Thursday night’s make-up of the unforeseen cancellation of the 940 dance company’s May 11 performance at the Lawrence Arts Center was worth the wait. Indeed, it’s a shame that the troupe’s exciting “New Works Concert” won’t be seen again.

The company’s verve was exemplary. Dancing as if there were no tomorrow, the 940’s immensely talented young members – Whitney Boomer, Tuesday Faust, Penelope Hearne, Michael Ingle and Kathleen O’Connor – inhabited their wonderfully various roles with uncommon dash and gusto.

At the same time, there was a palpable poignancy in the air given that Thursday’s concert was 940 artistic director Susan Warden’s swan song. Clearly, the dancers – and many in the audience – had come to celebrate Warden’s pivotal role as artistic mentor and, indeed, friend.

One of the evening’s wonders was the hand-in-glove interplay between the inspired choreographic designs and their exuberant execution. The immersion of the company’s five members in both creation and performance was evident everywhere. At the same time, one sensed Warden’s nurturing spirit and hand.

First up was Ingle’s “The Wish and the Well,” a dynamic etude associated with pedestrian movement and sound. Here, the quartet of Ingle, Boomer, Faust and O’Connor enacted an alone-together scenario suggesting an existential angst dealing with the challenges of interpersonal communication in the modern world.

In that sense, one was reminded of the requiems for lost human connections inscribed in celluloid by Michelangelo Antonioni for “Eclipse” and “L’Avventura.” At the same time, Ingle’s gestural vocabulary – with its tics, twitches and sudden turns – evoked elements of the pell-mell, manic desperation of “Run, Lola Run.”

“In Spite Of,” described by choreographer Faust as an exploration of unyielding bureaucracy redeemed by the romanticism of a fool (Ingle), called upon the company’s lyrical lifts, leaps and twirls. Taking advantage of the arts center’s intimate stage, middle curtain and lighting, the multiple and interactive planes of Faust’s subtly evolving design engaged the eye as well as the soul.

“Wandering Brother” set the five dancers on a journey exploring, according to designer O’Connor, themes of choice, isolation and retribution. At the same time, the dancer’s couplings and partings, and rhythmic movements, whether from sitting or standing positions, constituted an experience in themselves.

After intermission, we were treated to an imaginative comic retelling of “Goldilocks.” As set by Ingle to a polka band opus with spirited German lyrics (apparently reprising the story), the piece unreeled with deliciously over-the-top melodramatics reminiscent of the early silent film, with a wide-eyed Hearne fluttering her eyes with Mary Pickford-esque abandon.

The evening concluded, appropriately, with Warden’s “Undercurrents,” an imaginative and also disturbing exploration of relationships based an a recurrent pose of four apparently smiling and happy friends who then decompose into striking patterns in which they bump into one another with fatuous “sorry’s” and “excuse me’s.” It was an unflinching glimpse into the ambiguities of human nature that won’t soon be forgotten.

A standing ovation greeted the 940’s five amazing artists and their guiding spirit, the energizing Susan Warden.