NEW YORK, NY.- In the work of choreographer Pam Tanowitz, it’s not uncommon for dancers to match the space around them, dressed to blend with their environment.

Those designs — costumes that quote the Joyce Theater’s geometrically patterned chairs or the muted gold of the David H. Koch Theater — are more than clever visual choices. They’re a statement on the inseparable nature of dance and space: how dance is inevitably shaped by where it happens, and how dancers can infuse a place with new life.

In her latest work, “Day for Night,” which premiered in full Thursday (Wednesday’s performance was halted midway through because of lightning), the setting was the amphitheater on Little Island — the Barry Diller-funded park suspended above the Hudson River — and the stunning backdrop a stretch of the river at sunset. On Thursday, golden-pink clouds hovered above the New Jersey skyline, turning to violet-gray, deep blue and then black, colors sampled in the sheer and luminous fabrics of Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme’s understated costumes.

Any commission for this stage is a tricky assignment, given its exposure to the elements and the impossibility of reproducing those in the rehearsal studio. But Tanowitz and her collaborators seem to have seized on the opportunity to take playful risks with lighting (by Davison Scandrett), sound (by Justin Ellington) and the markers of time offered by the river and the sky. Intriguingly — and a little long-windedly, as if eager to leave no compositional idea unexplored — “Day for Night” flows both with and against the current of its surroundings, in ways that reflect the park’s strange conglomeration of the natural and man-made, the spontaneous and controlled.

The hourlong work’s first and most cohesive chapter is a trio for Marc Crousillat, Lindsey Jones and Maile Okamura, who, as soon as they enter, take a moment to gaze out over the Hudson, then surge forward in pony-stepping formation, a choreographic foundation for the intricate movement to follow. Even when splintering into solos and duets, they maintain a sense of lightly conspiratorial togetherness, as they circle and cut across the stage with scurrying footwork or sweeping kicks. Some of the most striking moments are those in stillness, as when the three pause in a row on relevé, arms curved overhead, holding until the middle person swiftly drops to the ground. They reconfigure and repeat.

The pace of this opening section gives the eye and mind room to wander, to settle on the distant sights of passing boats or birds grazing the water’s surface, before returning to the action onstage. The soundscape, too, has a soothing, enveloping effect, merging with the drone of helicopters overhead or the nearby shouts of people in the park. Sounds of lapping water, squawking gulls and audience chatter (to Ellington’s credit, it’s hard to tell what’s recorded and what’s real) alternate with what seem to be British shipping forecasts, a reminder of the vast maritime world beyond this manufactured urban one.

As the sky darkens, the dance grows weirder, witchier and more fractured. Natural light gives way to theatrical. Two more dancers (Morgan Amirah Burns and Brian Lawson) enter unexpectedly, followed by two more: Victor Lozano, first seen running up and down the aisles, and Melissa Toogood, the most seasoned interpreter (among an excellent group) of Tanowitz’s often deliberately awkward movement, who makes even the most effortful steps look elegant. (That goes for her closing solo, too, a glimmering epilogue in Little Island’s smaller performance space, the Glade.) Abrupt shifts in light bathe the stage in saturated colors or harsh white, perhaps a reference to the cinematographic technique with which the work shares its title, in which scenes shot in the daytime are manipulated to appear as if filmed at night.

Maybe because a sunset is a natural ending — day is done — you expect “Day for Night” to wrap up shortly after the light fades. But it follows its own timeline, with more and more sections and ideas accumulating, including at least a couple of false endings in which the dancers bow middance. Their final posture, though, as they lie on their backs, returns us to the way a day should end: with looking at the stars, and with rest.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.