Last night's City Ballet program was dubbed "Passages." Mostly these passages were conceptual: between seasons, or stages of life. The passage in Mauro Bigonzetti's Oltramare, which premiered last night, is more explicit and obvious from the first appearance of its fourteen dancers. Bigonzetti and Marc Happel have dressed the women in drab mid-length dresses, skirts or jumpers, dark stockings and sensible shoes. The men wear high-waisted pants, some with suspenders, and collarless shirts and sometimes vests. They each carry a battered suitcase and queue in a line from wing to wing. Garbed and posed thusly, they're iconic. We don't need the overblown prose of Bigonzetti's program note to tell us who we're seeing. We know them from films, family albums and visits to Ellis Island: lower-class Europeans about to leave the Old Country for the New World. But if Nunzio and Elisabetta knew what awaited on the Good Ship Bigonzetti, they'd have run back to the olive grove.

Bruno Moretti's commissioned, eponymous score, with its twenty-one musicians featuring the accordion, evokes traditional music from southern and eastern European and even hints of Klezmer. With its many changes of mood and tone, from pensive clapping woodblocks and violins to stampeding, ecstatic horns, it's pleasant and engaging, even when it echoes any number of nostalgic Hollywood soundtracks. The accordion seemed always about to burst into the theme from The Godfather.

So it's hardly necessary to read Bigonzetti's florid program note; we've seen and heard this story all our lives. However familiar, Oltramare's real-world themes and decor are a change for Bigonzetti, whose previous works for City Ballet were leotard-and-tights abstractions, although not without hints of narrative. His note explains that the title means "beyond the sea," and describes for the visually impaired the ballet's depiction of this journey, and of the emigrants' "...sadness...excitement and joy." But there's no joy, and no Bobby Darrin, in this floating shtetl. In the gloomy chasm Mark Stanley's masterful lighting made of the State Theater's stage, Bigonzetti put his wretched refuse through contortions so relentlessly dolorous that I could never tell if dancers were recalling a woeful past or anticipating a desolate future. Of the present, I shared their despair.

Once ensconced in steerage, the dancers arrange their suitcases in a large semicircle upstage; the luggage double as their seats when they're not dancing. It seems theirs is a low-budget steamer. In pairs and other groupings, dancers emerge from the murk for for their turn at diverse soliloquies. Early on, Georgina Pazcoguin and Jason Fowler share a duet in which she seems to be reaching past the audience for something, or perhaps pushing that something away. Bigonzetti's vocabulary is grittier and harsher here than in his previous works, which were more recognizably balletic, with ballet's stretched and sharp legibility, however rococo his fractured embellishments. I don't think there's a single recognizable arabesque in Oltramare. Dancers slam themselves about with scary energy. Their partnering style is particularly alarming. Men shove women into the floor and jerk them up, again and again, like they're shaking dustmops. For their part, the women clamber on and about the men as if seeking refuge from unseen vermin; one pose Bigonzetti particularly likes has a woman perched with one leg hooked around her partner's neck while she's crouching behind his shoulder, like a deranged, off-center papoose.

There are two major duets. In the first, Amar Ramasar spends much time flipping Tiler Peck upside down with her legs in the air, or rolling her over his back, all in languorous slow-motion, as if they're having a nightmare about the Apache-dance competition they'd lost. Perhaps they really are dreaming; they spend enough time rolling about on the floor, uh, deck. Later, Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle have a more combative pairing, making the most of her flexibility for some particularly striking poses, none more so than this recurring one. Kowroski stands on one leg facing Angle, and plants her other foot pointedly on Angle's chest, while holding her arms high like a demented cross between Odile and a praying mantis. Angle stands with his back arched and his arms by his sides, offering himself up to Kowroski's carnivorous foot like Hilarion baring his chest to Albrecht's sword. Bigonzetti soon has other couples echoing this odd pose. I can't parse it, other than being emblematic of how couples can turn on each other under confinement and stress. Throughout Oltramare, there are hints of nastiness between the sexes, as the repeated times a man supports a woman with his hand clamped over her face. Is he about to suffocate her or snap her neck? He never does, but the dancers seem alway on the verge.

As the ballet progresses there are moments when all the couples are dancing in unison, and some vigorous, folk-dance-inspired moments for the male ensemble. It's exciting, but seems more a remembrance of past violence, or a blowing off of festering tension and anger. There's certainly nothing happy or joyous going on here. Near the ballet's end, some dancers reach out their arms towards some invisible destination behind us. But Lady Liberty (or whatever they see) is just another reason for affectless moping. Have emigrants ever contemplated their destination with less enthusiasm? Have they perhaps arrived at Botany Bay? As the curtain falls they prepare to disembark as they boarded, with all the enthusiasm of Sidney Carton at the guillotine.

I'd say its Bigonzetti's business if he wants to present this middle passage as unrelenting misery, but, unless his program note is a miracle of ironic misdirection, that wasn't his intent. After awhile, the relentless gloom and doom stops having anything interesting or coherent to say about the subject matter, and just becomes depressing, as he's misrepresented suffering as profundity. Despite the harsh, non-balletic phrasing and fragments of period dancing that Bigonzetti affects, there's a clichéd feel. Bigonzetti repeats and recycles bits and pieces so assiduously that even if a step doesn't look like something you've seen a million times before, it will soon enough. There's something unseemly about his reduction of such an important story to a venue for spreading such harshness and sorrow. The only golden door at the end of this journey was the one through which I happily escaped to the lobby after the bows. Did it occur to Bigonzetti that his ballet would premiere before the descendants of the people his dancers are portraying? My grandparents deserve better.

As for the other passages, Tiler Peck continues her habit of making Christopher Wheeldon's ballet look better than with their original casts. In An American in Paris, Peck took over the role of the sweet young thing with whom Damian Woetzel's painter, enthralled and thrilled by the Paris that's magically emerged from his enormous vaguely Cubist landscapes, dances a love-struck duet by the banks of the Seine. Peck's sweetness and subtlety made her character the only one, besides Woetzel's, which amounted to more than a dancing cliché. Sara Mearns was the red-bereted beatnik/hipster girl. It's a shallow role, but she had a happy energy in the jazzy parts, and it was good to see her in a role that needs her to cut loose and act wild and spontaneous. The ensemble gave Wheeldon's silly ballet more energy and conviction than it deserves, and Georgina Pazcoguin's buxom streetwalker was a particular delight.

In Peter Martins' little sketch Valse Triste to the popular Sibelius piece, Darci Kistler spent much time posing in reflection, contemplating the stage or ceiling while elegantly resting on a knee, or pacing about, while an offstage fan delicately stirred her black dress and long tresses, which have reverted to brunette this season. From time to time, like a memory, Jared Angle would whoosh in from the wings as his blousy shirt also fluttered in the breeze. He'd delicately scoop Kistler up and carry her about for a few bars, before racing off again. I quickly noticed that Kistler wasn't actually doing any steps in Angle's absence, just delicately noodling around on pointe. "Ah, it's another one of those pieces," I thought, where Martins has made roles where Kistler doesn't actually dance much on her own. He actually made Valse Triste in 1985 for Patricia McBride, who was herself d'une certaine age at the time, and Ib Anderson. Perhaps back then the piece didn't look so much a vehicle for a declining ballerina. While Kistler started out in a glowing-sunset mode, it soon became sadly clear that she just wasn't up for even the ballet's modest demands. Although she didn't make any major mistakes, she was alarmingly tense and stiff, and it was a blessing when the curtain fell.

Why have I never before noticed that one of the songs at the beginning of Leonid Desyatnikov music for Alexei Ratmansky's lovely Russian Seasons praises the virtues of growing a field of flax, and cannabis? Perhaps that explains why Ratmansky's dances in the Spring section have their slapstick moments. Indeed, the cast were a bit heavy-handed with the comedy, and there were times Albert Evans was so relentlessly impish I wanted to chase him with a butterfly net. It was Georgina Pazcoguin's night, as she substituted for Rebecca Krohn in the ferociously hard role originated by Sofiane Sylve. While Pazcoguin's doens't match Sylve's iron-sinewed technique, she did show some pretty pirouettes and fouettes. Softer and more vulnerable in manner than Sylve, Pazcoguin's portrayal was playful and dramatic. Rachel Rutherford debuted in Jenifer Ringer's role, with the beautiful solo where three men surround her like invisible angels, sheltering her and making their bodies into steps that let her walk above the stage floor. With her etherial beauty and delicacy, Rutherford glowed as if she were ascending to heaven. As always, the ensemble favors this ballet, with many small solos and stage business for all. In her long solo expressing a song about a woman mourning her dead lover, Wendy Whelan was heartbreakingly poignant. Near the ballet's end, she and Evans return to the stage in white raiment, as the dancers join the wonderful soprano Irina Rindzuner in a final hymn. She's the embodiment of the year to come, and for one wonderful instant, she and Evans shush the audience with a finger to their lips, icons come to life.

Then it was time for my own cold passage down Ninth Avenue.

Pazcoguin, Woetzel, Mearns, Kistler, Angle, Fowler, Angle, Kowroski, Peck, Ramasar, Rutherford, Whelan, Evans

In his third work for New York City Ballet, Mauro Bigonzetti, artistic director of Alterballeto, takes on a big subject: Oltremare or overseas journey, which here refers to the Atlantic crossing by legions of immigrants made at the turn of the last century. Addressing universal hardship, the ballet’s Italian title and Bigonzetti’s style deliver a very un-New York City Ballet production. Balanchinian coolness it is not, but a heart-on-your-sleeve dance.

Oltremare begins with 14 dancers, carrying an old leather suitcase, moving in single file and crossing the lip of the stage. They crouch behind their sole possession and gesture boldly with a drama not practiced widely since the days of Martha Graham. The commissioned music by Bruno Moretti includes bandoneon, harp and rumbling timpani, where minor chords prevail and melodic rifts evaporate into the darkness. On stage there isn’t a primary color in sight, either in the loose-fitting old world traveling costumes by Bigonzetti and Marc Happel, or in the nocturnal lighting plot by Marc Stanley.

Begun last fall and premiered last week, Oltremare is not a fun ballet. I would title it “Struggling with your Soul Mate in Times of Trouble.” I don’t mean to be glib. It’s just that in the seven, physically torrential pas de deux the immigration theme drowns like so many stones sucked down by riptide.

On January 30, Jared Angle strung up his partner by the ankle, transforming her into a human noose. That should give you an idea of the dire content of the seven duets. As each pair performed, with total commitment and physical daring—especially in the dancing of Amar Ramasar whose family originally hails from India—the rest of the cast sat on their luggage in a semi circle at the back of the stage. Calmly chatting with each other, they didn’t seem to notice the goings on a few feet in front of them. This included a man lashing his woman across the floor like a wet coiled rope. A woman taking her foot to her partner’s chest like a doorstopper, and a tendency for the manipulation of legs and arms to resemble a warring couple’s escalating volley of curse words. As I watched, I asked myself, if the oltremare travelers don’t care about these people’s struggles, should I?

To break up the I-hate-you/I love-you-pas de deux, Bigonzetti created three group numbers with folksy stomping, kick-up-your-legs, do-see-do unison steps reminiscent of Fiddler on the Roof. Oh vey. Here is another dance crying out for a good editor.

Aside from these failings, Bigonzetti deserves praise for his attempt to make a big, bold dance that shows off the City Ballet dancers’ range. Sean Souzzi spun on one hand, sending his body in a full-circle spin like a practiced B boy. Andrew Veyette whirred his legs like a Cuisinart blade free from its holding. Amar Ramasar pounded his chest and flung up his arms like a madman. At one point, the entire female cast executed in unison a double tour against the body of her partner. Each woman was caught time under her armpits as though, after flinging herself overboard, she had been saved.

Also on the program, aptly titled “Passages,” was Peter Martin’s 1985 Valse Triste performed by Darci Kistler with fragility (the physically pained-looking kind), and by Jared Angle, who dutifully partnered her. Christopher Wheeldon’s 2005 An American in Paris began the night and Alexei Ratmansky’s 2006 masterpiece Russian Seasons ended this leviathan evening of dance watching.

Ramasar, Veyette, Suozzi, Angle, Kistler