I was watching this at start of the sexual-harassment-revelation rockslide, so a metaphor for mankind turned, for me, into a kinetic essay about the entitled persistence of men. There is folly here. There is wonder. There is a tragic kind of joke. You really can’t keep a man down — good but often otherwise — because history’s mechanics are built to keep him climbing toward the top. Somehow, Icarus gets to be reborn as Iron Man.

Part of what’s mesmerizing about “The Mechanics of History” is its physical eloquence — how dancerly it is. The men don’t fall; they float. And when the trampoline restores them to the staircase, they move at a half speed. Cinema, they say, is 24-frames per second. For a couple of beats, these guys are going at about 12. And the descents are all flourish — the men pivot and freeze but with a smooth jerk of the head and neck with their arms up, sleepwalker-style, then they fall. No fear, just cool. No confusion, just inevitability.

The hipsterness of it all — a T-shirt, sneakers, knit cap and the same taupe suit draped over each guy, those hats, the facial hair — feels like a dare to mock “The Mechanics.” Do these clothes say “artists at work” or “sci-fi barista”? Honestly, who can tell? But you couldn’t stay hung up on that for long because the wit of the piece renders its chic beside the point. The chic is an accent.

Mr. Bourgeois is an acrobat and dramatist of physics. He likes his trampolines and the corollary challenges of — and meaning in — remaining upright. He’s a humorist and motion philosopher. This piece is of a piece with the other ruminating he’s done about time, space, gravity and human nature. In “The One Who Falls,” three women and three men, in everyday clothes, negotiate each other while moving, often in unison, on a giant spinning tile.

What could seem like a gimmick with another artist (or with like, say, parkour) becomes a moral conundrum with Mr. Bourgeois. To stand alongside other people or trip them all so I stand alone? It’s “Friends” but written by Jean-Paul Sartre and directed by Milton Bradley.