The opening octet “ByChance,” a commission from the prolific Jennifer Archibald, began the evening in a somber mood—no grooving house music here, as in her recent crowd-pleasing hits for BalletX and the Kennedy Center’s Pathways to Performance project, but a stitched-together soundscore of worried minimalist strings and dark synthesizer sounds from Ezio Bosso and Roger Goula, and a visual scheme of dark sleek dancewear (by Susan Roemer), and vectors of light cutting through fog. Fast, inventive partnering with suddenly staccato solo moments emphasized the difficulty of maintaining relationships. Hands hung in the air like claws, or exploded over a partner’s face. Three unison men had a passage of floorwork that showed Archibald at her most naturally propulsive. 

I caught a pervasive sense of ghostly loss as eerie voices entered Goula’s score, but could not make out a thread of thought related to the ballet’s purported subject of chance encounters. This did not matter in the final pas de deux between Terez Dean Orr and Ricardo Dyer, her legs swimming through the air, his partnering so slow and soft. The music was from Pēteris Vasks’s heartbreaking “Plainscapes” for piano and strings. The levitating duet would make a strong ballet excerpted on its own; I think I would prefer it that way.

Amy Seiwert knows and loves the company’s core supporters and is taking care to carry them along through this evolution. I would never have thought to compare Matthew Neenan’s “The Last Glass,” from 2010, to Smuin’s ballets, but that’s what Seiwert did in her pre-curtain speech. In the works’ character sketches and implied relationship narratives, it’s possible the choreographers could occupy some small shared space in a Venn diagram. But the differences are notable: Smuin would never have worked with music as ironically hip as these songs by Beirut, aptly enough described as a “wild street-parade sound of American indie-rock” in the program. Nor would he have made the majority of the movement so grounded and lightly absurdist (think Mats Ek with the spinal convulsions toned down), and the relationships so nuanced.