“The Turntable” quite literally revolves around a spinning disc, upon which Tessa Barbour frequently stands, dressed in a short white pleated skirt. The ensemble swirls about, wearing a variety of street clothes in a grey palette. (The “costume concept” is attributed to Delgado, and no designer is credited.) You keep thinking some kind of escalating storyline will emerge, but although various groups of men do pull Barbour off the turntable and twist her into throes of physical ecstasy, the emotional movement of the piece seems to whirl in circles just like that record player.

The music, ranging from re-mixed Kronos Quartet to a bolero by Trio Los Panchos leader Alfred Gil, is inter-stitched with the sound of a scratchy record, and is surprisingly sluggish and sad for the first third. The movement, too, is less lively than one might expect. Delgado is the co-founder of Malpaso Dance Company, known for its dancers’ virtuosic fluidity, but in this work (or on Smuin’s dancers?) the movement language feels muted. There’s a challenge here, too, in how Delgado has oriented all the action to the center (he has said in an interview that this work would best be viewed in the round), yet Smuin has premiered “The Turntable” on a small proscenium stage with poor sightlines. The gain for the company, and a not inconsiderable one, was that the dancers did seem to be intensely present to one another, and to be relishing dancing authentic interactions rather than mugging for the audience.

As the middle offering of this repertory slate, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Requiem for a Rose” made a repeat appearance, and indeed felt like a retread. The ballet is all concept and costumes—a woman (Barbour again) flails about to the sound of a heartbeat with a rose in her mouth, representing romantic passion, until a large ensemble, in unisex flowing red skirts and bare tops (well, the women wear nude leotards) partner each other to the adagio of Schubert’s String Quintet in C, representing cooler, mature love. This is, of course, gorgeous, infinitely rich music—one can easily imagine Mark Morris making a masterpiece of it—but in Ochoa’s hands, it’s little more than sonic wallpaper. Terez Dean Orr had the best lines and control in the classical partnering.

Rex Wheeler’s “Take Five,” to Dave Brubeck’s music, opened the program with the strongest Smuin-esque flavor, the dancers seeming to have practiced their winks and smirks to coordinate on the beat with the hip-bumps and jetés. It starts promisingly with a clip from a Brubeck interview about the jazz great’s rhythmic influences, and group choreography that lets the men show their extensions (John Speed Orr, Yuri Rogers, and Joao Sampaio were the standouts.) But then comes that music-as-wallpaper problem again. A duet to the standard “Memories of You” between the wonderfully sensuous Cassidy Isaacson and the gallant Brandon Alexander has little relationship to either the melody or the (unsung) lyrics, and trades in trite air-kisses just when the larger work could use a more serious climactic pas de deux (something like “I Can Dream, Can’t I” in Paul Taylor’s “Company B.”) When the ensemble returns, an already well-trod joke of having the women play their hands against a man like he’s a piano returns, and doesn’t yield more laughs on the repeat.

The Cowell was not a flattering theater for this proscenium-presentational razzle-dazzle. No doubt the company was forced there because most San Francisco venues are too large for covid-recovery sized audiences. So why not program to the circumstances? What would happen if Smuin commissioned a more intimate dance to live music, perhaps with an onstage piano/strings duo, or quartet? What might change if the hard-working Smuin dancers got to be in the moment with the music, rather than pushing “play” on the soundtrack and their smiles?