In its brief lifespan, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has made a habit of commissioning works from emerging choreographers — a noble undertaking. Yet for Cedar Lake’s audiences, the company’s emphasis on new work has produced some bumpy rides.

A Friday night concert at Cedar Lake’s home theater was again stocked entirely with unproven dances, all commissioned — or choreographed — by the company’s 32-year-old artistic director, Benoit-Swan Pouffer. Only one of the three New York premieres, Jacopo Godani’s “Symptoms of Development,” turned out to be a complete work with a clear point of view. The other two felt like underdeveloped works in progress by fledgling choreographers.

Mr. Godani actually created “Symptoms of Development” for the Nederlands Dans Theater last year; he only retooled it for Cedar Lake. The piece is set in a futuristic landscape, with dancers in sports socks, gray underpants, and tank tops with parachute harnesses. A rear-projection screen is employed to illustrate (with live model) how modern man has moved so fast that his soul actually lags behind him, attached by a long string. There are big speakers on which the dancers climb, and microphones they sometimes use. And there’s an automated voice saying cryptic things like “One lost particle never survives alone” and “I do not conform.”

There is so much happening onstage that one might be distracted from the dancing, were it not so much more interesting than its didactic trappings. The crisp steps (well executed by Cedar Lake’s fit dancers) suggested sleek, disturbingly cool humans with powerful limbs and slithery necks. Bursts of frenzied dancing alternated with episodes of manipulative partnering and concise solos to create a quite visual portrait of a conformist society, one that holds its members by both fear and apathy.

The program opened with Mr. Pouffer’s “Vastav,” inspired (according to the program notes) by a childhood visit to Algeria, on which he observed an arranged marriage. To add to the mix, there are echoes of Nijinska’s “Les Noces.” Then there’s a Croatian Gypsy-inflected score by Cedar Lake’s resident composer Stefano Zazzera, which morphs into a bass-boosted, thumping rock remix.

Those are a lot of trees, but they didn’t add up to a forest. The main problem was a meandering through-line: having gotten the cloistered girls and boys onstage, Mr. Pouffer didn’t seem to know how to exploit the dramatic situation. Sexual frustration made a few brief appearances, none of them memorable. Mostly the two groups just danced.

Even when two couples were broken up to form an enforced marriage, the separation seemed a footnote, carrying little tension. The unexciting plot was at odds with the music’s forward-driving rhythms and the energetic leaps and lifts that accompanied them.

The evening’s other new work, “Rastay,” came from the recently appointed associate choreographer of Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal, Edgar Zendejas. Dressed in gauzy neck-to-toe white, dancers paired off in a series of three seemingly disconnected chamber pieces. Only Roderick George, in a vigorous, aggressive solo (for which he was inexplicably blindfolded) broke through the generally wan mood.

Despite full-out performances by the dancers, the four-year-old company appeared to drift from piece to piece, a troupe in search of an aesthetic identity. When Lincoln Kirstein wanted to establish a New York ballet company, he recruited George Balanchine. Wal-Mart heiress Nancy Laurie, who founded Cedar Lake in 2003, has chosen a very different course, employing (thus far) two little-known artistic directors. It remains to be seen whether Cedar Lake can thrive on the difficult path it has started down: that of an American contemporary dance company without a signature choreographer.

Until January 27 (547 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-868-4444).