Miro Magloire and His New Chamber Ballet at City Center There is always some element of transposition in choreography: dances must be moved from the studio to the stage, and adjusted as they go, a transition to which smart artists are keenly attuned. Perhaps something is lost in this translation, and perhaps something gained, but it is never quite the same piece in those different arenas; the discrepancy of scale alone sees to that. Never mind the theatricality of décor and lighting. New Chamber Ballet: Sarah Atkins, left, and Elizabeth Brown in Miro Magloire's work at City Center. From left, the musicians Miranda Cuckson and Taka Kigawa and the soloist Victoria North in the fifth-floor studios. Miro Magloire probably doesn't make all of his dances for his company, the New Chamber Ballet, in the fifth-floor studios of City Center, though he always presents them there, as he did this past weekend. Maybe he doesn't make any of them there, but in other studios scattered around the city. Still, he is something of a site-specific artist, one who does not have to account for the rehearsal-space-to-concert-hall shift taken as a given by most of his colleagues. This is especially true in ballet, where that shift tends to be particularly pronounced; movements that seem outsize in a studio barely register in a cavernous opera house. Instead of wrestling with that transition, Mr. Magloire, and his audiences, can burrow into intimacy and detail. A dancer rising onto point has a much more visceral impact when the act happens only several feet away from you and on the same level: there is a democracy of doing and watching here that is very important. And, too, there is the intimacy of live music, which Mr. Magloire insists on. On Friday night the pianist Taka Kigawa and the violinist Miranda Cuckson were a source of constant, thrumming pleasure (as were Candice Thompson's smart costumes). During charming introductory speeches, Mr. Magloire cast the program as a conversation between narrative and abstraction. His "Emilia," a premiere and a dark love triangle set to Stockhausen's "Klavierstück VII and VIII" for piano, had something of the feel of Kurt Jooss's expressionistic dance theater, seething with strangled and rigid forms; it's intriguing to see this astringent choreographer investigating overtly emotional terrain. The program included other works. A piece by Emery LeCrone, "Caprice," to two Michael Nyman pieces for solo violin, was something of a sketch, made to show off the sleekly authoritative Sarah Atkins. "Spieglein," another premiere by Mr. Magloire, a solo for Victoria North to a Handel violin sonata, was rather too stagey in its evocation of a woman surrounded by reflections of herself. Constantine Baecher's duet "Slow Dancing to Kurt Weill," choreographed to "My Ship" and "Lonely House," cast a barefoot Mr. Baecher and Elizabeth Brown as a tempestuous couple, whose muscular roughhousing shaded into more violent interactions. I'd guess this was an experiment for Mr. Baecher, who invited the audience members to leave their seats and watch in the round. The dancers, here as throughout the evening, performed with an absorbing clarity and focus. This is vital, as the program's dances, all created in the last year, were so short as to be gone as soon as you began to sink into them. The lack of more sustained and textured choreography remains a limitation of this troupe; everything at a New Chamber Ballet show pleases, despite the antiseptic setting, but too little sticks in the mind.