All weekend crowds have gathered outdoors on the Lincoln Center Plaza to dance to big-band music at this year’s “Midsummer Night Swing.” The spectacle has lured some of the less inhibited patrons of the neighboring theaters to join the party during intermission. Kicked in the pants by Latin boogaloo, samba, and zydeco, the scene from the balcony was rhythm’s popular uprising against our tonier sensibility.

Inside the Metropolitan Opera House, audiences witnessed a similar blend of high and low style in American Ballet Theatre’s “Fokine Celebration,” which premiered Thursday night. The evening opened with “Les Sylphides.” After a rather awkward and half-hatched revival of the work last year, ABT has succeeded in restoring these creatures to the bright upper air.

The ensemble moved through their shifting tableaux in a harmonious sisterhood, chaste in their adherence to the basic academic steps. To the music of Chopin (orchestrated in this version by Roy Douglas), they accomplished beautiful symmetries. The undulations of their arms cast a visible spell over the rest of their body: Traveling from the sloping position of their shoulders down through their torso and knees, until it finally reaches their feet, shifting weightlessly from en pointe to demi-pointe.

The leading “Mazurka” ballerina, Gillian Murphy, magnified this gesture with expert musical phrasing. In the closing waltz, she dashed nonchalantly across the stage with imperceptibly small steps. Her danseur, Maxim Beloserkovsky, gave a refreshingly vibrant performance. He leapt avidly in diagonals and partnered Ms. Murphy and the two soloists with a visible graciousness. The ensemble, bowing on either side of him at the end of the “Nocturne,” might as well have been paying him recognition.

Yuriko Kajiya gave a lively and dynamic performance as the “Waltz” soloist, her legs sprouting gaily in a high-stepping walk, scooping the floor with her hands. Despite her nonstop energy, she always retained a calmness in her trunk. Leaning into an arabesque, she puts her hands to her mouth, roundly blowing tremendous kisses into the wings. Her spring-heeled jetes in the final “Waltz” display an imperturbable balance in motion. Maria Riccetto, completing the flawless team, excelled in her “Prelude” solo, careful not to overinterpret her role as she searched among the chorus-like circles of the ensemble.

But the success of “Les Sylphides” rests squarely on the ensemble work. In their tarlatans, they moved with a decisive elegance, glowing with the lithographic aura of the 1840s, when Taglioni originally placed the fantastic creatures on stage. In his version, their rarified movements aesthetically denounced the earthbound bravura dancing in favor of a pure la danse haute. But in “Les Sylphides,” Fokine elevated them even further, fatefully placing them in the realm of plotless abstraction. They no longer moved in defiance of gravity, but emancipated themselves from it altogether. Although their feet barely leave the ground, they seem to soar. The program also included “Polovtsian Dances,” “Petrouchka,” and “La Spectre de la Rose.”

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The program was repeated on Saturday. Fokine was one of the first choreographers to make folk idioms a central, vital component of his classical ballet. His “Polovtsian Dances” and the bustling village scenes in “Petrouchka” can read like encyclopedic entries on all the regional vernaculars that caught Fokine’s eye, ingeniously incorporated into classical looking divertissements.

“Petrouchka,” a story ballet in four scenes, conflates the conventions of Italian commedia dell’arte with Old Russian folktales. The plot, set to an engrossing score by Stravinsky, follows an unlikely love triangle that develops between three marionettes trapped inside a charlatan’s traveling theater during the crowded festivities of the Butterweek Fair. Petrouchka, a cross between Pierrot and Little Ivan the Serf, is a sad-sack clown-puppet (played adorably here by Julio Bocca) who discovers irrational feelings that stir inside him for the charms of a Ballerina, pertly acted by Amanda McKerrow. He cannot help but leap in repeated backward crunches at the sight of her as she enters his cell.

The raucous behavior among the crowed villagers – a group of coachmen fondling the nursemaids, and Stella Abrera and Kristi Boone as the gypsy pair flaunting seductively the flounces on their dresses – is matched inside the marionette theater by the sexual designs the moor puppet has on the ballerina. Marcelo Gomes, wrapped head to toe in green chinoiserie, stomps brutishly on the beat, making scimitar-shaped gestures with his hands, inchingly scooting the ballerina to his bed cushions.

In Alexandre Benois’s original set design, Petrouchka’s emotional awakening is given poignant expression in the evening stars that shine on his walls. His claustrophobia and heartsickness prompt him to make a lofty exit through the roof of the sky. He haplessly interrupts the moor with the ballerina. Imaginary and real worlds soon intersect. The marionettes chase each other through the village crowd, while the crowd behaves more like puppets in a succession of national dances. The merchants, drunkards, and street performers each have their own distinct folk vocabulary.

Fokine’s fascination with national forms is part of his continuous push for a more expressive and naturalistic form of dance (he was among the first to advocate the removal of pointe shoes). This trend led him to embrace the idea that life and art are largely inseparable. Thus we find in “Le Spectre de la Rose” a girl dancing with the spirit of a rose as if he were her actual love, or, again in “Petrouchka,” the Pygmalion theme that, indeed, art may have a life of its own.

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In painting, the technique of chiaroscuro produces the illusion of three-dimensional figures through a dramatic use of shadow and light. Lynn Taylor-Corbett applies the term more broadly in her own “Chiaroscuro,” performed Friday night at the New York City Ballet. A movement study for six soloists, the work provides a series of heightened contrasts between circular and linear motions, set in bas-relief by Mark Staley’s lightning and given animated life by the spirited harmonies of Francesco Geminiani’s “La Follia” concerto.

Ms. Taylor-Corbett has called the work a “tribute” to principal dancer Jock Soto, who enters alone at first, pushing with expansive gestures the edges of space around him. He encounters some resistance as Jennie Somogyi rushes in front of his outstretched palm, but moves forward undeterred, raising her body up horizontally. Joined by Miranda Weese, Pascale van Kipnis, and James Fayette, the ensemble rotates with open-armed spirals and high chopping kicks.

Geminiani’s composition, modeled on his teacher Corelli’s Op. 5 sonatas, alternates between fast and slow movements, sliding up and down the chromatic scales.

The momentum of the opening section is realized in Tom Gold’s furious entrance. He twirls across the stage with controlled exuberance, windmilling between the other dancers. Launching into the splits, he slides dangerously forward. At last he is captured by Mr. Soto’s stabilizing presence and put down to safety.

In the following adagio, Ms. van Kipnis displays admirable poise in a prayerful duet with Mr. Soto. Perched on his shoulders, she slowly slides down his profile until she is kneeling beside him. The dancers reflect the tempo changes with a strong sense of individual play, modulated by moments of care and precision in their partnering. In this way, they share a great deal with Paul Taylor’s own dances to the baroque.

Although they are genderless by all accounts, their movements hint at casual social implications beyond technique. In one overt reference to “Esplanade,” four dancers lie down in the middle of the stage. Ms. Somogyi steps over them and into Mr. Soto’s arms. After a brief duet, she relaxes on top as they roll her upstage as on a caterpillar tread.

Also included on the program was Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carnival of the Animals,” a relentlessly witty romp through Saint-Saens’s score of the same name. John Lithgow returns as the night watchman, recounting in loosely rhymed verse the night a young boy named Oliver, played by Ghaleb Kayali, fell asleep in the Museum of Natural History.

His classmates, transformed into scavenging hyenas, throw their knee-high socks into the air at each piano roll. Their fathers are hen-pecked cockerels, pecking and bobbing in yellow bodysuits and feathered tails. During the librarian’s fantasy as a mermaid in an aquarium, an ensemble of 10 in turquoise fall down on one another, suggesting scales on an amphibious tail. The choreography’s imaginative vignettes, along with Jon Morrell’s scenery and costumes, give Oliver’s anthropomorphic dreams a sense of permanence in the NYCB repertory. Rarely are children’s cries of laughter heard throughout the entire theater.

“Fokine Celebration” until June 22 (Lincoln Center, 212-362-6000).