Curtain Call, Davis’s newest work in the highly publicized “Beauty Must Suffer” series, places ballet into the mainstream—or, at least, into a kind of stream: the flow of tourists and commuters on Manhattan’s High Line who create little eddies of traffic around the larger-than-life ballerina figure.

Martha Graham began with the men. Watching them today, forty years after she set their steps, they enter one by one with long, halting strides and straight arms ending in Graham’s signature cupped hand. Their chins are raised to the studio’s stage-like lighting and sweat already beads on most of their foreheads.