As a title, “Dancing Americas” implies plurals, and plurals are exactly what the University of Michigan Dance Company delivers —along with absolute heaps of good dancing — in its annual Power Center show, which opened Thursday evening and runs through Sunday.

The title emphasizes “Americas,” and North, Central and South are duly represented on the bill, along with their musics, live and recorded. But it is not so much geographic diversity as choreographic diversity that makes the evening so successful. With pieces by two faculty choreographers, Melissa Beck and Sandra Torijano, and by the esteemed guest artist Dianne McIntyre and the late, great Merce Cunningham, “Dancing Americas” is really about diversity of choreographic style.

You wouldn’t start a program with Cunningham unless you were sure your dancers had the mettle for his uplifted, ballet-inflected style, so pure and elegant — and liable to show the slightest flaw in technique. And as appealing as the Cunningham style is, that’s just how unappealing some find the music he favored, by life and artistic partner John Cage.

But Artistic Director Judy Rice must have known she was holding all the aces for the Cunningham “MinEvent,” staged by former Cunningham company member Jean Freebury, that began the show. It combined elements of several Cunningham dances and was set to Cage’s “Cartridge Music,” played by members of the U-M Digital Music Ensemble.

The dancers, clad in pale gray and pastel unitards (by Mark Lancaster) that showed off their beautiful lines, were stellar, cool and precise in litanies of big and little steps, most recognizable from the ballet vocabulary, that Cunningham reveals from every angle, turning them like jewels to show every facet. Jessica Trepka, Derek Crescenti and Inae Chung were particular standouts, but the whole cast danced with assurance that was way beyond good-student work.

Mary Cole’s lighting, here and throughout the evening, was exquisite. So were the dresses that Christianne Myers, the evening’s costume designer, made for the next dance on the bill, Beck’s “Towards a sudden silence.” Little hats, wrist-length gloves, wasp-waisted jewel-tone dresses with knife-pleated skirts in flirty chiffon: the ensembles suggest the constrained 1950s world of the women sitting pretty — and not so pretty — on a long bench center stage as the curtain rises. A lone man, Sean Hoskins, draws them into his sphere, but they shrink from his touch or his threatening nearness.

Beck was inspired by the poems of Marge Piercy for her dance, and its subject — constraint and struggle against “Mad Men” norms — motivates its pushes and pulls, its scrambles and its silences.

There’s no ideological struggle in Torijano’s “Tango con la Vida,” a dance she made, to Piazzolla and Compay Segundo, to celebrate life and the “passion of living, the blessing to be present” after undergoing two years of chemotherapy for leukemia. Given that idea, it seemed odd to see the dance open with a sultry heroine, Francesca Nieves, lounging in red and smoking a cigarette as she waited for her man (Crescenti): cigarettes are not exactly a life-affirming emblem these days.

Better, I decided, to forget ideas external to the dance and to take it on its own sexy, black-and-red tango terms. Torijano moves groups, couples and soloists expertly, in powerful counterpoint. And she explores the dark side of tango — its dagger-sharp edge — as well as its softer moods, with joyous abandon.

The program’s second half is given over to McIntyre’s new work, “The Summit,” a major piece the choreographer made in a residency here since January.

McIntyre’s works are celebrated not only on the modern-dance stage but in the theater and on film and television. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2008 American Dance Festival Award for Distinguished Teaching, and PBS declared her “one of the most important black woman dance artists to emerge during the 1970s…[with] a distinctive body of work that features an idiosyncratic use of music, [and] a dynamic movement style.”

That dynamic movement style does not disappoint in “The Summit,” where she melds modern dance, jazz and African influences with archaic flattening to suggest an ancient Nubia and warring “tribes” whose conflicts coalesce around a couple that dares to cross the boundaries of clan.

“The Summit,” unlike the other dances on the bill, is a story ballet, a drama, with a multi-level set by Kasia Mrozewska to abet the unfolding events. And it’s a drama well told. It’s rare to see dancers “talk” so clearly with their bodies (stately Briana Stuart was particularly fine; the work is double-cast — she’s up again Saturday). And the movement was perfectly calibrated to making you hear the music — of Bo Diddley, Eric Dolphy, and Dizzy Gillespie, played live by U-M jazz musicians under the direction of Woody Goss and Stephen Rush — in a fresh, more comprehensive light.

And as was true all evening, the dancers were beautifully prepared and coached. For choreography and performance, this was the most satisfying U-M dance department show I can remember in recent years.

"Dancing Americas" continues February 4-6 at Power Center, 121 Fletcher Street. Tickets available at the Michigan League Ticket Office, 911 North University Avenue, 734-764-2538 or online at http://www.music.umich.edu/performances.

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers music and dance for AnnArbor.com.