The New York City Ballet has entered a season that celebrates Jerome Robbins, and last week, the company performed three iconic and totally dissimilar works by the choreographer: “Fancy Free,” “Dybbuk,” and “Watermill.” Each proved its worthiness to be seen in perpetuity, even if “Watermill” is guilty of an ersatz quality missing in the other two works.

Rarely has a choreographer debuted as confidently as Robbins did with “Fancy Free” in 1944. This larky vignette of three sailors painting the town red is brilliant, and one doesn’t imagine any way in which it could be improved. The news peg in Thursday night’s performance was a guest appearance by American Ballet Theatre’s Ethan Stiefel, who left NYCB a decade ago. Mr. Stiefel likes to turn a conceptual handle as far as it will go, and he certainly did here. He portrayed his shore-leave pleasure-seeker completely differently than Tyler Angle had characterized the same young man earlier this year at NYCB. If Mr. Angle was a sometimes winsome innocent, Mr. Stiefel dances as a comic dupe, a naif nearly always dealt the thin edge of the wedge by his two mates. It was fun to watch him go for it. Stepping out with this character were two pals: Damian Woetzel, who presented a self-styled man of the world, and Joaquin De Luz, a rowdy bantam. The girls they pursued were Amanda Hankes, Tiler Peck, and Briana Shepherd, and all made palpable the steamy pavements of a balmy Manhattan evening.

“Dybbuk” came 30 years after “Fancy Free” and marked the final collaboration between Robbins and Leonard Bernstein. The composer here supplied Robbins the clamor and rumbles of his full-blown symphonic manner rather than the glamour of big-band melody, which is part of the “Fancy Free” package. And Robbins here gladly and boldly ventures into esoterica; indeed, his subject is the arcane mysteries of the Kabbalah, which prove the undoing of his hero, prompting his death and subsequent possession of the bride denied him on earth. Whereas “Fancy Free” was designed to be a hit, “Dybbuk” lets the chips fall where they may, embracing the discursive ambiguities of ballet. We see here once more how ballet is uniquely qualified to evoke traffic between this world and the next. On Thursday, Benjamin Millepied and Janie Taylor (making her debut in the ballet), performed with an intensity that made credible this couple’s readiness to swallow all in their path like a tractor beam.

By 1972, when Robbins unveiled “Watermill,” he had disbanded the American Theatre Lab that he’d founded in the 1960s, a fecund era of convention-torching theatrical communes. Robbins hoped in ATL to foment new ideas away from the dictates of commercial theater, but it went downhill after he canceled a planned production of a Brecht play for which funding and a star had been located. In retrospect that seems like a signal failure of nerve on his part, and “Watermill” can be seen as an act of atonement as well as salvage and recoupment. Here he melds the theatrical appurtenances of Eastern drama, and above all its embrace of stasis, to contemporary ideas in art and performance, among them the tableaux vivant of Robert Wilson and Pop art’s monumental amplification of the quotidian and banal. But “Watermill” seems experimental primarily by virtue of its being enacted on a Western opera house stage.

The moon waxes and wanes, the seasons — or at least the weather patterns — shift, as a mature man divests himself of worldy trappings, seeking answers to the riddles of existence and revisiting chapters in his own experience. Performed by musicians sitting on the side apron of the stage, the music by Teiji Ito chirrups and chimes. Together with the stage action it accompanies, the score is sometimes hypnotic and sometimes soporific. “Watermill” does wind up seeming glib: Costumed by Patricia Zipprodt, a young matron arrives, dressed as if she’d just paid a visit to Halston’s. The woman, the mature man, and one of his younger selves all seem to be revolving through an ultimately pointless dalliance.

On Friday night, Nikolaj Hübbe took full advantage of the opportunities given him to recline, stand, and walk, so that the richly reflective inner life is made palpable at all times. Mr. Hübbe apportioned to his minimally kinetic movements just the right weight, so that every step he took did seem like a journey rather than simply locomotion.

“Watermill” is more for the Robbins completist than anyone else. And yet it serves an important purpose for NYCB’s audiences as well as dancers. For while the company is devoted above all to Balanchine’s proposition that speed makes for life, wherein more steps are nearly always better than fewer, “Watermill” posits an entirely different set of conventions.