Remember when you were about 15, and used to wait until your family was out of the apartment to put something on the stereo, then flail around to it in your underpants? Yes, I thought so. Well that is what Kristyna Lhotáková did Saturday night at Dance Theater Workshop in her piece, “I am here, you are at home.”And that is — to some extent — what the performers did in all three of the works shown as part of DTW’s Springdance Dialogue, which casts a global net to recruit emerging performers to create and showcase new work.

The participants on Saturday night exercised their own need to release inhibitions and dared both to make fools of themselves and to rebel against the performers’ compulsion to please. Their works were meant to try our patience at times, and they did. But the performers’ unwillingness to win our affection, their need to act out, had its own charm, too.

Collaborating on Springdance Dialogue with DTW and the Netherlands Springdance festival is Moscow’s Dance Agency TSEH, and the week of performances included a number of participants from former Soviet block countries. Ms. Lhotáková, a native of the Czech Republic, began the solo piece she choreographed with Ladislav Soukup by walking out downstage in a sweater over bikini briefs that showed a lot of her toned tush. She strolled and engaged in workmanlike stretches. As she performed steps with unpointed toes, there was at times a purposefully klutzy approach to Ms. Lhotáková’s movement. As her piece progressed, she flirted with turning into a demented exhibitionist. At the microphone she asked, “Where is my home?” in accented English. She shrieked and growled in response to her enumeration of various topographies. Her relentless attempts to avoid ingratiation — softened a bit by her gamine appeal — climaxed when she recited a monologue in Czech. How long would the audience tolerate it, I wondered. She knew when to conclude before our minds had shut off, exiting via the downstage right corner from whence she’d first arrived.

Muscovite Tatiana Gordeeva choreographed and performed the second solo performance of the evening, “To Fade Away Yesterday.” Ms. Gordeeva danced for nine years with the Kremlin State Ballet. Her piece was movement study rather than a character sketch like Ms. Lhotáková’s. Since leaving ballet in 1999 to start a choreography career, Ms. Gordeeva seems to have renounced her ballet training, shaping work reminiscent of the Judson dancers’ reaction against virtuosity in the 1960s. (Of course, one can’t entirely renounce ballet technique because it is too directly based on universal movement: spinning, running, jumping.)

Ms. Gordeeva was more of a sober side than Ms. Lhotáková, and less confrontational. Pale and dour, clad in a Tshirt and jeans and adorned with bluntly cropped blonde hair, she performed ballet steps executed without virtuoso flourish and lacking the clean and sharp definition we expect from traditional ballet. Again, we saw bent, turned-in legs, and unpointed feet. She frequently covered her eyes and shaded her forehead. There were falls to the ground and the assumption of fetal positions. Ms. Gordeeva swung her feet in a variation of a balletic tendu en croix that gravitated toward becoming a shuffle. Reclining on the floor, she dragged her limbs so they seemed paralyzed. Back on her feet, she rocked in place, and bounced her arms stiffly. She seemed mesmerized by the drums on the soundtrack before she retreated to a sanctum of geometric planes of light on the dark stage.

Next came Levi Gonzalez’s “Public Presentation of a Fragmentary Arrangement With Unstable Elements,” which he choreographed in collaboration with the three performers with whom he shared the stage. They enacted a tribute to anarchy performed to a sampling soundscape. The stage was preset with pairs of shoes placed on a mat downstage right, next to a laptop. The four cast members — Mr. Gonzalez, Hristoula Harakas, Isabel Lewis, and Kayvon Pourazar — began the piece lined up in a row facing the audience, then delineated depth by separating and claiming disparate planes for themselves.

Soon, a hail of detrtitus showered the stage. The performers regressed to children at playtime, wreaking havoc on the objects that blanketed the stage. The back wall began to attract the performers’ attention, as the two men performed an Alley Cat slide against it, and then creation as well destruction was re-enacted when three of the performers faced the back wall, and bestowed upon it a great show of physical affection, while the fourth watched. The performers stomped on- and off-stage so busily that the ensemble seemed larger than it was. At the end, they put on the shoes awaiting them, and walked away.