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Every season, Pacific Northwest Ballet offers a program of mixed repertory entitled Director’s Choice.

At a ballet company committed to showcasing the works of George Balanchine, presenting new and traditional full-length story ballets, and featuring works by other established modern and ballet masters, the program is an opportunity to fulfill its other important mission: to present Seattle audiences with recent works by younger, ascendant choreographers.

The current season’s program includes three works: former PNB principal dancer and current ballet master Paul Gibson’s Rush from 2002, Spanish-born Hubbard Street Dance Chicago resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrrudo’s Little mortal jump from 2012, and New York City Ballet soloist and resident choreographer Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit from 2012. The latter two are PNB premieres.

Gibson has not created a large body of work and none of it has been staged beyond the confines of McCaw Hall. But his 14-year-old piece, set to music by the Czech composer Bosulav Martinu, more than holds its own in a program of up-and-coming choreographers. “Rush” has the grandeur, spectacle and structural symmetry one might expect from Balanchine, but is a distinctive and fully-realized work in its own right.

The dancers, frequently lifting one another high off the floor, extend their arms upright, sideways or at 45-degree angles, giving the work an aggressive, sharp-edged quality while the score’s changing tempo provides the movement with a keen sense of urgency.

Carefully attuned to the intricacies of a score that is by turns percussive and lyrical, the piece alternates between the frenetic energy of the chorus and the more placid, intimate sequences danced by principals Seth Orza and Noelani Pantastico. It is a spirited dance work, with alternating waves of men and women appearing from the wings in a shadowy light, articulates a darker, more somber expression of human experience than Balanchine’s.

Cerrudo’s contribution to the program had all the elements one hopes to find in a work that seeks to upend and reinvigorate contemporary ballet.

But to what end?

Amidst some moving black cubes and a powerful smoke machine, men in braces and women in tight dresses engage one another on stage in movement that is jazzy, grotesque or pedestrian. It might briefly take on an Americana flair reminiscent of Twyla Tharp’s regrettable Waiting at the Station (a world premiere that debuted at PNB in 2013) before resolving into Jiří Kylián-style silliness. After muddling through some of this, we are treated to a Philip Glass sequence that may be a parody or homage to Tharp’s In the Upper Room. The problem with the piece was not Cerrudo’s incorporation of these familiar styles, however, but the fact that he could not seem to choose between, or integrate them successfully. Once a tone was established, the music would abruptly halt and a prevailing mood would be broken by the onset of a new and fundamentally different track.

The score itself was a disparate mashup of Glass, Beirut, Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire, Alexandre Desplat, Max Richter, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan.

The movement did, at times, manifest an awkwardness, discomfort and humorous self-awareness characteristic of our strained human relationships, making the work compelling to watch. But soon Cerrudo’s music shuffle would shift gears and we would find ourselves in a different place. One felt him growing impatient whenever he began to hit his stride.

In the final segment of Little mortal leap, principal dancer Elizabeth Murphy and corps de ballet dancer Dylan Wald, tentatively but inextricably linked with one another, moved towards a light emanating from across the stage. Are they helping or hindering one another in this effort? The intimacy and indeterminacy of their strange union was riveting, emotional and true to life. But it appeared to have little to do with the many other fragments that made up the whole of the piece.

The young Peck is one of the hottest choreographers working today. His sumptuous, dazzling Debonair was created for PNB and included in last season’s Director’s Choice program. This year’s work was a series of seven vignettes, each focusing upon a year and animal from the Chinese zodiac, set to music by Sufjan Stevens.

This work, which opens like an elegant fête, is profoundly sublime, making use of a languorous movement that belies our sense that we are experiencing something complex and carefully constructed. Whereas one might expect a degree of bestiary literalness from a treatment of this subject, Peck is more concerned with abstract qualities and states of being associated with the signs of the ancient zodiac. Each segment offers a drama of the self in the context of a social world, complete with connections, recognition and alienation. It’s all marvelous, but there is something cool and detached in Peck’s work, especially when it comes to his partnering.

The audience response to Year of the Rabbit was positive, but it did not get the thunderous standing ovation that the decidedly more haphazard Little mortal jump had received earlier in the evening. Perhaps Peck is playing chess at times when checkers would suffice.

I found myself very eager to see the work again, however, so that I might more fully engage its deeper textures and possible meanings.