Though the dances were enjoyable, the greatest pleasure of the New Ballet program at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre could be found in the music, which was for the most part played live by musicians sitting on the aprons of the stage. Strings predominated, and all three works on the program, Amanda Miller’s “dogwood,” Luca Veggetti’s “Four/Voice,” and Alison Chase’s “Sweet Alchemy,” found different and mostly effective ways of echoing the dreamy, long-breathed undulations that string instruments can provide.

Presented jointly with the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, the evening opened with Ms. Miller’s piece, which was an exercise in the arrangement of both furniture and people. The stage was arrayed with chairs resembling chess pieces, which were designed by Seth Tillett, and somehow the entire configuration resembled a Louise Nevelson installation. The four dancers moved around the chairs, which provided not so much an obstacle course as a collection of piers around which to sling spatial and emotional encounters. The four jogged or broke their stride to settle into poses, which grew out of their own volition or were rearranged by their colleagues. Much of the perambulation was off-kilter and spongy. “dogwood” was performed to two pieces by Fred Frith that were hypnotically lulling but also shot through with sour notes. The dancers’ behavior and deportment also seemed to vacillate between the social and the antisocial. “dogwood” was performed by Ms. Miller, together with Rebecca Jefferson, Gino Grenek, and Matthew Prescott. Ms. Miller, an American, has worked in Germany for more than 20 years, and the quartet’s kinks and crotchets suggested Central European performance art.

Mr. Veggetti’s and Ms. Chase’s pieces, on the other hand, were danced by ballet dancers, who tend to register as linear abstractions of people, particularly when seen alongside non-ballet dancers. These two pieces seemed slicker than Ms. Miller’s, a fact aided by production frills that seemed more like marketing than mise-en-scène. Mr. Veggetti’s work was accompanied by projections of typographic gibberish or text scrawls, and Ms. Chase’s included photographic closeups of the dancers’ bodies and faces.

The four dancers in Mr. Veggetti’s work struck poses and movement quotations borrowed from Balanchine and Forsythe. They often seemed to be arrested in living tableaux, replete with cantilevered and off-balance pull aways. The music, by Paolo Aralla, consisted of muted runway taxiing; in the second half the baton was passed to a live celloist sitting downstage. The dancers were Rachel Piskin, Robert Fairchild, and Daniel Ulbricht from New York City Ballet, joined by Frances Chiaverini from Karole Armitage’s company. Ms. Chiaverini, who at times stood aloof and haughtily away from the other three, seemed to be there to put things into perspective.

Ms. Chase’s cast was entirely drawn from NYCB: Ms. Fairchild, Megan Lecrone, and Abi Stafford, partnered by Charles Askegard, Stephen Hanna, and Andrew Veyette. “Partnered” was the operative word. Ms. Chase used the dancers’ ballet skills to construct a landscape of her own design. She used both overhead balletic lifts as well as anecdotal, sexually reciprocal verticals and horizontals that suggested tumbling or human sculpture, and recalled her long association with Pilobolus. And she provided smooth segues and connections between the two schools of physical support. In the men’s arms, the women became unfurling umbrellas, or hydrofoil rotors, or they floated off the men’s arms, which were outstretched like struts. The women also took turns sitting on the men, or the men vaulted over each other, or the three male-female couples rolled on the floor in sync.

The music for “Sweet Alchemy” was by John Adams. Here the strings were plucked as well as bowed and there was a gutbucket, down-on-the-bayou flavor to the sonic arrangement. Ms. Chase responded with an equivalently homespun flavor to much of the dancers’ interaction, but seemed overall to hew to her own internal tempo, which was slowed until she concluded with some rapid hopping in the accelerated finale.