Ballet Next at the Joyce Theater Ballet Next Michele Wiles, center, and other company members in "Picnic" at the Joyce Theater. With higher energy, brighter music and more rewarding choreography, the second program of Ballet Next proved altogether better fare than the first of the company's current New York season. Though problems certainly remain, both dance and dancers held the attention firmly. At Wednesday's performance, all three works were world premieres. Each gave room for lively discussion. The opening item, "Stravinsky Divertimento," showed us Charles Askegard, one of the company's two artistic directors, as both choreographer (a capacity in which he is scarcely known) and virtuoso dancer (a role he seldom performs now). Here he has arranged three numbers from the "Divertimento for Piano and Violin" as a pas de deux, showcasing not only his own prowess but also that of Georgina Pazcoguin. His dances, deftly arranged along conventional Petipa-Balanchine classical lines, reveal no great originality but skillful compositional professionalism. He releases neither the intensity nor the colorfulness that makes Ms. Pazcoguin, a member of New York City Ballet, such a remarkable dancer; instead, he shows her as a bright, fast, confident technician. Paradoxically, this diminishes her charms, even though it shows her facility. His own dancing, though lacking juice these days, has plenty of élan. The most exciting passages were in the partnering: lifts, catches and sudden holds that showed not just Mr. Askegard's extraordinary skills in handling women but his way of turning risks and support into theatricality. Is it perverse to say that the overall most admirable item on the program was also the most obviously flawed? "Picnic," by Brian Reeder, tantalized its audience with an evident scenario that remained wholly undecipherable to the uninitiated. In approximately Edwardian attire, five girls of an impressionable age - were they sisters? school friends? neighbors? - danced and idled in various combinations, sometimes accompanied by a man (Mr. Askegard), who may have been their father, tutor or elder brother. Relations between him and the senior girl (Michele Wiles, the company's co-artistic director) were at least amorously trusting; a trio for three girls included some pointed girl-girl kisses. The introduction and epilogue, with Ms. Wiles alone at a picnic, hinted that the whole thing might have been a daydream both gratifying and frustrating. A program quotation from Edgar Allan Poe also spoke of "a dream within a dream." Still, why was this dream set to Shostakovich's cello sonata in D minor? At intermission, everyone was trying to figure out what had or hadn't occurred. Yet Mr. Reeder's little period scene of family might-have-beens, however enigmatic, is vividly, stylishly composed, with the most keenly detailed and characterized dances in this Ballet Next season, and are sensitively set to internal features of the score. I'd like to see Mr. Reeder tackle a ballet that took him away from historical fiction, where his gifts run the risk of seeming more trite than they surely are. The biggest audience hit of the program was Mauro Bigonzetti's "BachGround." Anyone can understand the frisson it makes, with dancers in fancy black underwear sitting provocatively and moodily with legs apart on upright chairs and getting up now and then to do kinky things to piano arrangements of Bach. Does it matter that most of these Bach pieces are of philosophical and Christian intent? I don't find "BachGround" profane, but I do find Mr. Bigonzetti shamelessly exploitative. Even if you had never seen a Bigonzetti piece before, you would know by the end how much he loves his dancers to feed an arm around an extended leg or, less frequently, a leg through a crossed arm. Dancers, while wrapping one limb across another in ways that vaguely suggest shame or conflict, keep stretching in a what-the-hell mildly erotic way. It is all flamboyant, posey, superficial and deeply silly. All three works had live music. Hajnal Pivnick made slightly heavy weather of the Stravinsky, but Elad Kabilio on the cello made the Shostakovich a thing of marvelous imagination. In both the Shostakovich and Stravinsky, Ben Laude's piano playing was superb in pace, tone and eloquence. Ballet Next performances continue through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org.