“Is that it?” So I was asked by one of two impossibly chic French women seated to my right on Saturday, at the abrupt end of Set and Reset. I replied that, after a mere 24 minutes, the show was indeed over, whereupon her incredulity turned to delight. “Time for dinner, then!” she exclaimed.

If this standalone revival by Rambert of Trisha Brown’s much-loved 1983 work – part of this month’s London-wide Dance Reflections season – makes for an unusually short evening out, it is also (as les deux Françaises agreed) an unusually sweet one. Brown (1936-2017) was a remarkable talent. A leading light of New York’s early-Sixties Judson Dance Theater, she was an insatiable tree-climber in her youth in Washington state, and, as a choreographer, was to have a lifelong fascination with light, space, gravity, geometry and technology.

In one early work, two men torturously put on and then take off a series of oufits woven into a large, flat, rope grid – a normally vertical exercise made horizontal. Similarly, her Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (re-staged in 2006, also at Tate Modern) sees a dancer do exactly that.

When I was lucky enough to meet her at the Montpellier Dance Festival in 2007, I couldn’t resist asking her if this was all connected; if, behind so much of her avant-gardery, she had been trying, above all, to convey a sense of the great outdoors, attempting even to climb back up into the tree-tops of her childhood.

“I have a desire to fly,” she replied, “I know that. I had a recurring dream in which I’d lie on my stomach in the air and I’d make this pumping action, like a jellyfish, and then I’d get up to the ceiling and my back would be hitting the ceiling. I’d say, ‘God, I’m going to do this with my troupe, Judson – it would be so cool.’ I was asleep, of course.”

Certainly, Set and Reset (which was performed at Tate Modern five years ago, by her own troupe) both toys with gravity and has an invigorating, enigmatic tang of the outdoors, even when performed, as here, in the fractured, subterranean brutalist hexagon that is the Tate Modern Tanks. A remarkably high-end collaboration – sets are by proto-Pop Art supremo Robert Rauschenberg, score by pioneering experimentalist Laurie Anderson, lighting by the fêted Beverly Emmons – it plays out beneath three three-dimensional, tent-like structures (one cube flanked by two tetrahedrons) apparently floating in space. On to these, well before the action starts, and until its end, are projected a random, all-human-life-is-here assortment of black-and-white newsreel footage of everything from surfing to bi-planes to boxing.

The show proper begins with a repeated “Long time no see” bursting from the speakers (Anderson’s score, while eccentric and insistent, is in fact thereafter not as bonkers as you might expect from her), and a trio of dancers breezily carrying a single performer horizontally above their heads as she “walks” with them. Thereafter, breezy buoyancy is everywhere, in Rauschenberg’s tastefully floaty costumes as much as in the generous, loose-shouldered, almost lolloping jog of Brown’s steps, which the octet of Rambert dancers deliver beautifully, even sexily.

With the choreography feeling at once pin-sharp and borderline improvised, there is, then, an irresistibly human quality to all this, particularly as the dancers constantly acknowledge each other with warm, familiar smiles. In fact, such is the piece’s combination of conviviality and mystery that watching it is a little like stumbling across some infinitely benign rite playing out in a remote, moonlit forest glade. Meanwhile, the fact that you access all this through the darkening Bankside twilight and then via an eerily empty Turbine Hall, with roughly half of the Tanks’ 110-strong audience seated on cushions, only adds to the evening’’s strangely and satisfying fringey, almost culty flavour.

Yes, it’s all over in a flash. But it’s an experience that I suspect will prove pretty close to unforgettable –  and how fine, and how rare, to be left wanting more.

More performances by Rambert March 13 and 14; Rambert and Candoco Dance Companies give the “performance lecture” “Set and Reset/Unset” on March 23. All details: tate.org.uk