Troy Schumacher and BalletCollective Open Eyes BalletCollective, featuring a number of City Ballet dancers, presented "The Impulse Wants Company," by the company's director, Troy Shumacher, at the Ballet v6.0 festival at the Joyce Theater. In "The Impulse Wants Company," a new ballet by Troy Schumacher, the young dancer Harrison Coll, in profile, steps into arabesque. One arm stretches forward into space, one leg continues the line behind him - whereupon first his colleague Kaitlyn Gilliland, tall and mature, goes to support him, keeping him in that position. Next, other companions cluster around, partnering him, sharing and amplifying the gesture. This image coalesces before our eyes like a rapid coral formation. It's a collective moment, and the company that performs it is called BalletCollective. But the pun is not why I draw attention to this strange and wonderful moment. It - the man's arabesque being supported by, first, a woman and then a whole group - is a truly singular one, a completely fresh use of familiar ballet language. And it's the firmest sign, among many in the two works shown by Mr. Schumacher and BalletCollective last week at the Joyce Theater, that his is an intriguing new dance voice. Both pieces the company presented on Wednesday and Thursday belonged perfectly in the Joyce's admirable two-week Ballet v6.0 festival featuring small experimental companies. The week before, Matthew Neenan's "Last Glass" proved the most touching and assured item of the whole festival. But the more seriously experimental pieces by the far less experienced Mr. Schumacher are Ballet v6.0"s real discoveries. So who's Troy Schumacher? At present he's better known for dancing than choreography. He performs at New York City Ballet, where his roles, often twinkling and nimble, include Candy Cane, Tea and the Soldier in George Balanchine's "Nutcracker"; Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; and the Third Campaign soloist in "Stars and Stripes." But at BalletCollective, he's the director and resident choreographer to a small number of City Ballet dancers and other artists. Though Ms. Gilliland no longer performs with City Ballet, she's now the assistant children's ballet master at the company's School of American Ballet. It would be wrong to overrate Mr. Schumacher's two works: they're sketches, structurally unsatisfactory, stylistically unresolved. But he's addressing central questions about the genre of ballet - music, gender, body language, academic vocabulary - and without strain. His answers look both direct and unforced, experimental and refreshing. When women partner women, or men men, or women support men, it doesn't look as if Mr. Shumacher has an agenda; it appears simply as if his stage world reflects the one most of us live in today. And he's using music that's both new and live. His Joyce program featured the world premiere of "The Impulse Wants Company" and a revision of "Epistasis" (2011), both with music played live by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, featuring piano and strings. The "Impulse" score is a suite, covering a dramatically wide range of sonorities, by Ellis Ludwig-Leone. It starts with exciting string tremblings, and has both legato and pizzicato sections; a drum part during one movement proved an unexpected and effectively startling supplement; you couldn't see any drum or drummer. The string sounds in "Epistasis" - whose score by Nick Jaina, Nathan Langston, Amanda Lawrence and David Moss was arranged here by Mr. Ludwig-Leone - also cover a surprising range. Mr. Schumacher draws dance variety from this variety of sound: though the women wear point shoes, they only go on point when the sound and tempo seem to prompt it. At times, his dances seem metrically connected to the music's rhythm; at other times, to ride freely over it. Another fascinating aspect of Mr. Schumacher's works is that they're connected to literature without being literary. "The Impulse" is a response to a poem by Cynthia Zarin, while the credits for "Epistasis" include "Abstract Libretto" by Kevin Draper. But these aren't ballets where you need to read texts to appreciate the choreography. Mr. Schumacher creates societies onstage; it's already rewarding to follow the inner lives. At every point, the choreography seems about these dancers. The vocabulary is connected to those of both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, the main choreographers for these City Ballet dancers, but with many new inflections, alternating between informal manners and academic rigor. A reason it's so absorbing is that it's affectionately tailor made for these dancers, showing each one in a new light, with facets of vulnerability, tentativeness and self-contradiction not seen so far in their City Ballet repertory. Taylor Stanley makes a particular impression, his clean, questing energy offset by aspects of youthful uncertainty, but Mr. Coll (City Ballet's newest corps member), Ms. Gilliland, Lauren King, Ashley Laracey, Meagan Mann and David Prottas are all given solos characterized by unforeseen gestures or sequences, happily disconcerting. What Mr. Schumacher doesn't attempt in either piece is any tight classical structure. At moments, suspense drops. The tone is exploratory. But within his pure-dance methods, he has a dramatic instinct. Every entrance, exit, meeting is an event. The Ballet v6.0 festival ended on Friday and Saturday with four works performed by Jessica Lang Dance. All four are energetically dancy, well structured, politely respectful of musical structure and tempo, and appealingly performed by nine fine dancers of varied backgrounds. Ms. Lang's work, skilled throughout, is scarcely experimental. In manners, gestures and musical construction, "A Solo in Nine Parts" (2010) is along Paul Taylor lines, while "Aria" (a world premiere) is along Mark Morris ones; "i.n.k." (2011) is slickly, even cutely, made to video art of moving ink spots, by Shinichi Maruyama, with matching music by Jakub Ciupinski, and in "From Foreign Lands and People" (2005), the square columns of the set, designed by Ms. Lang, become a shtick, rearranged by the dancers for every part of the score, which happens to be Schumann's "Kinderszenen." At her best, Ms. Lang illustrates her music - "Aria" is set to Zenobia's aria "Son contenta di morire" from Handel's "Radamisto," and distinguishes neatly between voice and orchestra while showing the death-fixated fury in the words - but she provides no new interpretive insight. She uses the Schumann suite as a mere convenience. The bright purposefulness of her choreography is engaging. She doesn't deepen our knowledge of her dancers, but she always makes them look motivated and handsome.