Ten dancers stand in perfect stillness as the first notes of Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations” fall around them like stars. As they scatter to the wings, they leave one man alone. He raises his arms to begin a ragged, fractured dance, hopping, running in circles, and twisting into shapes, all startlingly reflective of the score.

Anyone familiar with modern-day dance would have no trouble identifying the spine-tingling, opening sequence of “Three” as the work of Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company. Following its sold-out engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2005, the troupe returns with the New York premiere of the evening-length “Three,” which will open tomorrow.

Since 1990, working in Tel Aviv, Mr. Naharin has managed to create some of contemporary dance’s most profound, disturbing, and entertaining works — most often for his own troupe, but also for Hubbard Street Dance, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Nederlands Dans Theater, and, most recently, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet.

Largely through his own distinct movement language, which he dubbed, with characteristic irreverence, “gaga,” he conveys wide-ranging and deeply affecting emotions. “Gaga is very free,” he said in a recent phone conversation from Tel Aviv. “That’s why we look so different. I picked the name because it sounds like baby talk. It’s as primitive and basic as that. “

With time, one can usually recognize the influences that inform a choreographer. But not in the case of the 55-year-old Mr. Naharin, whose background is as unusual as his choreographic style. Born in Israel to a mother trained as an Isadora Duncan-style dancer, he grew up on a kibbutz and began dancing only after completing his military service. He first danced professionally with the Batsheva troupe, which was established by Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild in 1964 with Martha Graham. In 1974, Graham created a role for Mr. Naharin in “Jacob’s Dream,” and he later joined her company for year before leaving for Maurice Béjart’s Ballet of the 20th Century in Brussels. Later in New York, he presented dances at Dance Theater Workshop and Riverside Church, finally returning home to become director of Batsheva.

More in evidence than the influence of Graham or Béjart in his works is the affect of gaga. Though tired after a long world tour with his troupe, he seemed to relish talking about his creative process. “I began developing gaga 20 years ago after I injured my back,” he said in his warm, gravelly voice. “When you recognize your weaknesses you get in touch with all kinds of possibilities, and learn how to take care of your body. I discovered new and unexpected movement patterns, once I recognized my weaknesses. Now all my dancers train this way. As a result, they become more sensitive, more alert, quicker and more versatile. They find endless ways to interpret movement.”

For dancers, gaga training serves more than one purpose. “It didn’t just give me tools to dance better and more creatively,” one dancer, Gili Novat, said, “it gave me tools for life. It makes you braver.” Members of the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, who performed his “Deca Dance” here last summer, were equally transformed by his methods. “He goes to extremes,” a dancer, Jubal Battisti, said. “He talks a lot about using subtlety and understatement, often asking us to tone down our movements. It’s a way of making the audience lean in a little closer and pay attention to the details. But he also uses exaggeration, like bigger jumps, faster runs. With him, you end up giving much more and going further than you ever imagined. It’s part of tapping into your vulnerability.”

Given his exacting nature, it’s not surprising that Mr. Naharin spent three months choreographing “Three.” “My ideas cook in my brain for a while,” he said, “then I go in the studio by myself and work them out alone. I love connecting abstract thinking with multidimensional movement. My dancers and I play with the texture. We laugh at ourselves. I see lightness as a virtue. There’s a lot of discovery. The only thing that links the three sections is that I did them all at the same time, and they’re performed continuously. They’re like three poems or three paintings.”

He named the sections in Latin. Bellus means “beauty”; humus means “earth” or “soil”, and secus translates as “this and not this, at the same time.” But he made it very clear that he gave them these names like one would a child — not because the dances embody these qualities, but more simply for their sound. For each one, he employs very different and distinct music: Glenn Gould’s recording of the Bach for “Bellus,” a piece by the electronic composer Brian Eno for “Humus,” and for the third, “Secus,” a combination of Chari Chari, Kid 606+Rayon, AGF, Kaho Naa, Pyar Hai, Seefeel, and the Beach Boys, which sounds quite as wild as one would expect.

Mr. Naharin explained his choice of music. “I choose the Bach for its amazing beauty and structure and its sense of understatement,” he said. “It has a nice sense of rhythm, a percussive quality, and leaves lots of space between sounds.”

For the Eno-accompanied movement, Mr. Naharin posed the question, “Why do we move?,” and answered himself by having the dancers alternate serene periods with explosions of movement, in which they fly off in many directions at once. Mr. Naharin’s sense of irony is never far from the surface, and the dancers perform shoulder shakes that break the intensity of the action. For the last section, Mr. Naharin wanted “a collage of music,” he said, “because I choreographed even more layers of movement. It’s the most complex of the three sections.”

Irony also comes into play in the way he introduces the last sections. A dancer strolls center stage, a television held in his arms. Mr. Naharin appears on the screen and announces the name of the upcoming dance, briefly describing how it will begin, and insisting that the audience keep quiet.

But, Mr. Naharin said, “There’s no theme, just many suggested themes. I look upon this dance as simply one more offering of the power of imagination.”