NEW YORK, NY.- The Fall for Dance Festival got its start at New York City Center 20 years ago with a $10 ticket price and a worthy aim: to introduce the art form to new audiences. Admission is now $30, but the goal of spreading the gospel of dance remains the same.

On Wednesday, Wendy Whelan, associate artistic director of New York City Ballet, unveiled the 21st edition with an opening night speech pointing out that each of the evening’s choreographers — Alexei Ratmansky, Tiler Peck and Andrea Miller — has ties to City Ballet. Whelan is a lovely, warm speaker, but having her open the program seemed a little out of left field. While she has performed at City Center, she doesn’t actually work there.

Fall for Dance, frustratingly, is as hit or miss as ever, but on opening night, something else was in short supply: range. For a festival prized for its diversity of styles, such familiar voices — even though Miller is a contemporary choreographer as opposed to ballet — didn’t amount to much of a stretch.

At least the program, the first of five, began on an evocative note with Ratmansky’s “Wartime Elegy,” a ballet that is somber and sweet in equal measure. Performed by the National Ballet of Ukraine, a company that has persisted despite the war, the work spotlights a community that seems to know what it’s like to live through loss and desolation — even to dance through it.

But the dance, created for the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 2022, seems like a rough sketch of “Solitude,” a more harrowing, masterful work by Ratmansky that delves more deeply into the horror of war and was unveiled last winter at City Ballet, where the choreographer is artist-in-residence. “Wartime Elegy,” performed by the Ukrainian company with some shaky moments, has the bones of “Solitude” — and even bones by Ratmansky are worth watching.

Set to music for piano and strings by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov along with recordings of folk music, “Wartime Elegy” begins in semidarkness. The dancers’ limbs glow, cutting through the moody landscape. Soon bodies spring into action, sometimes like lush brushstrokes, at other times stuttering. What is unsaid, unseen? For all of their robust physicality, this is a community bonded and torn by buried emotions.

The mood flips when three men — having traded their short black unitards for folk costumes by Moritz Junge — bound onto the stage. Their sprightly energy is infectious. But as they push themselves to the limit, their heightened joy lands in a kind of desperate exhaustion. After they exit, the women take over, filling the stage with airy jumps and frantic spins that lean toward manic, too. Try as they might, they can’t dance the anguish out.

In the final section, the landscape dims again, and the group descends to the floor in a pose that has them stretching and reaching a single arm. One man rises and pulls a woman to her feet; she raises her back leg in an arabesque, and even as he takes his place on the floor, she remains in position as the curtain falls: stoic, focused, unwavering. She’s still standing.

The second offering featured Aran Bell, the American Ballet Theater principal, in the New York premiere of “Piano Songs,” choreographed by Peck, a City Ballet principal celebrated for her musicality. A joint commission by Fall for Dance and the Vail Dance Festival, the solo frees Bell from the kind of dramatic roles for which he’s normally known: a prince here, a count there; Romeo.

Peck places Bell in unfamiliar territory: dancing to three selections by Meredith Monk, “Ellis Island,” “Paris” and “Folkdance.” (Monk came out for a charming, surprise bow.) It starts off slowly — ponderously so — as Bell takes dreamy steps, pausing every so often to extend an imploring arm into the distance. His gaze follows.

As the dancing picks up — Peck sprinkles the choreography with turns and tours in an admirably understated way — Bell starts to play more with the music, even interacting with the two pianists (Derek Wang and Joel Wenhardt) and their pianos. He loosens up, but his way of dancing — frontal, princely, mannered — isn’t expansive enough to fill out the notes, and I couldn’t stop thinking about who I would rather be watching in this ballet: Tiler Peck.

The program ended with Miller’s “Sama,” a 2019 commission in collaboration with Rambert 2 and the Juilliard School. The work was full of the choreographer’s tropes, mainly a dance vocabulary influenced by Gaga, the movement language invented by Ohad Naharin. With Miller’s hyper-physical chewiness and frequent unison, dancers twisted and churned, as if they wanted to break out of their skin.

Performed by Miller’s company, Gallim, the dance was meant to explore the desensitization of the body in the digital age. There were stilt walkers, virtuosic backbends and frenetic windmill arms — all the more to get the crowd going. It’s disappointing when the weakest dance on a program receives the loudest screams of approval, but that’s one of the more reliable aspects of a Fall for Dance show. On Wednesday, “Sama,” with its mass of throbbing bodies and pulsating music, did the honors. That’s the way dance goes at this festival: out with a bang.

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2024 Fall for Dance Festival

Through Sept. 29 at New York City Center; nycitycenter.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.