True, it’s less than educational (though definitely Google-search inducing) to see these early solos with only minimal program notes. On the other hand, encountering the Limón mid-program, you didn’t experience it as a museum piece, and you could feel what is still contemporary about its ethos: the combination of a carefully pared formalism in both music and choreography with an elevation of what we once celebrated as the human spirit. Is it strange or aesthetically haphazard to sense a connection between the Limón and Tanowitz’s “Gustave Le Gray, No. 1,” as beautifully danced by Freemantle, Korkos, Stella Jacobs, and Brooke Corrales? Tanowitz is a cool deconstructor of ballet vocabulary, slicing asymmetrical arms above big battement tendus that make the stunning red costumes by Reid + Harriet cleverly drape and ripple. Yet there’s a community atmosphere and a value of unpretentiousness among the dancers as they circle and listen to the pianist (in this case, Danny Sullivan, a faculty pianist for the SF Ballet School) play Caroline Shaw’s score, and later push the piano across the stage while he continues to play, helpfully offering him a new bench. 

Among the world premieres, the greenest work actually excited me the most. Laura O’Malley, a former LINES Ballet star, has made less than a dozen dances and still squarely qualifies as “emerging.” For “The Tone Inside,” she commissioned new music, a lightly electronic and piano work by Alton Allen, but even bolder was her theatrical scheme. Yamanaka danced furtively in a black wrap before approaching the piano, whereupon the fabric billowed from the instrument, manipulated by dancers underneath who lifted the now-exposed Yamanaka from behind the covering, so that she hovered against darkness. You’ve got to love a simple prop cleverly used, and O’Malley kept working with it, eventually exposing the whole cast of five. Even better was the section when they danced fabric-free, twitching and glitching in positions that looked almost primordial. I did not quite follow the arc of the allegory when Yamanaka returned to the piano again and stared into its open workings—I suppose she was looking at her true tones inside—but O’Malley is a choreographer to keep watching.