Lately when spring rolls around and Dance Theatre of Harlem announces its home season, many of us feel nothing but relief. After an eight-year hiatus because of financial woes, then the pandemic, no one is taking the storied ballet company for granted. For his second season as artistic director—after 13 years as a dancer and another 25 as resident choreographer and school director—Robert Garland adds the comic Donizetti Variations to the uptown troupe’s Balanchine trove, builds the Forsythe-and-friends trove with a Jodi Gates premiere and Forsythe’s own hyperextended, slyly subversive Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, and presents two of his own works, one old and one new. The premiere, The Cookout, proceeds in Garland’s chosen key of “urban neoclassicism,” by which Balanchine’s jazzed-up classicism arrives with funk flourishes. This barbecue heats up to a mixtape of soul-funk standards that you could imagine blasting out of a boombox on a summer evening in Marcus Garvey Park. Each of the four programs at City Center includes four of the season’s five works in a unique configuration. —Apollinaire Scherr