“Please put on your 3D glasses,” reads the directive on screen. The audience laughs.

“If one is poor in spirit,” wrote poet, performance artist, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara in his 1918 manifesto on the movement, “one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that can not be shaken.”

In Laura Peterson Choreography’s evening-length work FAILURE, this question of how someone can “lose” dominates. “What is failure,” she asks in the program notes, “and how do we deal with it—as individuals, and as communities?

The work . . . features Baldwin alongside ten performers, all women. The evening-length dance premiered at Abrons Arts Center this June as part of the Joyce Theater’s Joyce Unleashed initiative. It makes no apologies for the space that it occupies, the sound that it projects, or the emotional depths that it scales.

“Please set an intention for your work as a WITNESSING audience member tonight,” reads the slip of paper. It continues: “write down that intention on a notecard.

The life-force that moves through the roots of a dandelion,” reads the sign, “was thought to be the same life-force that moves through us.” The text is barely noticeable, printed on a slice of laminated paper and tucked into the pot of a scraggly plant. The fact that it is a quote from Porter Shimer’s book Secrets of the Native Americans is hidden beneath its soil.

“This show is about you and your problems,” Ann Liv Young declares. Her blonde wig and powder-blue eyeshadow are harsh under the house lights, which she has requested the theater tech turn up. She wants to see who’s in her audience.

Jeroboam Bozeman began his dance training in middle school at the Ronald Edmonds Learning Center. Each time that he entered the studio, he passed two posters.

In 1974, Sol LeWitt debuted his sculpture series Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes. The conceit was simple: how many different ways could the artist not finish a cube?

“To make my original movement language,” wrote choreographer Trisha Brown in the 2009 essay “Forever Young,” “I set off in pursuit of ‘pure movement,’ movement without connotation, movement that is neither functional nor pantomimic.”

To understand Pam Tanowitz’s style, it seems fitting to start where she ends. As her two-part piece the story progresses as if in a dream of glittering surfaces comes to a close, Tanowitz’s dancers show no signs of slowing down.

According to her longtime friend and colleague Agnes de Mille, contemporary choreographer Martha Graham would often declare: “Wherever a dancer stands ready, that spot is holy ground.”

Walter Dundervill chews gum. The sleeves of his button-down shirt are ripped as if he has tested his wingspan one too many times. He has a sheet of bobby pins in his back pocket. He paces, purposeful, among a group of stone-still dancers. He is the most powerful man in the room.

In the music video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World,” choreographer and artist Blanca Li constructs a scene straight out of a fever dream. Female dancers wear retro swimsuits and prance like showgirls on an Ed Sullivan-style stage.