“Apollo” presents a male god (ahem, a Balanchine stand-in?) coming into his full powers by judging among supplicating women. I don’t think Krutzkamp meant to critique this paradigm by placing Andrea Schermoly’s premiere “Salve” next, but what a thought-provoking contrast occurred.

Three couples take the stage in succession to Daniel Taylor’s hushed and disquieting choral work “The Lamb.” In each duet, the stylish partnering grows brutish, though Schermoly is too sophisticated to outright mime violence. The shoving, the lording over a dependent partner, this all seems to emerge from recognizable contemporary partnering tropes, which makes the effect all the more chilling. When Wen Na Robertson lies abandoned on the floor, Kaori Higashiyama and Enrico Hipolito take their place standing atop her, embroiled in their own grapplings of abused and abuser. But as the music shifts to Arvo Pärt’s “Salve Regina” and the three couples share the stage, the women find tiny moments of freedom and connect, just a touch of hands here, a tiny gesture of solace there. In a loud burst of voices the abuse reaches its crescendo, Hipolito pushing Robertson to the ground and literally stepping all over her, until she runs to the other women.

The miracle here was in how Schermoly’s continually inventive partnering rode the outer edge of discomfort but never descended to melodrama. A program note quotes Maya Angelou: “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.” Just knowing that a woman choreographed this had me alert to subversion without need to consult the program. A man might choreograph partnering just a hair’s breadth less violent without recognizing an implicit misogyny. “Salve Regina” felt like a calling out of this blindness as much as a story of female solidarity.