DanceBrazil, which performed at Central Park SummerStage on Friday evening, has been trained to deliver capoeira: the Afro-Brazilian genre, originally developed by slaves, in which dance meets martial arts. Since this meant that 10 good-looking and exceptionally fit men in white trousers, their smooth chests usually bare, delivered a display of agility and acrobatics to largely percussive Afro-Brazilian music, it is scarcely surprising that there were ecstatic screams and eager applause from the thronged audience. (The company also included one woman, but although she earned applause, she wasn’t central to the experience.)

What was often in doubt, though, was whether all of this was interesting as dance. I have known it combined with modern dance, and Friday’s performance demonstrated some of the controlled falls and off-center tiltings that can be spectacular in the techniques of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. But much of Friday’s display, choreographed by DanceBrazil’s founding artistic director, Jelon Vieira, looked not like real dancing so much as a classroom-type demonstration of bravura technique, building gradually over an hour from slow to fast, basic to brilliant.

No question that it was often exciting as such. In capoeira dancers are trained to let the torso swing low and the working leg thrust high. The knee of the supporting leg is frequently kept bent — when both feet are on the ground, the dancer often squats with legs wide apart — and that leg gives tremendous support to the rest of the body, as both anchor and launchpad. Meanwhile the spine acquires an extraordinary combination of strength and suppleness. Dancers learn how to interact at speed — the mood is often similar to that of judo or karate — partnering or avoiding one another with extreme dexterity. Legs are thrown like fists or spears.

Handstands are a commonplace. On Friday some men, standing on their hands, tilted their legs far to one side and then the other: breathtaking. In the most spectacular passages the dancers spun through the air in complex somersaults and butterfly jumps.

Only sometimes did this seem to make any serious connection with the music, most of which simply set tempo and whipped up excitement and atmosphere. And only sometimes did all this technique acquire any rhythmic interest of its own. The program was called “Ritmos,” yet how often were rhythms its real point?

There were, however, several passages in which connective phrasing transformed this aerobic movement into coherent, pleasurable dance. For all their strength and agility these capoeira performers can easily show relaxation within motion; and then they show sensuousness, charm, and fun — even sweetness.

The wittiest moment occurred when four men walked upside down. That is, while walking on their hands, they also swung their legs exactly as if they were pedestrians. And the most unexpectedly adorable moment — near the end, after many astonishing and amazing jumps — came when six men hitched up their trouser legs, just like women pulling up their petticoats, to do fast, little footwork across the stage. Whoever expected these hunky athletes to do that? It felt as if suddenly they needed to let rhythm rule; nothing all evening was quite so innocent or enchanting.

Preceding this troupe was a half-hour show by Max Pollak and RumbaTap. Hypothetically it might be nice to see what RumbaTap — featuring four women and one other man — could do without Mr. Pollak, the artistic director, but we weren’t given much chance to find out. Mr. Pollak is a stocky, tense, lightly bearded man who customarily displays two rows of teeth even when not smiling; he makes the spoken introductions, he has done all the choreography, and he is either the star soloist or the leader of the ensemble.

He tends to lean forward from the pelvis while dancing, and he gives the impression that his main purpose is to keep his bottom out of the action. He does more footwork than anyone else, and yet his legs move with less freedom than those of his colleagues: tap shuffles and foot-swinging steps start to have a blitheness with his colleagues that they lack with him. Accompanying him, the Paul Carlon Octet and the RumbaTap Musicians were often more remarkable than the dancing. The whole evening, however, exemplified the vice of overamplification, as if to say the louder, the better.

-by Alastair Macauly