Ballet Hispanico launched its 25th annual Joyce run with one work from the ‘80s and another about the decade. Artistic director Eduardo Vilaro has attracted both new and older Spanish choreographers, as well as a lively young audience.

On the opening bill, Nacho Duato’s barefoot “Jardi Tancat,” a prizewinner from 1983, displays six of the troupe’s strong dancers, including the terrific Jamal Rashann Callender, a local product who recently won the Princess Grace Award. The piece is easy to read: People cultivate a garden and care for one another with strong, simple, shapely partnering.

The season’s world premiere is a trifle by comparison: Cayetano Soto, a native of Barcelona, offers a duet, “Sortijas,” for Callender and Lauren Alzamora, both wearing black socks and costumes (including a glittery black and silver sweater) by designers Talbot Runhof. A brief encounter, it ends abruptly when paper airplanes attack the performers.

The grand finale, “A vueltas con los ochenta,” has crowd-surfing choreography by Meritxell Barbera and Inma Garcia, but is noteworthy primarily for Diane Ruettiger’s costumes — punk-style outfits mostly in black, with studs and chains and leather and fishnet stockings, big hair and jazz shoes — and Joshua Preston’s lighting, which sends fixtures climbing up and down, bursting into strobe explosions and flooding the nightclub atmosphere with moody dust.

Set in  ‘80s Madrid in the months just after the long Franco dictatorship ended, it opens in silence, the dancers wearing big headphones attached to tiny iPads, which is strikingly anachronistic. But the European pop score, overlaid with the sound of a phone being dialed, makes it clear that we’re watching history.

If you go

Ballet Hispanico
Through April 28
Joyce Theater,
175 Eighth Ave.
212-242-0800
$10-$59,
www.joyce.org

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The Martha Graham Dance Company just can’t catch a break. Finally back on its feet after years of legal turmoil, the 87-year-old troupe last year celebrated its move to the Greenwich Village studios vacated by Merce Cunningham’s defunct organization — only to have its basement storage space swamped by Sandy. Priceless sets and costumes were damaged or destroyed.

Janet Eilber, current artistic director, faces two challenges: getting Graham classics back onstage after this crushing blow and adding new works to the repertory to attract young audiences. Scores of volunteers are helping by restoring the scenery, lending costumes (the ensemble will dance Graham’s lovely “Diversion of Angels” in dresses belonging to American Ballet Theatre) and donating choreography, time and money. The current Joyce season includes a new Luca Veggetti piece and a preview of a work by Nacho Duato.

Program A features “The Show (Achilles Heels),” Richard Move’s fantasia on themes from Homer’s “Iliad.” Originally commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov (whose voice still lingers on the voiceover, to which the dancers lip-synch), this cheeky piece includes a game show and songs by Deborah Harry of Blondie in its Arto Lindsay score. Overlong, overstuffed and intermittently static, it nevertheless has its charms — notably the physiques of many nearly naked young men, a meme Move borrows from Graham herself, as well as Natasha Diamond-Walker playing a horse. And 1962’s “Phaedra,” not Graham’s best work, also shares this program: It’s one of many descants on Greek myths that obsessed the pioneering modernist.

Program B, three vintage Graham works, is for purists; Program C includes her “Angels” and others’ variations on her themes.

If you go

Martha Graham Dance Company
Through March 3
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave.; 212-242-0800
$10-$59; www.joyce.org

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An artist since childhood, Ron Brown was studying journalism when the dance bug bit him hard. For close to 30 years since then, he’s run a company based on the dance vocabulary of the African diaspora, commemorating and celebrating the love that binds people together. With a powerful style grounded in Senegalese and urban vernacular movement, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence tours internationally, revealing aspects of the dance experience that other ensembles neglect.

Two bills alternate this week at the Joyce. Program A, Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening, features remarkable guest dancer Matthew Rushing performing an excerpt of “Ife/My Heart,” made in 2005 for the Ailey company where Rushing is now rehearsal director. Dressed all in white, he channels a Latino street-corner guy celebrating his body to a spoken-word score by Ursula Rucker.

Also on that program is 1998’s “Incidents,” a quiet, dramatic piece in which a group of women comfort and heal a young girl, dancing as they work to spirituals sung by Aretha Franklin, Wunmi and the Staple Singers. No erotic bumping and grinding for this crowd; Brown’s urban people find solace in God, producing uplift rather than cheesy entertainment. A new work, “Torch,” celebrates the life of his recently deceased friend Beth Young.

Brown’s troupe operates on the border between this world and the next, aspiring to heaven while living fully on Earth. Program B, running Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, as well as at Saturday’s matinee, features the 2001 “Walking Out the Dark” and “Upside Down,” made in 1998 with Rokiya Kone of the Ivory Coast troupe Jeune Ballet d’Afrique Noire, to music by Fela Kuti and Malian vocalist Oumou Sangare.

If you go

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence
Through Feb. 17
Joyce Theater,
175 Eighth Ave.; 212-242-0800
$10-$49: www.joyce.org

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