The climate that Ballet Memphis brings to the stage is unorthodox, peculiar, fresh and large-spirited. That company is visiting the Joyce Theater with six pieces, four of which were on Tuesday’s opening program. All four are odd; only one proves a complete work of art — Matthew Neenan’s “The Darting Eyes” — and it’s every bit as odd as the others. But the mood blowing through all of these dances is generous, imaginatively breaking rules.

Here’s a basic rule for making a ballet: Don’t mix scores from different sources. In particular, when using taped music, don’t use recordings by a variety of composers and performers. Yet all four Memphis pieces cheerfully and effectively smash this rule. They all seem to show that no one composer is enough for what they have to say, and for the hybrid Memphian culture they’re representing.

In “Darting Eyes,” the music ranges from Baptist singing to a Handel chorus and part of a ballet score by John Adams. These are a religious background — subtext — for a portrait of a secular but Baptist community on the Mississippi River. It’s baffling to see how Mr. Neenan switches between musical idioms and situations, and yet his stage world grows and deepens.

We can’t follow half the stories that seem implicit here, but we hang on these people’s vitality. One classy dame (Julie Marie Niekrasz) plays with her pearls until they torture her. The pathos of a climactic male-female duet, apparently about the withered hand of a man (Jared Brunson) and its cure by religious faith (the devotion of the woman, Virginia Pilgrim Ramey, seems to heal him) is riveting and imaginative.