“Probably in a great way but also in a bad way,” Asante said, he decided to give Sandy the stems, or building blocks, of all the many tracks he had created for the show. “So I would walk into rehearsal and discover that a track I gave him is now a few counts longer,” he said, making Sandy laugh.

“I’ve learned so much from Mikey,” Sandy said. Now Sandy can look at a music file on a computer and “see the waves, see when the beat is coming.” Now he’s “not just making a move for the sake of it,” Sandy said; he’s choreographing to the bass, to the snare, to different slivers of the beat. “You tailor the choreography,” he said, and these days he also tailors the music.

Hackett entered this process too. (As did the group’s longtime rehearsal director, Nathaniel SB Impraim-Jones.) “Jade and I were bouncing off each other,” Sandy said. At one point in rehearsal, he had created a hand-gesture combination, while Hackett had made a footwork sequence. Sandy proposed that hands and feet should join, then left the room. When he returned the next day and saw the result, “I was like, ‘Yeah,” he said, nodding his head.

And so it went, round and round. Sandy and Hackett would alter a track, and Asante would say, “No, it doesn’t sound right.” Asante would fix the track to his liking and give it back to the choreographers, who would apply it to their movement and say, “No, it doesn’t feel right.”

Eventually, they would hit upon combinations that satisfied everyone, hard-won discoveries that made all three sigh with the satisfaction of finding something that’s identifiable only when it appears. Then everyone said, “Yeah.”

The creative process involved others, of course, most crucially the show’s nine dancers. One challenge in casting was that “Cycles” requires dancers who can execute intricate choreography with Boy Blue’s signature precision, but also, because the work includes many spots of improvisation, show off individual style and virtuosity in freestyle fashion.