Garth Fagan has sometimes seemed a limited modern-dance choreographer, with jagged moves and cross-stage patterns as his too familiar trademarks. There was some of that when Garth Fagan Dance opened at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday night. But this first of two programs for once suggested range and invention.

The awkward grace of his inexperienced first dancers in the early 1970’s can be seen in the angles and raw push of the 1981-83 “Prelude: ‘Discipline Is Freedom’” and the “Spring Yaounde” duet from “Griot New York” (1991). In the 1978 “From Before” Mr. Fagan seemed to be giving his dancers dessert in the form of West African dance-flavored oozes and struts that display the performers’ extraordinary physical fluidity and acuity.

The new “Edge/Joy,” to music by Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, is a formal departure from Mr. Fagan’s dancer-driven style and requires extra work from the audience, but it’s rewarding work. The look of dancers moving to music that fills and propels their bodies is mostly gone. Here the thorny and tender music, performed live by the Eastman School of Music Ensemble on instruments from piano and violin to vibraphone and marimba, seems to be doing the choreographing.

The music wraps the dancers in pockets of air and space that allow moments of intimacy and meditative quiet to bubble up through the piece. It herds the dancers into tightknit clusters, then moves them about the stage like clusters of notes on a page of music. The teacher-student passages toward the end are mystifying, as is Mr. Fagan’s tendency to punctuate smooth-flowing solo moments with abrupt, jarring extensions. In “Senku” (2006), a suite of dances to music by four composers, Mr.