When Susan Jaffe assumed the reins of American Ballet Theatre from longtime director Kevin McKenzie, in 2022, one wondered whether the very American, very appealing former ballerina would take a page from her own ABT boss, Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was so daring in his curation that his board hardly tolerated him. So far, she hasn’t. For her first summer season, Jaffe is favoring story ballets that were either tired to begin with (Onegin and Like Water For Chocolate, Christopher Wheeldon’s longwinded footnote to the movie) or have become so from overexposure. The one intriguing addition—and the season’s sole premiere—is Woolf Works, choreographed in 2015 by the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor. Woolf Works devotes each of its three acts to a different Virginia Woolf novel. The choreographer and the novelist are not an obvious fit. McGregor, an extreme-ballet maverick and movement systematizer, is almost clinical in his approach, with bodies kept off-kilter and splayed out. Woolf’s terrain is that of most novelists: shades of feeling, states of mind. But they are both serious experimentalists. —Apollinaire Scherr