Beach, meadow, and ballroom — all were prominent landscapes in the “Essential Robbins,” program New York City Ballet performed last week. The evocation of rural community came in the hour-long “Dances at a Gathering,” which dominated the program by virtue of both length and quality. Of the three Jerome Robbins works on view, this is certainly the most essential. Performed by 10 dancers to a collection of Chopin piano pieces, “Dances at a Gathering” explores the relationships between dancers onstage. It established a paradigm that Robbins continued to return to in subsequent years. But what could become formulaic in late incarnations, here shows originality and integrity.

Robbins created “Dances” in 1969; it was the first ballet he’d made for the company in 13 years. It was both the beginning of a new and crowning phase in his career — he would concentrate on NYCB until his death in1998 — and a return to his roots. Musically, Robbins picked up where he had left off, choreographing again to Chopin, whose work he had used for his comic masterpiece “The Concert,” his previous work for NYCB.

Throughout “Dances,” Robbins lays down touchstones to the great masters who influenced him. In both “The Concert” and “Dances at a Gathering,” he uses some of the same Chopin to which Mikhail Fokine choreographed his landmark 1907 “Les Sylphides.” When “Dances” was first performed, Robbins discussed in an interview the influence of the Italian “paseggiata,” the stroll around a town square at twilight. It’s also reminiscent of the strolling at dusk and midnight that occurs in the small town of Antony Tudor’s “Pillar of Fire,” which had made its premiere at Ballet Theatre during Robbins’s years as a company member there. (He returned more explicitly to Tudor-esque territory in his 1988 “Ives, Songs.”)

Part of what makes “Dances at a Gathering” interesting is Robbins’s studied insistence that the ballet not be read novelistically. Throughout the work, Robbins is partial to asymmetrical clusters of dancers that can’t be divided by two. The relationships are constantly shifting; we almost never get to identify two dancers as being conclusively a romantic couple. Indeed, the overarching subject of “Dances” seems to be camaraderie. Women and men link arms, whiling away the time, or walk together but start to move balletically as a way of projecting their lapsing into their own thoughts.

Robbins also interweaves vignettes that root the ballet in something more explicitly anecdotal: On Thursday night, Sara Mearns was the flirt who can’t seem to make herself more than a passing fancy to any of the men she attracts. At another point in the ballet, thecastengages in the novel experience of posing for the camera.

Robbins uses the role he created for Edward Villella, danced last Thursday night by Benjamin Millepied, to make two pointed references to the aesthetic of 19thcentury romanticism of which Chopin was prototype. “Dances at a Gathering” opens with Mr. Millepied onstage alone; he flutters his fingers in front of his eyes in the “Was it a dream?” gesture that instantly summons up an entire repertory and literature of fantasies, apparitions, and imaginative figments. At the end of the ballet, Mr. Millepied puts his hand down on the stage floor, recalling romanticism’s elevation of the countryside and its inhabitants as the repository of sentiments more cherishable, more authentic than could be found in what was perceived to be an artificially constructed urban civilization.

Thursday’s cast blended dancers with experience in this and other Robbins works, such as Mr. Millepied, Jenifer Ringer, and Jared Angle, with dancers who were entirely new to this piece, namely Ms. Mearns, Adam Hendrickson, and Megan Fairchild. The practiced and the neophytes all performed together harmoniously.

“In G Major,” which opened the program, is a highly functional piece, performed to Ravel’s piano Concerto in G, which he began composing in 1929. The Concerto’s idyllically indolent slow central movement here is used for a long and involved duet, danced Thursday by Maria Kowroski and Philip Neal. They’ve performed this ballet many times before, and danced very nicely on Thursday night; some of the duet’s most difficult passages have, however, looked more effortless on other occasions.

The program closed with “I’m Old Fashioned,” which begins and ends with Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire on the silver screen performing in a style Robbins tries to retrofit with mixed results. Morton Gould’s score plies variation on the eponymous Jerome Kern tune until delightful acquaintanceship becomes odious. Ms. Ringer, Ms. Mearns, and Mr. Angle reappeared, along with Rebecca Krohn, Tyler Angle, and Stephan Hanna. Mr. Hanna was a fine partner for Ms. Mearns in the duet performed to Gould’s most deconstructive rephrasing of the title tune, but in his solo he operated at only about 50% of his capacity.