On Saturday night, New York City Ballet presented an eveninglong retrospective dedicated to choreographer Eliot Feld. The program included his new works, “Etoile Polaire” and “Ugha-Bugha,” the first offerings of NYCB’s Diamond Project series. The evening opened with one of Mr. Feld’s earliest ballets, 1969’s “Intermezzo No. 1,” a skillfully crafted example of a genre that was popular at the time: the neo-Romantic ballet performed to Romantic piano music, in this case Brahms.

To some extent, “Intermezzo” and other comparable works of the time descended from Balanchine’s 1960 “Liebeslieder Walzer.” But “Liebeslieder” is set in a ballroom, which then dissolves into a surrealistic subjective space. Mr. Feld’s “Intermezzo,” as well as Jerome Robbins’s “In the Night” (1970), have no real scenery, yet they do have a note of domestic reality bordering on the prosaic.

Mr. Feld gave all six of the three couples sometimes cloying specificity and quirkiness, as when Charles Askegard got giddily carried away by the music and had be pulled into the wings by his partner, Jenifer Ringer. Inevitably in pieces like this, there is a strolling sequence in which community is acknowledged. But one thing that characterizes the “Intermezzo” couples is their near-total self-absorption. This provides a contrast to 19thcentury ballet romanticism, such as “Giselle,” in which the protagonists must defeat societal and supernatural forces – thus addressing issues outside themselves.

In “Intermezzo,” Mr. Feld responds to accented fermatas in the music by slipping in an anecdotal snapshot or tag line. The ballet ends with the dancers not floating or darting out of our view and our reach in true Romantic ballet fashion, but sitting on the floor in Fragonard fete-champetre poses of ardent repose.

Between the time of “Intermezzo” and “The Unanswered Question,” which Feld made for NYCB in 1988 and was revived on Saturday, he became fascinated by stage mechanics and machinery. The crux of “The Unanswered Question” was a trap door downstage center from which dancers emerged and descended. Once onstage, they participated in free-floating, non-goal-orientated ways of passing the time amid a landscape of enervated clowns and acrobats. The costumes and props seemed indebted to Alexander Calder figures or Picasso’s saltimbanques.The evident alienation and the daffy costumes also recalled the oblivious asylum inmates of the film “King of Hearts.”

Tyler Angle was the catalyst for, or the imagination from which these fantasies were spinning. When Venus, in the person of Maria Kowroski, made her ascent, she was borne aloft in Mr. Angle’s arms before being returned upside down into the rabbit hole.

They were an interesting partnership one isn’t likely to see in standard repertory, because Ms. Kowroski is very tall. Here, they were a perfectly odd couple.The piece concluded when Mr. Askegard began to ascend suspended wires, while a rope ladder descended and Mr. Angle climbed up.

The third section of the program consisted of four short but overextended pieces, reflecting Mr. Feld’s recent interest in populist culture. Each of these pieces could have been been snappy New Vaudeville turns, but eventually, they turned into borderline gibberish as they yammered on past their logical conclusion.

In “Backchat,” Craig Hall, Andrew Veyette, and Adrian Danchig-Waring were bikers on the Venice boardwalk, clad in spandex tanks and shorts.They climbed down a tapestry screen and proceeded to rub, pump, and undulate against it, sometimes swinging from pegs in rock-wall climbing fashion. In “Etoile Polaire,” the evening’s first world premiere, Kaitlyn Gilliland wiggled all over the stage to Philip Glass’s minimalism. Then, in “Ugha-Bugha,” Wu-Kang Chen, a member of Mr. Feld’s Ballet Tech company, did the same thing to calypso rhythms, courtesy of John Cage.

Finally, in “A Stair Dance,” a piece dedicated to the late Gregory Hines, five NYCB dancers didn’t actually tap dance, but clattered up, down, and sideways over a short flight of stairs.

It was a little unsettling because it seemed that a dancer could get injured very easily. Already wrung dry by “Backchat,” Mr. Danchig-Waring was put through another marathon of aerobic endurance, an onus he accepted without visible complaint. Indeed all the dancers onstage Saturday night did more than their fair share to bring Mr. Feld’s work to life. They had obviously been rehearsed well, and they treated the material reverently, as though handling a first folio of Shakespeare.

Until June 25 (Lincoln Center, 212-870-5570).