It’s New York City’s club scene without the bad vibes and pretentious people. On stage, a throng touches one another, moving to Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star.” They pull, lift and rearrange themselves: playful yet intimate, sensual but kind. The stage lights turn on the audience, silhouetting the dancers and throwing an unbearably bright glare in our direction. An invitation to the audience to dance, perhaps?

Watching Nicholas Leichter Dance at the Schwartz Center on Thursday night, I was nostalgic for summer, missing the remarkable energy of a dance floor in the city. “I’d like to think my work calls for people to let go. I don’t require people to always be reserved,” Leichter said in an interview. Leichter — who started out as a club dancer in his teens — fuses disco, funk and urban forms with freewheeling movements and prayerful gestures, creating a sparkling concoction that delights in its own confounding lack of definition.

You could call it an eclectic club mix with an edge: Besides urban forms and Michael Jackson, Leichter also counts expressive modern dancer pioneer Martha Graham and avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham among his influences.

The company’s dancers exude self-assurance about their skin color and bodies, masking the intricacy of his dance sequences. “You got a problem? We’re just doing our thing,” each dancer seems to say in his or her own voice. Leichter’s own movements seem to love and fight the music at the same time. His limbs draw out each step to the last possible split-second — till the music forces him to freefall into the next move. Watching him dance is like watching a man jumping off a cliff without fear: Who knows where he will land next?

Most likely into a flamboyant dance that flirts with flamenco and cabaret movements while still managing to stay fluid and athletic. Or a succession of spins in which the dancers lift one another, gaze into each other’s faces and then soulfully embrace. (Leichter isn’t afraid of punctuating his pieces with lots of group hugs. And everyone looks just so together pressing close.) With the dancers’ enthusiasm to tangle their limbs up with one another, the piece took on the rough-and-tumble quality of children at play. In Leichter’s pieces, the floor also becomes something that his dancers fight against, collapse into and support themselves with — adding a new dimension to the texture of his dance.

In a gorgeous duet, a couple writhe on the floor, jostling to be on top, moving one another’s limbs as though attempting to sculpt the other into the shape of their own desires. The movements are hard, strong and forceful. But perhaps the piece is less of a rape than a portrait of a man and woman asserting their own independence while recognizing that each can never possess one another.

While teaching a technique class to dance students at the Schwartz Center last Wednesday, Leichter’s commands seemed simple: “Fall into your body,” “Reach up” as if you need to “toss your clothes,” do an aggressive “jerk back,” followed by the emotional “fall again.” The sparseness of Leichter’s choreographic language is enabling: dancers get to inject their own personal oomph into his steps.

The climax of oomph appeared with the dancer Monstah Black. After being unstrapped from a cart, he broke into song, making a powerful statement about resisting the commodification of art forms. Strutting on stage wearing platform pumps with heels cut off and shimmering with bling and glitter, Monstah Black was both sassy and freakish — in Leichter’s words, “the underground emerging.” Monstah Black, who calls himself “a self-shaped Messiah of the Funk,” merges new-funk, modern movement and visual design with a hybrid genre of music that some have called “electro Afro-punk funk.” In an interview with L Magazine, Monstah Black described one of his art projects with these words: “I imagine it resembling Fela Kuti meets Sylvester while sipping champagne with Prince and Grace Jones in a lounge on the bottom of the ocean.”

If the edge in Monstah Black’s art wasn’t enough, dancers stumbled around with fedoras tilted over their eyes and grooved out at the same time, presenting funk dressed in vaudeville in the piece “Killa.” Leichter burst on to stage, gesturing to the audience to clap the rhythm of the music — perhaps to point to the fact that an audience’s desires make them not completely innocent in how art becomes marketed and produced. What he got was a mixed reaction: perplexed, and then overenthusiastic, applause that quickly faded out.

“I would say any reaction is an honest reaction,” Leichter said, while also admitting, “my works get misread.”

Nicholas Leichter Dance stops your heart with its energy. But one wonders if the intricate layering of dance genres and the subversions of gender and race taking place are so complex that they are ultimately lost to the audience. The best art doesn’t scream out what it’s trying to say. Perhaps it’s a professional hazard for the best of dancers: what’s being worked out in the piece leaves questions piled as high as Monstah Black’s platform pumps.