in life compared to most dancers, Mr. Petronio quickly set out on an intense course of dance training. He skipped a semester of school and came to New York to work as much as possible. After finishing his degree, he returned to New York and joined the Nancy Meehan Dance Company. He later became the first man in the Tricia Brown Dance Company. And then struck out on his own.

This week at the Joyce Theater, audiences will get a chance to see what he created from that point onward. The Stephen Petronio Company is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a program that includes three revivals and one new work set to a song by Rufus Wainwright.

In the program’s first piece “MiddleSexGorge” (1990), the dancers form a heaving tangle of angry bodies, pushing and pulling each other with intense grace and a lot of intricate steps. Looking back on the work, Mr. Petronio recalls that it was made during the AIDS crisis and plays with issues of control. But there are other images at work, too, that informed his thinking at the time. “I had done some acts of civil disobedience during that time. I had been carried to the van,” he said. “When the Ayatollah died in 1989, a sea of people were passing his body along during the funeral.”

It all added up to an urge to put those sights and ideas into movement. “I needed to make a dance that deals with control. With the women being as violent as the men.”

At the time, Mr. Petronio was defining his vocabulary and it was turning out “kind of aggressive and sensual.” But when asked how to describe the overall look of his work, he goes a bit broader: “It’s fast, virtuosic, intuitive, non-narrative, meant to talk to your brain and your pelvis at the same time.”

Which is a pretty good way of thinking about the look of “Lareigne” (1995), a work in which he wanted to move away from the aggression of “MiddleSexGorge.” Of the work, he said “There’s no theme. It’s all about the form.”

He did give the dancers some ideas to work with, though: “You’re like a video character popping through the screen. There was a game called Junkyard Dog – you’re running away from something or running toward something.”

By contrast, “Prelude” (2000) keeps the dancers in a straight line for most of the work. They’re leaning on, holding, or grabbing each other, in a rather dramatic fashion, but they remain in a line facing the audience.

There’s a reason why the dancers don’t get around much in this piece. “I had broken my foot, and I couldn’t really move,” he said. “I made it from the chair. I thought of it as a contraption.”

His new work, “bud” is the starting point for a larger work (to be called “Bloom”) that will be set to an original composition by Mr. Wainwright, to be presented next year. As for “bud,” it’s five minutes long, and Mr. Petronio says it has a happy feel. “It’s very clowny, campy. It’s men being very physical and clumsy. Think of very sophisticated, drunken sailors – on leave.”

Using contemporary, popular music is something that matters a great deal to Mr. Petronio. “It’s difficult to get people to take choreography to songs seriously,” he said. “The art world thinks that pop songs are light. I don’t believe that. I’ve choreographed to The Rites of Spring. I’ve choreographed Bolero. And I find it just as challenging to use a song in a popular format.”

Music, for this choreographer, is of supreme importance, and a variety of genres is loaded into his Apple iPod: “I listen to everything from classical to Missy Elliot.” Which he can do daily, as he travels from his fixer-upper in Upstate’s Putnam County to company rehearsals in the city.

That Mr. Petronio mixes classical and hip-hop music, urban and rural surroundings on a regular basis seems an extension of his impulse to reach out and combine things in art. For example, he has invited his friend and fashion designer Tara Subkoff, of Imitation of Christ, to create costumes for his works. And the extended circles that that collaboration brings to dance invigorates him.

“I love having an audience that includes artist friends, Tara’s friends, and people who are there for the music,” he said. “If one or two people in the fashion world get turned on to dance. And if some of the dance world says, ‘What was that?’ That kind of chemistry, I live for that.”

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Right about now, the Battery Dance Company is in the middle of its State Department-sponsored tour of the Middle East. This tiny company has been devoted to dance as public diplomacy, and even as the political landscape in the Middle East has shifted daily, artistic director Jonathon Hollander has worked doggedly to make sure the trip happens.

The company had originally included stops in Jordan, Kuwait, and Israel. A few weeks ago, Kuwait dropped out, and Syria was added as a replacement. After the assassination of Rafik Hariri, that was a no-go, too. But there’s a happy result. The company now will spend the extra time in Jordan – where they had visited last year, only to find their visit cut short because they arrived two days after the assassination of Sheik Yassin, the leader of Hamas.

“We’re lucky that the people in Jordan know us and can have us for several days,” said Mr. Hollander. On the plan are extra performances and educational workshops in Amman, where the troupe will be from March 17 to 26. On March 27, the company will arrive in Israel, where they will teach classes at Haifa University and the Arab-Jewish Community Center in Jaffa. Then on March 30, they will perform in a venue outside Tel Aviv.

I expect they’ll have fascinating stories to tell when they return.