For his 90th birthday, the choreographer Merce Cunningham threw his usual surprise party – where no one knows anyone. The set, the music and the dance don’t meet until the day of the premiere.

Contrary impulses: ‘Nearly Ninety’

Sometimes the encounter is electric. Sometimes everyone stays in his corner nursing his drink. And sometimes a drunken lout shows up to spoil things. On Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the 90-minute Nearly Ninety had its world premiere, there were two louts. At least the art-rockers Sonic Youth – joined by longtime Led Zeppelin guitarist John Paul Jones and Cunningham musical director Takehisa Kosugi – knew how to behave, delivering a textured wall of sound to intensify the dance’s moods. But architect Benedetta Tagliabue’s massive shipwreck of a set confined the dancers to a strip at the front of the stage and Franc Aleu’s trippy light show created such visual din that you had to exert yourself to take in the dance at all.

It was worth it, however. For its first 45 minutes, Nearly Ninety consists mainly of those entrancing Cunningham adagios where limbs frame open space as a latticed window might frame paradise. These sequences emanate profound calm. The dance’s second half moves faster and more unpredictably, with a series of solos whose steps contain such contrary muscular impulses that the dancers almost grind to a halt.

The whole work, in fact, plays with paralysis. In the duets and trios, the men take on the role of certain limbs of the women they’re squiring. As the luminous Holley Farmer, for example, dives backwards, two men substitute for her arms, restraining her so her head grazes the floor. Her dancing is at once headlong and held back.

The pathos in that paradox runs through Nearly Ninety, but not all the dancers discover it. To find the freedom – and humanity – in Cunningham’s steps, the dancer has to be deeply familiar with his enormous lexicon. A 12-year veteran of the troupe, Farmer has that advantage, as does Daniel Squire, in his 11th year.

Last month, Cunningham told Farmer and Squire he wouldn’t need them any more. It was a Lear-like gesture. Someone should have taken the role of Cordelia and told the old man he was wrong. ★★★★☆