Summer arrives early this year at New York City Ballet. Balanchine’s evening length “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” usually danced in the last week of the season, to coincide with the summer solstice, instead kicks off the company’s spring season at the New York State Theater tonight.

Balanchine’s “Midsummer,” first performed in 1962, may seem to be an anomaly in the company’s repertory and sensibility. Shakespeare’s “Midsummer” abounds in plot combinations, whereas Balanchine’s aesthetic revolves around ballet without plotline. He extolled the significance of movement for its own sake, echoing the credo of modernism across the aesthetic board.

But Balanchine ballet and Shakespearean text are a perfect blend. So much of Shakespeare’s plays are written in poetry rather than prose, and poetry is one of the closest correlatives ballet can find in the allied arts. Elizabethan plotting accepts wide leaps in plot development and chronology, restless alternation between locations far removed in space, and consecutive scenes that presuppose irregular intervals in time. All this makes the epoch’s dramatic works ripe for translation to ballet, a form that resists the strictly rational and linear.

In creating “Midsummer,” Balanchine was returning to his roots, in a sense. As a child in St. Petersburg, he had appeared in a production of the play. It was accompanied by the famed Mendelssohn Overture and Incidental Music that Balanchine would then use for his ballet decades later.

For Balanchine, knowledge of the Bard was a point of pride. In a 1973 interview, Balanchine, then almost 70, claimed that he still knew Shakespeare’s “Midsummer” “better in Russian than a lot of people know it in English.” In St. Petersburg, both Marius Petipa in 1877 and Mikhail Fokine in 1906 had made their own “Midsummer” ballets to the Mendelssohn score.

Balanchine’s usual impulse was to collapse and conflate balletic genres, employing a less rigid organization of the cast: no more princes entertained by the same old jesters. But in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he reverted to a schematic organization. Balanchine’s Puck, for instance, relates back to the taproot of balletic demi-caractere virtuoso dancers, who tend to be short, agile, and frequently zany. The fairy king Oberon becomes an incarnation of the Balanchine sovereign at his most magisterial. First performed by Edward Villella, Oberon’s Act I solo is extraordinarily challenging. It has come to be seen as something of a landmark in Balanchine’s choreography, one that shows his take on male technique. The solo is made up of flurries of rapid and often small steps, rather than the booming grand allegro of more traditional men’s classical ballet.

As so often in his work, Shakespeare in “Midsummer” allies mistaken-identity confusions with his interest in characters who are strangers to their own psyches. Helping his protagonists discover who they really are, Shakespeare makes subtle use of the intercessionary deus ex machina as a manifest simulation of a god’s descent from the heavens. Here that force rests in Oberon and his lieutenant Puck, the instrument of their intercessions a magic flower.

Balanchine’s representation of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, suggests that he sees her, too, as a potent catalyst. In the play, her impending marriage to Theseus, Duke of Athens, initiates the delirious sequence of inappropriate couplings that are eventually set to rights. In his ballet, Balanchine has created a midnight foray for her that triggers a cresting chaos that soon precipitates a return to order. On her midnight ride, the Hippolyta ballerina roils the stage with imperious pyrotechnics; as Balanchine has choreographed her, she is related to the female soloist in Balanchine’s “Rubies,” or the Choleric ballerina in his “The Four Temperaments.” All three women dance largely unsupported, and project in their steps uncontainable autonomy and domination.

In his “Midsummer,” Balanchine uses a personal synthesis of pantomime styles to make the story clear. His pantomime is indebted partly to the gestures of vaudeville and musical comedy, both genres in which he worked, as well as the characteristic pantomime in Soviet ballets. Indeed, a transition in Russian ballet pantomime was ongoing when Balanchine was a pupil at the Mariinsky school in St. Petersburg. The new sign language was less detailed and less picturesque, bigger and more generalized; the old pantomime of the Mariinsky was highly specific even if only those versed in its lexicon could be sure what it was specifying.

Like so many of Shakespeare’s works, “Midsummer” concludes with a nuptial celebration, which occupies the entire second act of Balanchine’s ballet. Having put the plot resolution behind him, Balanchine let Act II proclaim the episodic nature of ballet itself in the manner of Petipa’s “Sleeping Beauty” Act III divertissements.

Balanchine introduces a new couple, who dance a sensuous adagio. The man and woman are not named characters from the play. They might be construed as entertainers at the multiple wedding, but they are native to the balletic realm more than to the literary. Their dance falls somewhere between the adagios in Balanchine’s “Diamonds” and “Symphony in C.” The couple’s duet encompasses the connubial bliss of all the many couples who are united at the play’s conclusion. It also symbolizes the platonic essence of wedded bliss. And it is accomplished with the unusual celebratory spirit that ballet and poetry can deliver by working together in concert.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” will be performed until May 2. New York City Ballet is in season until June 25 at the New York State Theater (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).