Charles Anderson’s love for the idiom and manners of classical ballet informed the New York debut program of Company C Contemporary Ballet, his San Francisco-based troupe, on Thursday night at the Joyce SoHo. A former New York City Ballet dancer, Mr. Anderson helped to found and direct Ballet Inc., a series that encouraged new and lesser-known choreographers to create ballets.

But his 12-member company, formed in 2002, is not a polite textbook copy of a chamber ballet troupe, filled as it is with distinctively big, extroverted women and smaller, more introspective men. And one of his choreographers was the adventurous, iconoclastic Twyla Tharp, whose “Country Dances” was restaged for the company by Christine Uchida. But Mr. Anderson’s delight in ballet was central to the evening.

Aléxandre Proia, a guest choreographer, clearly shares that love, taking it an extra step into pure, limpid ballet territory in an excerpt from his 2004 “World to Come.” Patrick Corbin, also a guest artist, tempered the form with today’s pump-it-up physicality, evident in “Partly Cloudy.” Most choreographers seem to have a dance that begins, usually unconvincingly, with the dancers warming up onstage, and this was Mr. Corbin’s.

Mr. Anderson’s “Hush” looked like an incompletely envisioned foray into classicism and its legends. A modern revisiting of Fokine’s “Dying Swan,” “Hush” did not add much to the look and lore of that hokey but potent 1907 solo, though the way Alexis Drabek’s long arms stretched languidly into oblivion was intriguing. Much more interesting was Mr. Anderson’s new “Aposiopesis,” set to music by Michael Nyman.

The title, which translates as “a break in memory,” seems peculiarly inapt for such an intricately plotted and flowing ballet. Shifting patterns are more important here than the steps, in a dance that grows and changes from a racing swirl of eight dancers, led by Lizabeth Saenz and Elliot Mercer, to a quieter close for elegiac totem bodies. James Meyer designed the stylish, pretty costumes.

Mr. Anderson’s dancers needed to be crisper in Ms. Tharp’s “Country Dances,” which Company C acquired in April. Crispness is crucial to this slyly loving tease of a quartet about country music and ballet, filled with Ms. Tharp’s typical dance-on-a-dime choreography. But it will come.

At the moment, as crucially, there is a playful, easy look to the performing by Charlene Hannibal, Katherine Orloff, Ms. Saenz and Alec Lytton, an endearingly sleepy-looking young dancer with a habit of suddenly whipping casually into bursts of razzle-dazzle dancing.