Laura Dean Musicians and Dancers.

Laura Dean's choreography for her own company continues to look like no one else's and, at the same time, like the dance equivalent of world music, because it works with the universal, basic building blocks of dance.

The familiar 1982 Sky Light, first on the Joyce program, consecrated a dancing space as in Pueblo Indian rituals, with the dancers entering one at a time to perform a salutation to each of the four directions. And their separateness from one another and their into-the-earth quality, with upper bodies leaning forward and knees bending in broad-based plies, recalled African and Asian dance.

Two New York premieres, Ecstasy and Infinity, look, in addition, very nineties, with their rising volume, excitement, and frantic speed, all based on Dean's own percussive scores. Yet the usual folklike quality of Dean's work is still present in the simple repeated steps, geometric floor patterns, and sense of community. The dancers stand in a row upstage as witnesses for their colleagues performing downstage. Dean made the 1993 Ecstasy during a period when she was also working on a commission for the folk-dance group Aman.

Dressed in Dean's red costumes, Ecstasy is hot. Dancers throw their heads back deliriously while thrusting their fists forward. With the women in character shoes, the piece derives a special piquancy from a stamping motif that is carried out even in chaine turns. At one point the arms also swing, suggesting tap dance. More problematic are the big jumps that made me wince for these women in their heels.

Initially cool, with its ice-blue costumes and lighting, Infinity (1990) doesn't have a closed dancing space. Pairs of dancers enter circling their arms, cross the stage diagonally, and exit; they could be traversing infinite distances. But the piece still has a strong folk element: The dancers allemande, taking hands to circle each other; later individual dancers from two rows trade places.

Dean's work lays bare universal dance elements in its steps and floor patterns--circles, squares, and other symmetrical formations--and its sacred space meant for bonding, both between humans and the human with the unseen. It summons forces and energies: in gestures scooping up energy, in one line of Ecstasy dancers "pushing" another without touching. A strong image from the same work has four dancers chaine clockwise (I think) along the four sides of the stage until they reach four others who take over the pattern, like relay runners. This transmission of energy from dancer to dancer is about as primary a dance activity as there is.