Grisha Coleman says the a cappella quintet Hot Mouth thought up its name over dinner one night about five years ago. She doesn’t explain nor does she give hints about the meaning. But when Hot Mouth shows up, as it did Friday at the Maine Center for the Arts, the name and all of its reverberations converge into the headstrong performance piece “You Say What I Mean But What You Mean Is Not What I Said.” A combination of dance, theater, music and primal noises, the show is at once soothing and disorienting.

Soothing because the vocal dynamics of these five singers — Coleman (who founded the group and conceived the piece), Helga Davis, William Moses and Tom Nelis — seem to come from somewhere deep in the center of the Earth. Disorienting because “You Say” unleashes a longing to live more intensely.

At its most basic, the 80-minute, intermissionless performance is about sound, beginning with total blackness and breathy harmonic grunts. What’s being birthed here is music — spirituals, gospel, field songs, R&B, bluegrass, opera, hip-hop, bebop, barbershop or Coleman plucking crudely on a cello. But the larger picture has to do with life beats and what feels good. Or, really, what feels at all.

The voices flow like the River Jordan and have the power of deliverance as well as amusement. The dance, which takes its cues from the street, has an instinctual rightness to it, too, and any lyrics — even when they are gibberish — have a poetic sensibility. But Hot Mouth, at its best, pulls beauty from simplicity, and that’s where it comes up stunning.

The troupe eases on down into the belly of expression — then shuffles, or cakewalks, waltzes, stands up and crows, folds in or does the cha-cha-cha. It even does a frenzied, techno version of “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

Hot Mouth occasionally suffers from redundancy and a shard of narcissism, and that’s too bad for a group this sophisticated on so many other levels. But as an ensemble, it has a collective voice that plays with counterpoint: delicate and wild, screaming and cooing, sweet and raunchy. “You Say” is angry and amused and ready. The refrain that encapsulates the ethereal and corporeal thrust of Hot Mouth comes early in the show, and then returns at the end: “The moment that I saw it, it’s already gone.” And, when the show ended, the audience took a mere half-second to rise in a well-deserved ovation.