NEW YORK CITY BALLET

At the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 870-5570. Through June 30.

——–

NEW York City Ballet is alive with new choreography this season, as its remarkable Diamond Project continues to offer a bevy of world premieres.

On Tuesday night, it gave the first airing to Melissa Barak’s “If By Chance.” Barak, 22, who joined City Ballet’s corps de ballet three years ago, is still a young dancer.

But as a choreographer, she’s a positive babe in arms. Still, she created a work for the School of American Ballet a year ago that was so well-received, it was later taken into the City Ballet repertory.

So “If By Chance” did not come exactly by chance. Barak has been composing ballets in workshop for some years, but this was her first (or perhaps second) big break.

Sensibly, the ballet is set to a Shostakovich sonata for cello and piano – the piano providing the choreographer with a readily discerned rhythmic base, the cello giving the work color and ambiance.

The choreography is simple, nicely measured, completely unflustered.

Barak opens with a woman dressed in black (a flowing Pascale van Kipnis) surrounded by four black-clad men who dance around but do not touch her.

Next, we have a man all in white (a zippy Benjamin Millepied), again surrounded, this time by four white-clad women. Vivé le différence!

After a time, we find Van Kipnis and Millepied rather nervously sounding one another out, to the apparent consternation of their two color-coded clans.

After the apparent lovers go off into the sunset, Barak follows the music’s last rondo movement and everything ends in disconcerting jollity.

She should have been tougher and ended ambiguously.

She took a wrong turn at the end, perhaps, but Barak has something – a gift for listening, for hearing emotion in music and shaping it into movement.