(Bloomberg) -- Just before the pandemic, New York City Ballet was finally beginning to recover from a series of unfortunate events. In 2018, Peter Martins, the company’s longtime director, resigned amid allegations of abuse and misconduct (which he denies), followed closely by a texting scandal that led to the firing, then rehiring, of two star dancers. 

By the start of 2020, however, a new creative team was in place, led by artistic director Jonathan Stafford and associate artistic director Wendy Whelan, both beloved company alumni, as well as Justin Peck, resident choreographer and artistic advisor. That spring, Jamar Roberts, a veteran dancer of the Alvin Ailey company and its newly appointed resident choreographer, was set to debut his first work for City Ballet. The company’s future looked promising. And then, you know: Covid-19.

Nearly two years later, Roberts’s work has finally arrived at Lincoln Center as part of a program called “Visionary Voices” that also includes recent dances by Pam Tanowitz and Kyle Abraham. It debuted earlier this month and will return for three additional performances Feb. 22-24. In one evening, it offers a snapshot of an encouraging new direction for City Ballet, one that seems to understand that its artistic relevance requires an expansion of who’s invited to make ballets.

Each of the choreographers on this triple bill hails from the contemporary dance world. Over the past decade, Tanowitz has been praised for her intelligent, unexpected deconstruction of the classical vocabulary. Abraham, a MacArthur fellow, has been celebrated for his blending of dance styles as he explores Black identity and kinship to sumptuous and substantive effect. Roberts has emerged as a choreographer more recently, but was known to audiences for nearly 20 years as one of Ailey’s most captivating performers. 

During this time, City Ballet did what it has always done: dutifully commission new ballets, primarily from former ballet dancers who are primarily white men. It’s refreshing that these three “visionary voices” are none of the above. While this departure from the curatorial status quo is novel and overdue, what is most thrilling is that the program is excellent. Each dance is a satisfying—sometimes surprising—expression of the dance maker.

Roberts’s new work is called Emanon—in Two Movements, taking its title from jazz legend Wayne Shorter’s 2018 album, sections of which provide the agile, layered score. The dance starts like a race and doesn’t let up. The footwork is fast and jittery. The arms counter with wheeling arches one moment, as if chasing the music, and angular shapes the next. The partnering has hints of a spirited mischief, as when one dancer yanks another offstage with an impish grin. At other times the gliding and swirling across the stage seem to nod to Olympic ice dancing, which is not meant as derision; one of Roberts’s strengths, as a dancer and now choreographer, is how he elegantly gobbles space like a skater. That’s even the case in the work’s feisty, subtly searching central solo, as performed with charismatic bite by the corps de ballet dancer Jonathan Fahoury.

In the Ailey tradition, Roberts’s prior work contained a grounded grace that serves story and theme. Over the past two years, he’s made powerful, intimate dances for stage and screen, responding to pandemic isolation, racism in America, and Black resilience. Emanon, in contrast, feels more interested in how the music moves the body than what the body means while moving. Here, drawing from Shorter’s orchestral effervescence and the possibilities of pointe shoes, Roberts finds new playfulness. In the context of his earlier work, this levity and joy, along with a light palette featuring costumes in shades of purple, can feel like its own statement—an act of self-care.

If Roberts is experimenting here with shapes and sounds rather than story, Tanowitz moves in the opposite direction. She has made her mark on dance using the rigor, strength, and geometric lines of ballet to more abstract, less emotional ends. Her work can feel almost scholarly in its dissection of movement and game-like in the way dancers relate to each other, but her 2019 work on this program, Bartók Ballet, feels intriguingly tribal in its evocation of folk dance steps and inward-facing circles. (Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5, played live on stage by the Flux Quartet, takes inspiration from Bulgarian folk music).

There’s a hint of character here—newly promoted principal Indiana Woodward’s regal confidence contrasts with Daniel Applebaum’s hunched insecurity—and a nod to narrative, even if it appears to fall into the easy dance trope of the individual vs. the group. Presumably there’s meaning, too, in the fact that the dancers all begin in handsome copper costumes with billowing sleeves by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung until most (but not all) end up in gold leotards. Something has shifted in the politics of this tribe, but Tanowitz keeps the drama submerged and opaque, thus keeping the audience at a distance.

Meanwhile, the loud black-and-white, feather-heavy costumes in Kyle Abraham’s piece The Runaway, which concludes the program, are by the British designer Giles Deacon, and they’re as flamboyant as Abraham’s soundtrack from Jay-Z, Kanye West, and others. The reason for such haute rags is that the work premiered in 2018 as part of City Ballet’s annual Fashion Gala, which pairs choreographers with top-shelf fashion designers. Often the collaboration results in fun, if forgettable, dances. The Runaway is one of the few successes of that project because the fashion serves Abraham’s fantasy rather than overwhelming it.

Other reasons The Runaway has become a hit and earned its place as a staple of the company’s repertory have to do with Abraham’s bold concept, his choreographic variety and restraint (sometimes he rides the hip-hop rhythms; sometimes he uses them to contrast mood and texture instead), and his inspired showcase of the principal dancer Taylor Stanley, who flows from vulnerability to virtuosity with his customary understated poise (as well as less common but very welcome bursts of sass). 

Abraham thrillingly breaks so many of ballet’s codes in this work that it’s not hard to see why he would be called a “visionary voice.” But the program’s title also made me think about how unlikely this triptych of dances would have seemed just a few years ago. Perhaps “visionary” can also refer to a legacy company at last awakening its obligation to think bigger.

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