When Susan Rose’s concert began last Friday night, a man in a tiny tutu and black briefs was standing in a gloomy light, fussily adjusting his costume and his turnout. Vivaldi music played as he swooped into a sequence of overstretched and oversold ballet gestures, pausing to slide the tutu into new positions — over his chest, around his neck — for different effects. The solo had the word parody written all over it, which is kind of unfortunate, because the rest of the evening then took on a derisive tone. Rose’s choreography is often campy and physically bizarre, but she doesn’t always ask for laughter, let alone mockery.

As Songs That Help Derange continued, Joel Smith, the tutu man, was joined by Laura Johnson, who wore a skirt made of neckties and a Princess Margaret hat of black tulle and silver spangles. They did some reconnoitering in a walking duet with little echoes and chases, then went into a pas de deux of oppositions. Moving close together, they’d lunge for the wrong place, whiz past in near-miss precision, grab a foot or an arm as if by accident. Caught in a gender-specific balletic form, they were resolutely demolishing its assumptions.

The movement didn’t appear to match the Vivaldi’s decorum either, but they’d skid into position in perfect synchronization with the musical cadences. On the last note, just before the lights went out, Johnson sat down improbably on the calf of Smith’s extended leg.

Susan Rose, formerly of Boston and now based at the University of California-Riverside, returned to open the performance season at Green Street Studios. All of her six mostly recent pieces, including two sections from works in process, featured deliberately offbeat movement and a sensitive, sometimes perverse response to music. Rose slips her fine sense of dance composition underneath layers of attitude and comic reference. Sometimes her dance looks muddled, as if the people were trying the same moves in different combinations, searching for order at the same time that they’re shattering it.

El Tugurio, a section from a longer piece to be premiered in Argentina this fall, began with a tango parody. Johnson, Smith, Susan Goldberg, Kelli King, and Brian Moore lusted and seethed, devoured one another with their eyes, slunk across the floor alone and together. Their seductions got more inventive and more grotesque. The hot tango touches led to clutching embraces, head butts, strangulation, and God knows what other intimacies.

After this, passion forgotten, the group brought out a café table and chairs. They sat down for a chat, failing to notice that two of them were wearing parts of the tablecloth. Having developed this surrealistic image, they didn’t find much they could do with it, and the piece dissolved in a dreamlike miasma of flouncing and tangoing.

A Prior Arrangement began with a solo by Kelli King, who jerked her limbs into superhuman extensions and angular shapes as if manipulated by an unseen puppeteer. She was joined by Joel Smith for a fumbly duet where they couldn’t seem to follow up on contacts they’d established. When Susan Goldberg appeared, they began the duet again, and the pattern expanded as she inserted herself into their relationship. This piece seemed slightly sinister to me, perhaps because Goldberg grinned maliciously the whole time, or perhaps because of the music by a German punk-rock group making nasty sounds at unhealthy decibel levels.

Back Scratching looked like a boring afternoon at the gym. With a tape loop by Sean Griffen that recycled sound effects, semi-articulate words, and a disco beat, the four dancers crouched and heaved as if stuck to the ground, did goofy calisthenics with partners, leaped and jogged without bothering to go full out. Inexact Parallel Loops was a trio to Arcangelo Corelli, where the music’s formality accommodated both luxurious and eccentric moves.

Buried in the Footnotes, a work in progress, began with another tango. This time the five dancers made slow, effortful crosses, crawling, tilting, falling, stretching, and collapsing till they got to the other side of the space.

There were three more sections, and in each one the dancers worked just west of what the accompaniments suggested. They did a miscellany of world-dance gestures, faux native style, to some African chanting and clapping. They scattered and regrouped, grabbed, fell, scattered, regrouped, all while muffled voices seemed to be reporting a police raid. Finally, they faced upstage in a line-up and made exclamatory gestures while Burundian women sang a light, hocketing melody that might have been coming from the treetops of a rain forest.