NEW YORK, NY.- When choreographer Trisha Brown died in 2017, the life of the company that she had founded decades earlier was uncertain. Would her works, some of the finest in contemporary dance, survive? Would audiences still want to see them?

So far, so good. New dancers have continued to join the company, performances have been plentiful and strong, and at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday night, both the group and the samples from Brown’s oeuvre looked in good health. But a company needs new works, and so for the first time, this group presented a premiere not by Brown.

It’s a tricky assignment. There would be little value in a Brown knockoff, yet some mutually beneficial relationship to Brown’s work is necessary (even if that dynamic is often absent in the commissions of other companies whose founding choreographers are gone). Judith Sánchez Ruíz, the Cuban-born choreographer chosen for the task, danced in Brown’s company before developing her own choreographic voice, largely in Berlin. Her premiere, “Let’s Talk About Bleeding,” is successful in this sense: It has a family resemblance while going its own way.

The resemblance is apparent less on the surface than in the sense of an active, questioning mind expressed through a sensual, let’s-see-where-this-takes-us physicality. But where Brown’s works are all logic and flow, “Let’s Talk About Bleeding” is highly episodic and many-layered.

A scene of two men collapsing on and around each other, emphasizing their elbows, is followed by one involving two women, one standing precariously, the other snaking on the ground and groaning. In one section, the group clumps and leans to create cat’s cradle formations. In another, they gently bump one another. It’s hard to see how the sections, interesting on their own, fit together other than as a pile. (In a program note, Sánchez Ruíz calls the structure “an architectural orgasm of poetical constellations.”)

All of this is accompanied by Adonis Gonzalez-Matos’ dramatic score — partly recorded swells of strings and percussion, partly live interjections by the composer at the piano, pounding virtuosically all over the keyboard. Sometimes, the choreography works in opposition to the musical tumult, as at the end, when the floor-bound dancers slowly shift between positions of spooning. Other times, the choreography responds rather too faithfully, the dancers thrashing while the score does.

Least convincing is the talking. All at once, the dancers speak fragments of text: “I want to see the room,” “Get over it.” Later, one of those dancers, Burr Johnson, delivers something between an inner monologue and a self-actualization meditation, telling us that the monster he needs to face is just a little girl.

That’s one of several moments during which I thought, Is this supposed to be funny? Particularly in its solo sections, the dance has an improvisational aliveness that’s exciting and excitingly different from Brown’s work in its ferocity. But comparisons are inevitable, and while Sánchez Ruíz’s work follows Brown’s example of multiplicity, it seems much less specifically articulated — both blurrier in the physical details and less legible, less coherent overall.

Those differences are heightened by the Brown repertory on the program, two pieces that derive from her simplifying “Back to Zero” cycle. In “Rogues” (2011), two dancers (on Tuesday, Johnson and Cecily Campbell, both excellent) play a complicated game of “You go, I go, let’s go together” in loosely swinging, windblown phrases that build to Tilt-a-Whirl wildness without losing a fundamental softness.

“For M.G.: The Movie” (1991) isn’t a movie, but it is unusually cinematic for Brown. Some of that quality derives from Alvin Curran’s score, which alternates between a piano theme that would suit a French film and the sounds of machinery and traffic. But much of the drama is structural. Johnson remains onstage throughout, an unmoving pillar, while Spencer Weidie jogs forward and backward, tracing circles or right-angled Etch-A-Sketch patterns. Surprises come from the edges of the stage and from sudden synchronicities.

Even in these relatively minor works, Brown’s wonderful mind still shimmers. But that source is gone. “Get over it,” you could say, and some version of that counsel is wise. Brown’s company is choosing to do so by bringing in other voices, carefully but with no guarantees about how those works will communicate with — or measure up to — Brown’s. “Let’s Talk About Bleeding” is an honorable start to that conversation.

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Trisha Brown Dance Company

Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.