Sarah Michelson's "nowhere" is running daily at the Museum of Modern Art through October 11 — a work the performer Juli Brandano described as "essentially a 25-day dance." The choreographer has filled the Marron atrium with objects, sound, projection and movement that keep resurfacing in new variations, in a career-spanning act of self-quotation.

The dancers carry white duffel bags emblazoned with the words "Dance | Debt" — a pointed joke about what it means to make a life in dance. The French luxury fashion house Maison Margiela is thanked in the project acknowledgments, an irony that sits uneasily beside the bags' implicit poverty.

Michelson's autocannibalism, as one early note from a critic who attended seven performance hours across the dance's first two days put it, is "the endless self-referential tunnel/wormhole/abscess/parade." Audience members sit on stools wrapped in tape branded with the names of two theaters most associated with Michelson's work. Parts of the marbled floor come from her work "4," performed at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Projected dancers and images drift across the atrium walls, including a cartoon Nicole Mannarino doing split jumps and squats, just as she did in the same atrium space 14 years ago for Michelson's "Devotion, Study #3" (2012).

New elements abound. Michelson herself appears pressed against the wall in a lackadaisical dance of joints and limbs while a hidden machine shoots ping-pong balls at her. Performers Lauren Bakst and Juli Brandano wheel two large silver sculptures of women dancers with outstretched legs — Degas's ballerinas respun for the 21st century, at times spun literally to the soundtrack of Dolly Parton's "9 to 5." One sculpture wears a necklace spelling out "cunt." The other bears a tattooed heart reading "RIP Steve Paxton."

The sculptures are totems to dancers, whom Michelson elevates with near-spiritual reverence while demanding a grueling, almost sadomasochistic commitment to difficulty and repetition. The effort is never brandished. Dancer John Hoobyar, engaged in never-ending forward rolls and then never-ending jumps, never lets the audience see his face — never lets his toil become a magisterial portrait of suffering.

Choreographer Alexa West said Michelson is in her "meta period." "nowhere" is not a dance about dance; it is about a lifetime of making dances with dancers, including this stop at MoMA. Michelson talks to the audience frequently, often explaining what is happening, but never why. The work's logic is completely transparent and totally impenetrable at once, pointedly disinterested in how its audience digests it. Lighting designer Adam Silverman, brought along for an afternoon, repeatedly asked: "Is she pulling our leg?"

The work distends time — some actions linger until they lose their bite, others vanish sweet in the knowledge of being missed. It is a temporal system that leaves viewers both relaxed and hooked, anxious about missing something during even a brief trip to the bathroom.

Michelson, a choreographer notorious for privacy and secrecy, is a constant presence in the hyperpublic atrium — a recalcitrant yet loving lodestar. Thousands will see the dance, but only she will really know it. Near the end of one performance she turned and asked a critic in the audience: "so what do you think?"

How "nowhere" embraces or resists change across its 25-day lifespan will be the test of Michelson's cunning: a mammoth dance that perhaps nobody but the choreographer herself can absorb in full.

Sarah Michelson: nowhere continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through October 11. The exhibition was curated by Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph with Sibia Sarangan, and produced by Kate Scherer and Olivia Rousey.