In Misuse liable to prosecution, which features live and recorded music by Zeena Parkins, Jasperse juxtaposes the Harvey’s particular aesthetics with the impoverished life of an artist: Everything onstage has been found, borrowed or stolen. The title is taken from words printed on milk crates (one of the many set elements transformed from junk into art), which the choreographer views as being particularly symbolic. “There’s a tradition of the milk crate being reinvented by college students in dorm rooms and by homeless people,” he says. “They’ve even been made into basketball hoops.”

Jasperse also integrates the Harvey’s history of expensive spectacles. “I decided to see what it would be like to make a piece where I am dealing with visual objects and design in a way I have in the past, but not spend any money,” he says. “Frankly, I think a lot of my aesthetic sensibility has very much been about cleanliness or some kind of purity; this was a conscious decision to subvert that and to see what would happen when I placed myself in this other territory that is somehow less comfortable for me.”

The process, he says, hasn’t been entirely pleasurable. While Jasperse’s dancers (Michelle Boulé, Levi Gonzalez, Eleanor Hullihan and Kayvon Pourazar) have contributed a bit to the scavenging, much of the process has fallen to the choreographer. “It’s 11pm on recycling night, and I’m ripping open garbage bags trying to find coat hangers—it’s not a particularly elegant moment,” he says. “I have to be honest: There have been many evenings of me standing there, thinking, What the hell? Am I really going off the deep end? The reality of living in the building that I do, surrounded by aging artists of various levels of eccentricity.…” Jasperse, who resides in the Westbeth complex, pauses for dramatic effect, then laughs. “You do sometimes wonder what the future holds.”

While Misuse takes on bigger implications about how we view trash, Jasperse also touches upon his own status as a midcareer artist, picking up the theme of irrelevance he explored in his last work, Becky, Jodi and John, which was performed at Dance Theater Workshop. “There was a moment in the process where I did realize that as an aging experimental artist, I’m becoming that piece of trash,” he explains. “And it’s not that I feel I’m worthless, but my relationship to society is shifting. I’m not so old, but I do begin to think, What am I going to do? This construct is set up so that you can’t really retire; it’s not necessarily about wanting to make an enormous amount of money. But it’s also about not wanting to end your life as a destitute person in a tiny, dark room.”

In a sense, the new work is a celebration of those who toil in New York’s dance and performance community and, against the odds, keep going. But how does the conceptual framework translate into an actual dance? “I feel like that has been a real struggle,” Jasperse admits. “One of the things [lighting designer] Joe Levasseur asked was, ‘So is there going to be an idea for this project beyond the set?’ I thought, Okay, well that’s kind of sassy, but I think one of the struggles has been to try to figure that out. I have an incredibly ambivalent relationship to dance. I both really love it and find it difficult, and I don’t think that has been ever more true than in this piece: The representation of that ambivalence is really there.”

John Jasperse Company is at BAM’s Harvey Theater through Sat 3.