“Kammer” kicked off the night, and the opening made me chuckle: I had forgotten that this ballet began with manspreading. The eight corps gentlemen lunged apart and froze in a chain of weighty poses behind the two principal women, Emilie Gerrity and Mira Nadon (both excellent), who furiously stomped along to the clanging piano of Paul Hindemith’s score. From there, the men’s steps and port de bras flitted back and forth between almost cartoonishly masculine and feminine. The octet showcased dainty, retracted arms, (sometimes with demurely crossed wrists) as well as goonish flexed-footed jumps and squats with stiff, goalpost arms. A corps trio crossing the dark back of the stage scooted along in b-plus, keeping their thighs tightly crossed like mincing geishas.   

The two “Kammer” women also experimented with gender tropes. Turned-in tightrope walking and aggressively plunked, hip-width stances contrasted with prances and pinpointed toe-digs. Their girly, flinging ponytails countered heavy leaps and strings of emboîtés, which had them skimming the stage like pebbles across a pond. Sometimes they strode with flexed wrists and feet like the cast of Balanchine’s “Symphony in Three Movements.” 

Conversely, the principal men, Chun Wai Chan and Ryan Tomash (who were also great), stood close together and made menacing circles of tiny steps, just like the principal women do in “Sym 3.” Between the ponytails, the T-shaped arms, the alternately teeny curlicues and brutalist walks, “Kammer” (1978) shares quite a lot of DNA with “Sym 3” (1972). Gerrity and Chan’s pas de deux of grazing fingertips and intertwined limbs in stationary positions echoed the central pas in “Sym 3” too. The T-arms appear in other abstract ballets, of course, like “The Four Temperaments,” from 1946. What is abstract vs what is manly or womanly? are questions that lurk in the margins of several of Balanchine’s Black & White ballets, but especially in “Kammer”—the most gender fluid of the lot.