By Susan Reiter

“For me, the premiere is only the beginning of the second phase of the work. I’m reworking a piece all the time; it’s constantly changing,” choreographer Emanuel Gat said during an interview two years ago. Sitting outside a community center outside Tel Aviv where he had rented space to prepare K626—the work Emanuel Gat Dance is bringing to the Joyce Theater next week—he had to compete with the lively sounds of kids playing nearby and the enthusiastic chirping of what sounded like hundreds of birds.

At the time, he was discussing the two works he was looking forward to introducing to New York that summer, when Lincoln Center Festival presented a double bill that went on to win a Bessie Award. One of them, Winter Voyage, a somber, intriguing duet in which he himself performed, had first taken shape as a work for five dancers before evolving into a quartet and then taking its final form.

K626, which is set to Mozart’s Requiem and was then just taking its initial shape, had an all-female cast of 10, and was seen in that version at the American Dance Festival in July 2006. But true to his word, Gat delved further into the work, and at the Joyce it will be danced by three men and five women. What has not changed is his decision to set the piece to a 1984 Christopher Hogwood recording of the “Requiem” that casts aside the additions and alterations made by others after Mozart died leaving this magnum opus incomplete. “There are a lot of versions, some completed by the composer’s students. Hogwood went back to Mozart’s original score,” Gat explained.

Working with music of this stature, he realized, “you are dealing with the context, and not with the music itself. There’s so much associated with it; everyone knows it, has thought about it.” [Not to mention the way Amadeus turned its composition into heavily foreboding drama.] Unfazed, he not only used this music, but also “opened intervals of silence” in between the sections.

Gat can approach music of this stature (as he did with the “Rite of Spring,” to which he created an intimate, salsa-flavored dance for five that completed the program he brought to Lincoln Center) with assurance because he before turning to dance, he was initially studying to become a conductor. While studying at happened to take a contemporary dance workshop, and immediately changed his plans. “It was an easy decision for me, very natural. I’ve been so comfortable in dance,” he said.

In keeping with the change and evolution he anticipates and cherishes in his work, a lot has changed for Gat and his company as well since 2006. A planned multi-studio headquarters near Tel Aviv for the troupe’s artistic and administrative activities fell through for lack of funding, and last fall he and four dancers relocated to France. Now based at La Maison de la Danse in Istres, near Marseilles, they are hosted by Provence Ouest for a three-year residency.

March 25-30. Joyce Theater 175 8th Ave. (betw. 18th & 19th Sts.), 212-242-0800; Tues.-Wed. 7:30; Thurs.-Fri. 8; Sat. 2 & 8; Sun. 2 & 7:30, $25-$34.