What’s terrific about “Dreams About Japan,” which uses mainly Japanese costumes and features of Japanese movement, is its sheer vigor. In six scenes Japanese characters burst onto the stage, full of rages, griefs, determinations; the women are more individual and driven than the men. Those women walk on their heels and dance on point, and each style has its own percussive vitality. In the most memorable episode Ms. Ananiashvili is a rejected maiden who is transformed into a vengeful Fire Snake, hopping on point and winding her flame scarf in changing patterns. She plays the role with marvelous glee, and its force shows us aspects of her we’ve never seen before.

Christopher Wheeldon's new ballet, which opened a quadruple bill on Thursday night, is concerned with the dancer's identity: refracted, private, public. How we see dancers, how they see themselves, is the crux of a work that develops in fascination as it progresses and, in the process, more and more complex ideas about the performer, as filmed being, as distorted image, as memory, as illusory persona for themselves - and for us - crowd our view.

This may suggest over-intellectualised trickery, but Wheeldon and his designer Jean-Marc Puissant, with Michael Nunn and Willam Trevitt as producers of the important video projections, and with Natasha Chivers as an admirable lighting designer, have made tremendous theatrical capital from the interplay between the cast of four splendid dancers (Sarah Lamb, Zenaida Yanowsky, Edward Watson, Eric Underwood) and the multitude of video selves, the duplications and reflections of their presence, their dream-images and alter egos, who throng the set with its screens and doors.

Electric Counterpoint sprang from contemplation of Steve Reich's score of the same name, in which a lone guitarist (James Woodrow here) plays live against 11 recordings of himself.

Wheeldon has twinned this with a selection of Bach's keyboard pieces that unfold as a counterpoint to four dancers - Edward Watson, Sarah Lamb, Zenaida Yanowsky and Eric Underwood - speaking about their lives in dance.

Yet the dancers who led each work on Friday's program weren't quite as consistent. NYCB possesses a wonderfully rich, deep treasury of ballets, but judging from this engagement, its stable of star-quality dancers is somewhat thinner.

Perhaps Tiler Peck, in the company just three years, signals a brighter future. Looking every inch the tender ingenue, she was the love interest in "Carousel," Wheeldon's dazzling shorthand of the Richard Rodgers musical, created for the composer's centennial in 2002. As Julie, the factory worker who falls in love with a carny, Peck gradually blossomed into innocent, openhearted abandon, while her partner, Damian Woetzel, had a reckless, high-strung intensity that hinted at the musical's tragic outcome.

David Bintley clearly gets fired up by jazz: four of his most recent ballets have been set to music by Duke Ellington and others. But, on the evidence of this triple bill, his best choreography is inspired by jazz that comes tied to a concept, rather than music that veers into pure abstraction.

His latest project is Take Five, set to early classics by David Brubeck. In principle, this brand of cool, elegant jazz is prime dance music, with its cross-springing rhythms and lazily curving melody. However, Bintley seems curiously reluctant to tackle the music on its own sophisticated level. Maybe it's the dancers' sweetheart frocks and T-shirts, but there is a sophomoric look to the skippy, flippy choreography with which Bintley reacts to Brubeck. It's especially notable in the self-conscious "vibe" of boogeying, shimmying mannerisms that he lays over the steps.

After dinner, members of the Ballet Theatre of Ohio danced around Tangier's huge fountain in the center of the dining room. Artistic Director Christine Meneer choreographed their dance to music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Dancing were Natalie Alexiou, Meghan Dietz, Eryn Hanes, Sunita Joshi, Jessica Schroeder, Andrea Blankstein, Katie Edmonds, Damien Highfield, Brian Murphy and Bridgitt Staudt.

Between cocktails and dinner, Ballet Arizona dancers performed an excerpt from Rubies, by George Balanchine.