It’s not surprising that an inquisitive, rigorous process lies behind each of Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s dance works. This is a choreographer who once questioned her involvement in dance and stepped back from the scene entirely for two years. Now, she creates meticulously distilled pieces in which she scrupulously avoids falling back on movement that is learned or familiar. “The way I work is to make an entirely new vocabulary for each new piece,” she explains in between rehearsals for A Number of Small Black and White Dances, which has its premiere this weekend at Dance New Amsterdam.

This time, however, she shifted her approach. This is her second local presentation this year (following 3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words at Center for Performance Research last May), so she did not have the usual extended period of investigation that produces that personalized vocabulary. “It usually takes a year or two, and there are months and months of work before there is anything towards performance,” she says. “I wondered how I could do something in a shorter amount of time, and I decided I wanted to investigate how to use old material, but make something new.” Re-examining earlier dances (she has been presenting work regularly since 2001), she identified “certain kinds of through lines between different pieces. I found moments I would like to keep, and developed a piece that makes a cohesive whole out of those parts. So it’s a new piece, but a different process from how I’m used to making them.

“When I looked back at what really interested me over the last few years, so much related to people connecting, or really not connecting. I think it’s also a lot about how we work. We have such an intimate process. I feel it becomes so important how the dancers view each other, watch each other as performers.”

Intriguing use of lighting has marked several of Vandenbroucke’s works. Full Circle was entirely lit by flashlights. A Number of Small Black and White Dances opens with a dancer calmly involved in private movement, creating her own light as she holds a flashlight, and includes unexpected lighting changes as well as lines from T.S. Eliot’s  “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” projected through the light, onto the dancers’ bodies. She and her longtime lighting designer, Nelson R. Downend, Jr., met at the North Carolina School for the Arts. “He always pushes me a lot, so I start to see things a lot through light,” Vandenbroucke says.

When she graduated 10 years ago from NCSA, an elite performing arts conservatory, she did not launch herself, armed with all the technical proficiency acquired during her years of study, full-force into the New York dance scene. Instead, she arrived here and immediately re-evaluated her connection to dance.

“I quit dance when I got here. Because my whole background had been such intense conservatory training, and I wasn’t sure if it meant anything to me anymore. I needed to step back. So I baked for a while, and did all kinds of other things for a couple of years. It felt like dance had become this success-oriented thing, and so heavy on the technique. I felt like if I was going to do it, I wanted to figure out how to look at it more as a full artist. So I needed to stop for a little while.”

She did eventually return to dance—which she says is “just so in my bones”—after much reassessment and with a new clarity of purpose. “I needed to figure out how to have it in my life in a way that felt right to me. I felt that the right way to go back into dance would be if I could make my own company and my own work. I wanted to create my own atmosphere—the intimate, sacred feeling of a rehearsal space.”

A similar individualistic, self-starter approach came into play when Vandenbroucke and her husband, photographer Mathew Pokoik, started Mount Tremper Arts, a center for contemporary performance and visual art located in The Catskills. They fixed up a “falling-down old house,” built a studio and performance space and, in 2007, started a summer festival with eight weeks of residencies and performances. “It’s really important to us that it’s a place for artists to feel loved and taken care of. Matt makes big feasts; there’s a beautiful organic garden that a lot of the food comes out of,” she says. Beyond the summer activity—weekend performances, artists in residence and visual art exhibits—Mount Tremper also hosts residencies year-round.

Those attending the Vandenbroucke’s DNA performances can get a taste of the place’s unique atmosphere—intensive creative gestation plus convivial communal meals—through Pokoik’s concurrent gallery exhibit, “In Conversation: MTA at DNA” on view through Dec. 30.

A Number of Small Black and White Dances

Dec. 10-13, Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway (enter on Chambers, betw. Broadway & Elk St.), 212-227-9856 or www.dnadance.org; times vary, $17