Ballet Theater has also been the vehicle for the world’s foremost international stars, ballet’s answer to the Metropolitan Opera. (For many devotees, these luminaries have been the true cornerstone of Ballet Theater identity.) More recently, it’s become America’s foremost ballet flagship of ethnic diversity. Drawing from its JKO School, it has also developed its own classical style, recognizably and valuably different (especially above the waist) from that of City Ballet. And now the company’s new Women’s Movement has put it in the front rank of companies forging new opportunities for women in choreographing ballet.

But how many admirable policies can any company honor at one time? Currently it looks as if Ballet Theater has discarded Fokine, Ashton, Tudor, and — a big departure — the international stars from its scheduling. And who can notice Ballet Theater’s admirable purity of classical style? Its too-many-cooks approach to ballet obscures that.

Ms. Lang’s “Garden Blue,” new on Friday night, has obvious drawbacks; you can reasonably object to more about it than you can admire. And yet it’s a real theater piece, with a memorably peculiar conjunction of dance, music (Dvorak), and — especially memorable — design (by Sarah Crowner).

A striking tension — though it’s not wholly successful, it’s memorable — derives from the contrast between Ms. Crowner’s strong visual colors (sky blue, lawn green, buttercup, fuchsia, tangerine) and the largely muted sound of the music, the first three movements of Dvorak’s “Dumky” piano trio in E minor; Ms. Lang’s choreography creates an odd harmony between them. She makes some surprisingly huge acrobatic lifts to quiet passages of music, she responds to the music’s changes of speed but sometimes works pointedly against its meter, and she gives the dancers linear configurations and arm positions that enrich the stage picture.

Mr. Ratmansky’s “Songs of Bukovina,” new last year to a commissioned piano score by Leonid Desyatnikov, has suddenly fallen into place this season as it did not in 2017. (The pianist Jacek Mysinski may well be the deciding factor.) It’s a relative of Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering” (1969) in its amalgam of pure ballet, personal relationships within a community, and Eastern European folk dance. “Bukovina,” more conventionally hierarchical (one star couple, four supporting ones), is fascinating in its very specific folk details, and in the ways it sometimes isolates one or both its leading individuals from the group, as if in moments out of time.