This was supposed to be a big year for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, founded 50 years ago. In early March, the troupe flew to France to begin a sold-out anniversary tour. The first few shows went great. Then came the wave of coronavirus cancellations, and the dancers found themselves on the last American Airlines flight from Paris to New York.

Scattered across the country — or in one case, back home in Australia — the dancers did what separated groups of every kind are doing: They met up virtually. They checked in on one another, commiserated about the canceled shows and started floating ideas about how they might continue to work remotely. One option quickly rose to the top: “Roof Piece.”

“Roof Piece” is a work that Brown, who died in 2017, first performed in 1971. She and some colleagues scattered themselves across the water-tower-capped roofs of SoHo and played a dance version of the game telephone. One dancer executed a series of semaphore-like movements, which the dancer on the next roof over tried to copy exactly, and so on down the line.

Spectators, stationed atop buildings, could follow the transmission and the errors, the inevitable decay in the signal that Brown intended the exercise to expose. People who didn’t know what was going on might also take notice, and that was part of the plan, too. That’s why the dancers all wore red.