Four ballets choreographed by Jerome Robbins to Debussy and Ravel made up a cohesive whole in the New York City Ballet’s “French Cuisine” program last week. “Mother Goose (Fairy Tales for Dancers)” is self-reflexive: The dancers onstage appear to be impersonating themselves. We see them first in practice clothes, posed as if at ease listening to a storyteller who sits with an open book. Then they take the initiative, acting out their own series of tales. The stage is mostly bare when the ballet begins, and the dancers bring onstage what look like bits and pieces of leftover scenery from NYCB’s own warehouse. Robbins follows the scenario Ravel himself created for these pieces, originally written for piano, in which the heroine is somewhat self-reflexive. She’s a Sleeping Beauty who dreams about some of her fellow fairy-tale creations. The choreographer goes to the balletic source, quoting Petipa’s “Sleeping Beauty” as well as other ballet world references. Here Robbins give us a romanticized view of the ballet dancer. As the dancers improvise their tales, they are made to seem themselves creatures of fairy-tale innocence. The company performs with the right quality of belief and charm.

The evening’s second act put together Robbins’s 1953 “Afternoon of a Faun,” with his 1984 “Antique Epigraphs.” A pause separated them, and that was all the punctuation necessary since the two works naturally interlock. Both are performed to music by Debussy that was inspired by texts purporting to evoke the pagan world.

“Afternoon of a Faun” continues Robbins’s ongoing fascination with the archetype of the ballet dancer, although here the two dancers are portrayed more cynically, practicing in a ballet studio, spellbound by their own reflections. Fauns and satyrs are proverbially half-goat. Bare-chested Damian Woetzel’s long-waistedness is apparent in a way that it usually isn’t, and it works for this piece.

When the “Faun” ballerina was originally created by Tanaquil Le Clercq, she was called a “dryad of Fifth Avenue,” and part of the power of the ballet is its clarifying connections between symbols of female allure spanning thousands of years. Janie Taylor’s almost martial stride as she walked into the ballet studio made one think that Robbins was perhaps relating the Amazon to the ambition and discipline of a professional dancer. As the performance proceeded, however, Ms. Taylor didn’t seem to be quite on her game, despite this being a ballet she has danced many times. Sometimes she was round-shouldered in a way that almost seemed hippieish, and she wobbled needlessly in her exposed developpe.

“Antique Epigraphs” was led by Rachel Rutherford, Sara Mearns, Teresa Reichlen, and Rebecca Krohn, making her debut in the ballet. If women were largely invisible in ancient Greek and Roman life, they were prominent in religious and domestic arrangements; the epoch’s literature and mythology allowed them an extraordinary range of identities. Robbins seemed to have wanted to make all of this visible here. The women of “Antique Epigraphs” dance primarily to Debussy piano pieces orchestrated by the conductor Ernst Ansermet, a Debussy specialist. Most of what they do is more jagged and percussive than the ballerina’s movement in “Faun.” Rather than standing balletically, they are arrayed in a turned-in stances that seem to denote “pagan.” The choreography details art versus nature, stasis versus movement. Toward the end of the ballet, the stage turns into an agitated hive; each of the women is now queen bee.

The closing ballet was “In G Major,” made, like “Mother Goose,” for NYCB’s 1975 Ravel Festival. Here, it was led by Wendy Whelan and Philip Neal, and they had a great night. Robbins found a piano concerto by Ravel that allowed him to salute the chic beach ballets that the Ballets Russes showed during the 1920s and ’30s. Ms. Whelan commanded Deco swank from her first rakish entrance; I waited for the flash of the diamond and platinum bracelet I was sure she had to be wearing. The male ensemble jumped around her like avid dolphins — or rather, a Lido brand of fauns or satyrs. Ms. Whelan kept her insouciant cool while playing it for all it was worth. In the long duet that occupies the central movement of the ballet, she and Mr. Neal made apparent the way that Robbins relates the ballerina’s walking and bourreing on the ground to her lightly pedaling and beating legs when supported in the air. This duet can seem slightly protracted, but it certainly did not on this occasion. Their exit was one of the evening’s highlights, as Mr. Neal carried off Ms. Whelan upside down, and she serenely extended her leg ever-higher into the air.