The opening of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company’s season at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday night featured work that fluctuated between expressions of Mr. Lubovitch’s consciousness and movement that seemed made to fill the maw of the dance marketplace.

The evening opened with the company premiere of “Love’s Stories,” which Mr. Lubovitch originally created for Chicago’s Hubbard Street Dance in 2005. This piece had the journeyman flavor of a work made on demand, a product of expediency. Mr. Lubovitch has an enduring interest in setting ballets to jazz and Broadway song books, and watching “Love’s Stories,” one couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that Mr Lubovitch has done this all before — despite the choreographic competency and the expertise and genuine appeal of Mr. Lubovitch’s dancers.

While on the soundtrack Kurt Elling’s voice lists across cocktail lounge standards, the dancers slouch and saunter and slip in and out of what might be called a kinetic answer to scat singing. Much of “Love’s Stories” is lyric-driven, and each of the three duets sign off with an illustrative image. At the end of the “Prelude to a Kiss” segment, Marty Lawson slips Kate Skarpetowska’s leotard off her shoulders and kisses her. It’s clear here that Mr. Lubovitch is mocking literalism, but he’s also simply appealing to his audience.

In the opening and closing movements of “Love’s Stories,” Mr. Lubovitch makes interesting use of Sean Stewart, who left American Ballet Theatre in 2002 and began dancing with Mr. Lubovitch in 2005. In the opening “Nature Boy,” Mr. Stewart is a stranger in the midst of the ensemble, a specimen of wild child or provocative faun. Mr. Stewart is among the most balletic of the dancers now prominently featured in Mr. Lubovitch’s troupe and this role both made use of and reimagined his balletic identity.

Fresher was the second piece, “Little Rhapsodies,” which was given its world premiere, danced by Rasta Thomas, Jay Franke, and Mr. Stewart, while pianist Pedja Muzijevic performed Schumann’s “Symphonic Etudes” onstage. Mr. Lubovitch is again on familiar territory here, but it is territory in which he seems to have more of a personal stake: He is intrigued by the constructs of sexual identity and he wants to make pieces for men that expand and explore their personas.

“Little Rhapsodies” is notable for its jocular posing and its re-affirmation of the way colloquial and contemporary attitudes can coexist with music of a distant era. There is some, but not too much of the camaraderie and competition that could be called standard issue in an all-male piece like this. The cascading notes seem to settle in and around the dancers’s arm flourishes. The three men exist independently, but their identities also entwine.

Mr. Lubovitch’s material for Mr. Thomas insightfully distills the personality of this dancer, framing him in portraiture. Although only in his mid-20s, Mr. Thomas already seems like a veteran, since he’s been ricocheting around the world dancing with different companies for a decade now. Is he someone who can do it all or is he someone who will do anything? Perhaps Mr. Thomas struggles with his own propensity to sell his material.

Here, Mr. Lubovitch allowed him to flirt with the audience in a different way than he might usually do: Mr. Thomas faced the audience in stances that recalled femme fatale parodies.

The program closed with the world premiere of Mr. Lubovitch’s “Dvorÿák Serenade,” performed by a 10-member ensemble, which slinked and wafted around in the dark, making intermittent meetings with a lead couple, danced by Drew Jacoby and Scott Rink.

Working in unison, the ensemble encompassed all different types of bodies and varieties of attack that turned its work into a humanistic statement. Though the work was performed to four movements of Dvorÿák’s “Serende in E Major,” Mr. Lubovitch’s “Dvorÿák Serenade” could have gone on longer.

Until April 21 (566 La Guardia Place at Washington Square South, 212-279-4200).