Mr. Moran laughed. “I’m not a choreographer,” he continued. “I only know about how my body feels when I play it. So I think in all collaborations, you’re not necessarily looking for people who simply give you what’s on the top of your head. We want to dig deep together, and that’s what this allows.”

While, to his regret, Mr. Moran wasn’t trained as a dancer, he is profoundly affected by movement — and that includes his own. “If I’m not moving while I’m playing, “ he said, “I know the music is bad. That means something is stuck.”

Mr. Moran said that he had to make sure that he did not think of a sound as done once he had played the note, but “that it is still moving in the air and running into people’s bodies,” he said. “I guess in working with Alonzo and dancers, you really are allowed to see it or what it triggers.”

The new work’s score is spare and poignant, building toward a powerful finale to which the dancers move in unison. Here, Mr. King is continuing to explore a theme that has been at the root of his recent series of ballets.

“It’s this idea of communal harmony and unspoken contracts,” he said. “There’s something about chemistry and the manipulation of energies and how they’re placed. You’re building an architecture, and it’s based on the building materials, which are the dancers. You’re really creating something that’s living and formed out of who they are, and what the ideas are in the room.”

Mr. King’s dancers are both free and precise; they possess an uninhibited consciousness of their bodies in space. As Ms. Phelan, of City Ballet, said, “They’re not afraid to try anything.”