The choreographer Pam Tanowitz is well credentialed and has been presenting all kinds of dance works in New York over the last few years.  Her very short program Thursday night at Joyce SoHo - one work "Storage," lasting exactly 30 minutes - was notable for her choice of music, and her response to that music.

Many modern-dance choreographers today, having gotten through their Philip Glass and Astor Piazzolla phases, seem to rely on electronic collages or popular music. Ms. Tanowitz went all the way in the opposite direction, choosing a recording of Charles Wuorinen's "Five", for amplified cello and orchestra, with the estimable Fred Sherry as soloist.

Mr. Wuorinen is back in the news these days, with his opera "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" at the New York City Opera and with James Levine championing his music with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  Success seems to have led to a regrowth of Mr. Wuorinen's polemical teeth; he is now denouncing any confusion between art and entertainment and blaming critics for any woes contemporary composition has suffered in recent decades.

Yet "Five" (1987) is pretty entertaining, here and there, with its intimations of Americana and even jazz.  Ms. Tanowitz, not performing herself but working with five personable dancers -- Stasia Blyskal, Sally Donaubauer, Anne Lentz, William Petroni, and Lillian Stillwell -- echoed and commented on the music most cleverly.

With a blank white wall in the back, bright lighting and a red carpeted frame to the dancing space, she had her spiffily costumed dancers (lots of sequins and ruffles) restlessly group and regroup, the patterns not slavishly illustrating the music, but providing a kind of dancing analogue.

Yet just as the music allows wit and play to peep through its rigor, so Ms. Tanowitz' dancers sprawled or stood or even danced on the side carpet, once even half hidden behind the rear wall. They performed in silence for the first five minutes, initiating the mood of sly formality, and again during a silent pause.

This was not material that could have sustained a full-evening work, perhaps.  But in the short dose offered on Thursday, it seized and held one's attention.

The program continues through Sunday at the Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer St. (212) 334-7479.