Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet at Joyce Theater Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet Company members performing Crystal Pite's "Grace Engine" at the Joyce Theater. It's impressive how the triple bill being shown this week at the Joyce Theater by Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet exhibits three quite distinct and thoroughly developed forms of dance theater. The pieces are well performed and well staged, with striking effects of lighting. Each gives you a clearly defined vision; nothing here is tentative or inefficient. The word "ballet" may mislead: there is no pointwork, and the sexes are given remarkably equal treatment. They do have a few things in common: All three have scores that include traffic and street noise. The opening and closing works, Hofesh Shechter's "Violet Kid" and Crystal Pite's "Grace Engine," are both large, dark-spirited, fierce ensembles, with episodes in which all the dancers line up at the front of the stage. Nobody dances for fun all evening. Each piece, however, takes you somewhere quite different. The middle work, Angelin Preljocaj's "Annonciation," a duet for two women, tells a story. You want to know what will happen next, yet you never know where it's going. Considering that it features only two women and that it tells the well-known story of the Annunciation, that's quite an achievement. It's remarkably suspenseful: you follow Mary's journey psychologically. Harumi Terayama sits in contemplation as the Mary figure; Acacia Schachte arrives as a modern-dance Gabriel. In the duet that follows, Mary alternates between collapse and elation; her spirits rise and fall at the prospects brought her by the angel, who is a constant source of sympathy and energy. The angel has studied Merce Cunningham technique, by the way, though she doesn't follow it religiously. It would be perfectly valid, and not less interesting, to read the whole scene as a lesbian encounter. The angel plants a kiss on Mary's lips, a climactic moment. I think the scene is best appreciated by waiting to read Mr. Preljocaj's lengthy program notes afterward: They are a commentary and an interpretation rather than an elucidation. "Violet Kid" (2011) is so skillfully delivered that I'm sorry I disliked it. Though Mr. Shechter mainly uses his 14 dancers in subgroups and occasionally as soloists, this work of roughly 30 minutes says that people - in urban, casual attire - are all the same. They bend over in dejection, they hammer their fists on the air, they throb, gyrate and shake, all of them at various speeds. Everything is lighted (by Mr. Schechter and Jim French) and delivered as a series of wow effects; this is choreography as clever control freakery. A live string trio, sometimes lighted as if suspended above the stage and sometimes invisible, plays part of the music, which also involves much loud taped sound, much of it percussive rock. In Ms. Pite's "Grace Engine" (new this January), Mr. French's lighting is yet more exceptional: Different paths of light pluck out dancers amid surrounding darkness. The atmosphere is often that of a thriller; the score includes amplified and echoing footsteps, sometimes as if someone were being followed down an alley. The dancers onstage, all in suits, seem in perpetual apprehension and alarm; Ms. Pite's choreography is overwrought in the manipulative way that it keeps its dancers in endless tension, and it's a shame that it features so many silent screams and shouts. Yet we're aware of individuals as well as groups; we feel the situation from several points of view. Ms. Pite's stagecraft is gripping: There are tableaus, formations and gestures that all keep seizing the attention, as do several urgent solos. The way that tableaus and lineups keep melting into movement is very fine. There is a dash of control-freakery about Ms. Pite's choreography too, but also a complex sense of humanity. Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performs through May 27 at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org.