Liz Lerman’s performance Saturday night at Northeastern’s Blackman Theatre featured seniors and children, laughter and heartbreak, stories about animals, Ravel’s Boléro, cross-dressing, and a hula hoop. For 25 years, Lerman has been developing sophisticated techniques for using and showcasing the varied human resources of particular places. By now she’s become one of the country’s most visible producers of community art. Half the program Saturday night incorporated about 60 local people; the other half was drawn from her company’s repertory.

Lerman’s Dance Exchange comprises upward of eight " multi-generational " professional dancer-performers — a once-separate company of seniors has gradually been assimilated into the original troupe of modern dancers. Some of the older members began dancing late; some have had substantial careers as choreographers and dance educators. It’s great to see an expressive dancer like Martha Wittman, who comes from the Humphrey-Limón tradition, in contrast to the clever, more objective younger dancers like Elizabeth Johnson, Kazu Nakamura, Marvin Webb, and Margot Greenlee.

All of the company members facilitate classes, rehearsals, and improvisation sessions in the local venues that they visit. Lerman’s most creative work has arisen from long residencies, where a lot of time can be spent in eliciting physical and verbal material from the community that then becomes the content of the piece.

Here in Boston the rehearsal period was about a week. The participants came mainly from the dance community rather than from the lay population, and instead of creating a site-specific piece together, they learned existing choreography, possibly making small contributions of their own. In Hallelujah: In Praise of Animals and Their People, kids played a game of catch with bug jars; a group of teenagers from the Boston Arts Academy did a bouncy dance number; five kids performed a simple duet with their fathers. Other kids and adults in another city could have played the same roles, so their personal imprint on the piece was limited.

Hallelujah intersperses dances with animal stories told by company members, possibly about their own pets — salamanders, a horse, a boa constrictor. Peter DiMuro, starting out in drag and lip-synching Lerman’s voice, related installments of a narrative about the feline members of Lerman’s family; this culminated in a bizarre cat funeral by phone. Some of the dances had rudimentary movement descriptions of the appropriate beasts, but sometimes the piece looked merely miscellaneous.

The other work with local performers, Still Crossing, seemed to be about the bond between the young and the old person in each of us. The older company dancers, including guest Boston dancer Ann Brown Allen, shadowed the younger ones in a sequence of gestures and walking, falls and lifts. Gradually a slow procession of other persons joined them, and when 40 or so had collected, they stood and faced the audience, slowly gesturing and acknowledging our gaze.

What Lerman is good at is making it all right for us to see people with dignity and difference. At the end of Still Crossing, they all look heroic. But what she demands from these diverse groups has a pretty low common denominator — could some individuals do more? The children’s games in Hallelujah seemed stilted, rehearsed to primness. Even her choreography for the company now uses a limited movement vocabulary, and it all looks overdetermined. Early into the first piece, Excerpts from Dances at a Cocktail Party, I thought the movement looked careful, as if driven by some pictorial end result like a lift or a meaningful glance.

The last work on the program, Anatomies and Epidemics, had a brief prologue by Lerman about being the same age as the State of Israel and identifying with its pain. Then the dance went from sorrow to extremes of laughter. I felt I’d seen all the gestures and supporting phrases before, though they were supposed to resonate from tragedies in the news.

This performance left me more unsatisfied than people dance usually does, and with as many questions about the community-art enterprise as about Lerman’s own development. Performing for an audience can be great for the ego, but a large part of the community process — working together with strangers and neighbors, learning to make something in common — has already taken place by the time it gets to the stage. I missed that other, rarer kind of transcendence that can arise when a community tells the audience its own stories, celebrates its survival, connects us to something beyond the novelty and pleasure of seeing our guys demonstrate their skills.