Returning to New York after nine years, the Bolshoi Ballet — the most heroically warm-blooded of ballet companies — seems keen to prove that it has reverted to the ghastly artistic torpor it enjoyed in the last two decades of the Soviet era. For a short time this century (thanks principally to the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who was for a few years its artistic director), this flagship company became an important center of new choreography and home to major revivals that changed Russia’s and the world’s view of dance history. But the three productions that it’s showing as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, all deriving from an earlier era, have been seen here before — a lot — and none of them are good.

The Bolshoi Orchestra, conducted this week by Pavel Sorokin, is superb. Most of the dancers are excellent, with virtues lacking in most Western dancers. And yet on Tuesday’s opening night at the David H. Koch Theater, those merits couldn’t save the company from making “Swan Lake” a bore.

At the start of every dance, my heart would lift again, noting some marvelous feature of Bolshoi style. The communicative generosity of manner! The thick-cream legato flow and keen dynamic sense! The juicy red-meat richness of texture! The unaffectedly erect posture of the torsos and their gorgeous pliancy! The easy amplitude of line! The powerful sweep through space! Yet nothing availed. Each dance soon grew monotonous.

“Don Quixote” (a 1999 staging based on a much older Bolshoi tradition) and “Spartacus” (a 1968 blockbuster first seen here in 1975), which open next week, have always been kitsch. But we can at least hope they’ll be delivered with the kind of Bolshoi panache that makes them enjoyable, even irresistible. It’s dismaying, though, to rediscover how the choreographer Yuri Grigorovich, 88 (the company’s artistic director from 1964 to 1995, and currently listed as the Bolshoi’s sole ballet master), turns the tragedy of “Swan Lake” into kitsch, too. Painstakingly, he sucks all the drama from it.