Of the many categories of dance in Japan, from traditional ballet to so-called neo-butoh and beyond into the unmapped territories of performance installation, Minoru Suzuki is the only ballet choreographer with the potential to be a contender internationally. To celebrate 35 years in the business, Star Dancers Ballet Company commissioned a work from Suzuki that stands head and shoulders above his previous works, such as the character-driven "DragonQuest" or the more abstract, unfortunately named "Yonk."

Members of Star Dancers Ballet Company perform Minoru Suzuki's "Missing Link."

His new, evening-length piece "Missing Link" boasts another awkward title and is themed vaguely along the lines of "the expression of the subconscious," but its premiere at Setagaya Public Theater Jan. 26 showed Suzuki in full stride. Unhappily, the dumping of snow on Tokyo at the weekend must have seriously compromised attendance at the remaining performances. "Link" deserves to be widely toured.

Suzuki has a keen sense of how much new dance is influenced by, and celebrates, the voyeurism of hundreds of people sitting quietly in a darkened venue watching other people move their attractive bodies in artistic and provocative ways. To this end, and following hot in the footsteps of choreographers such as William Forsythe and Jiri Kylian, he opened the piece in silence behind a curtain of vertical black and white stripes, more sheer than funeral bunting and twice as transparent with angled lighting.

His movement for dancers behind a three-sided mesh panel made us more aware of the imperfection of our vision, as they melted into shadow or were obliterated by lighting. And, of course, the many scenes included one of the dancers' shadows thrown huge against a screen and interacting with the silhouettes of other dancers.

Hiding movement, as opposed to revealing it, was first glorified by Merce Cunningham's now legendary use of "chance" arrangements in choreography and lighting, but it continues to be an important trend in almost all new work and has the result of sharpening the curiosity and the senses.

The choreography was cut through with wit and humor, sensual (in a sterile Japanese dance world where dancers never actually touch each other in most modern choreography) and wonderfully angled in off-kilter balances, twisted couplings and uncouplings with bends of arms that looked physiologically impossible, and use of the legs in high, arching patterns like storks.

The new thing about Suzuki's work is that it is approaching a spontaneity of movement, achievable because these dancers are so dancerly, weaned as they are on Tudor, Balanchine and the "old moderns." It shows in his many redoublings of patterns and effects, a sudden reversal in direction or velocity that seems as unplanned as walking beside a stream watching the carp, and then finding yourself leaping over the guardrail and plunging in there with them, fueled by a clear, if unexamined, propulsion.

Suzuki also made delicate slower work for the company's male dancers, especially Li Bo, with his sharp phrasing, and the perfectly balanced Kazuhiro Nishijima, full of interlacing and interlocking arms and athletic turns.

Some of the faster scenes also incorporated spontaneous developments from the too-varied soundtrack of everything from Satie's limpid piano to Yann Tomita's industrial noise. After the dancers moved in unison in a jaunty scene to the song "You're Just Too Good to Be True," Suzuki ended by having them gradually stop dancing as the music stopped and walk off stage humming the tune or, in the case of one dancer, flipping a switch to release a basketball from the flies, timing his dive across the stage to catch it. Small, easy touches and confident ones.

"Missing Link" ended with a section called "Degi Meta Go-go" that harked back to older Suzuki works using groups of dancers. It was perhaps fatally compromised by the need to create work for the many female corps de ballet dancers, instead of just creating work that needs to be expressed and finding the best dancers afterward.

With corps groups of three in more classically arranged unison work, the six pairs of top pas dancers sped across the stage, flitted and formed new alliances, regrouped and reheeled in a style that was reminiscent of George Balanchine's clean, forbiddingly difficult diagonals. And with people the caliber of Emi Oyama, Mia Atsugi, Hiroko Kohira, dynamo Shinya Nagase and danseur noble Tomohisa Hikita working for you with you, it's hard for a choreographer not to shine.