When it was all over, the dancers stood in a line onstage, soaking wet and clearly exhausted. And the audience stood in the Howard Gilman Opera House, applauding and cheering through multiple curtain calls, until some of the performers’ drawn faces softened into small smiles.

Had there been flowers, Wednesday night’s American premiere of “Vollmond” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival could almost have been a retirement celebration. But this was a farewell of another sort (and also a welcome back): the show was the first time Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch had returned to the United States since Bausch died last year at 68, just five days after her cancer was diagnosed.

This audience embrace is typical of the response the company gets. Apparently, and understandably, it can sometimes wear on the dancers, keeping the loss of their choreographer in a sort of eternal present tense. But who can blame people around the world for wanting to honor the woman, and her German company, who did so much to shape dance in the 20th century? So many of the dance, theater and opera works onstage today owe an often sizable debt to Bausch and her pioneering style of the neo-expressionist genre known as tanztheater, or dancetheater. It’s hard to overstate the influence her violently charged, dreamlike worlds and stark stagescapes have had.

It’s commonplace to talk of how those worlds had softened by Bausch’s later years, when her tangled depictions of sexual politics were notably mellower than in her earliest harsh evocations. Increasingly, beginning in the 1990s, the inspiration for individual pieces began to spring from — and at the invitation of — specific places: Istanbul for “Nefés” (2003) and India for “Bamboo Blues” (2007), both presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bausch’s sole home in New York for more than 25 years.

“Vollmond” (“Full Moon”), from 2006, is Bausch in mellow mode, still with childlike cruelties and fits of emotion unleashed onstage but leavened by a surprisingly gentle humor and a soundtrack of easy, lush songs. But it is not drawn from any particular locale, and this is a relief. Though shows like “Bamboo Blues” contain redolent moments, they also carry the uneasy whiff of cultural tourism, offering picturesque, self-consciously exotic portraits that have left some viewers (including this one) squirming a bit in their seats.

“Vollmond,” designed by Peter Pabst, takes place in an austere and often shadowy landscape dominated by a giant slab of rock. Fernando Jacon’s lighting leaves much of the space to the imagination, so that we at first do not really see the pool of dark water that stretches across the center of the stage. But we know it is there — initially through the dark glimmers it casts into the upper reaches of the black backdrop, then increasingly it becomes an inexorable, troubling center that pulls the dancers toward its depths.

These depths are in fact quite shallow, but still there is the sense that the waters are an endless well, like some communal unconscious, or perhaps even what lies beneath the unconscious. Soon enough, the men’s shirts and trousers are soaked, while the women’s assorted gowns and slinky dresses stick to their bodies like second skins. (Marion Cito designed the costumes.) A rain falls, sometimes lightly, sometimes in an exhilarating downpour: pure spectacle.

“It is full moon: you don’t get drunk,” the Wuppertal veteran Nazareth Panadero explains during the show in her inimitably thick voice, giving a knowing smile that suggests she is going to do just that, if she hasn’t begun already.

It is probably better to be drunk in “Vollmond”; the procession of scenes depicts the subtle ways we control and are controlled, how we cut our companions’ sense of self off at the knees while seeming to offer encouragement. These moments may at first seem alien, because of the setting (which is never fully resolved with the dramas that spin within it, creating a disjunction that seems to speak more to expensive production budgets than any dreamlike logic). But they are actually pedestrian: one woman times a man as he fumbles to undo her bra, another pecks rapidly at her partner’s lips, a third talks of being bitter, of waiting and crying, all the while rubbing fruit along her rail-thin frame and wielding a sharp paring knife. An older, sad-sack man (Dominique Mercy, who now runs the company with Robert Sturm) wanders about with two empty glasses and no date, as everywhere amorous couples pair off.

In one of the most oddly bracing moments, Mr. Mercy shatters a glass while trying to balance on it. Surely this must be a mistake, you think, as he returns with a broom and dustpan, and stares out wearily into the house; no one, after all, breaks glass on purpose during a dance performance.

Deliberate or not, the incident sticks in the mind because it jars in a way that too few encounters in “Vollmond” do. There is a sense throughout of an artist’s exploration having hardened into shtick. And the pure dance passages bring little relief, suffering from a severely limited movement palette in which the dancers curl their bodies through space like ink disappearing into water. Hair is whipped about (often causing a spray of droplets), torsos collapse and limbs hinge and buckle in vaguely Indian motifs.

This all feels tired and predictable, as if Bausch had run out of new ideas and instead offered up her trusty style. And that’s O.K., really, even if disheartening in the moment; it’s almost impossible for an artist to keep reinventing her game. Rare enough for one to change the game in the first place, the way Pina Bausch and her tanztheater did.