For the 63-year-old Eliot Feld, it’s been a high-profile spring. Last month, City Ballet feted him with an all-Feld repertory program. Now, this month, Mr. Feld’s latest pick-up company is mounting a two-week season at the Joyce under the moniker “Mandance.”

There were some good things in the first “Mandance” season, in November 2004. Mr. Feld’s conception of “Mandance” was airtight: Essentially, these pieces were tailor made for charismatic male dancers with washboard abs. There was a quirky, wellmade solo for Mikhail Baryshnikov called “Mr. XYZ” and a dark-lit solo for the underrated City Ballet dancer Sean Suozzi that made him look like a Caravaggio painting come to life.

This year’s “Mandance” has no stars borrowed from other companies, just young talent from Mr. Feld’s company and Juilliard. And at Wednesday night’s gala performance, it was a woman, Ha-Chi Yu,who stole the show.

Ms. Yu danced the premiere of “Pursuing Odette,” a solo set to the much-played Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The first sight of Ms. Yu, bathed in stage moonlight, was arresting. She wore a black jumper over a white jump suit whose longer leg stretched over her right foot (clad in a toe shoe). Her other foot was bare.

The image called to mind a kind of Odette/Odile hybrid, and soon Ms. Yu began to stretch and turn her arms like wings. Suddenly there it was: the collapsed wrist of “The Dying Swan.” But there was also much that was new and unexpected.

In one breathtaking sequence, the flexible Ms. Yu – positioned on the floor – snaked one long arm around her foot, cupping her ankle with her elbow, never using her outstretched, pressed-back fingers. In another, she leaned back in a gorgeous backbend, balancing on her bare foot and extending that strange white toe.

Ms. Yu danced with abandon, her face full of longing. By the end of the piece, when she released the top of her jumper, revealing her white bra and letting her skirt hang awkwardly from her hips, she exuded a kind of alert calm. As she sank to the ground and reached an arm around her ankle and pressed her toe to her forehead (with no help from her fingers), she had the riveting,

sad quality of a child contortionist.

Wednesday’s other premiere, “Op. Boing,” indulged Mr. Feld’s taste for gimmicks. This time it was a trampoline, set up in various configurations and rearranged (without a curtain drop) between the sections of the dance by a team of slow-moving stagehands. Apparently, the stagehands were part of the show, as Mr. Feld eliminated the curtain in favor of a thin covering of silver rods with flimsy white partitions.

Eventually five male dancers took their turns bouncing off the trampoline – some bouncing off its side as it stood on one end, one using it conventionally. Meanwhile the percussion group “SO Percussion” tapped out monotonous rhythms on a variety of instruments. The diverse movement phrases might suggest a graceful diver, a circus acrobat, a martial artist, a kid on the monkey bars, a man slipping on a banana peel, a gymnast, or SpiderMan. Whatever the case, they proceeded without development, almost as if arranged by chance.

There was something stingy about rolling out a trampoline, dressing dancers in fluorescent sneakers and cool black duds, then cutting them off every time they started having fun. In contrast, Mr. Feld’s 2004 “A Stair Dance,” with its punning title and five sets of matched wooden stairs, was a kind of high-wire playground for the five Ballet Tech students who danced it in colorful T-shirts and shorts.

After the striking beauty of “Pursuing Odette,” it was disappointing to see the talents of dancer Wu-Kang Chen so poorly used in “Ugha Bugha,” a solo that debuted last month at City Ballet. In front of a set of deconstructed aluminum trash cans, Mr. Chen came out in tights festooned with empty soup cans. Tasked with racing around the stage, executing periodic leaps, and shimmying downstage to shake his cans at the percussionists, Mr. Chen looked alternately bemused and cranky.

Christopher Vo, dancing the lead in 2002’s “Behold the Man” fared no better. He wound up in nothing but a dance belt and round white lights strapped to his arms and legs. Later, he was spun from a harness like an acrobat, a mystical blur of light. Then the mood changed – no more mysticism, just broad jokes that felt like a quick fix. He was crowned with a wreath of party balloons, and two men in pink swim caps, goggles, and racing suits came out behind him and started grooving like MTV background dancers.

During much of “Behold the Man,” two women in cloaks twirled beautifully, mysteriously in the background. Clad in dark robes, lit with lovely dappled blue light, they were bewitching. Behold the man? I couldn’t take my eyes off the women. At City Ballet, too it was a new solo for the young dancer Kaitlyn Gilliland, “Etoile Polaire,” that stole the show. And on Wednesday night, Mr. Feld’s pranks and stunts were no match for his work in a lyrical vein.

Until June 11 (175 Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, 212-691-9740).