When Balanchine famously—or infamously—assigned ballet to Woman, he didn’t mean the choreographers, who remained staunchly male at New York City Ballet during his lifetime and decades beyond. The fact, then, that the company’s sparkly, prestigious fall gala and “Contemporary Choreography” program are devoted to women choreographers—and young ones at that—amounts to a declaration of independence and a pledge to a liberated future. Yay! That said, premiere nights at City Ballet have long proved a gamble. Ballet choreography is a rarified and rare art, as talent for stage design tends to run counter to that for kinetic musicality. But Gianna Reisen’s penchant for strange surreality bodes well for her third work for the company. And the N.Y.C.B. newcomer Caili Quan—until recently a dancer at the iconoclastic BalletX, of Philadelphia—brings to bear on Saint-Saens’ Cello Concerto No. 1 her upbringing in Guam, with its percussive, blunt-angled folk dance. As for last winter’s concerto ballet by the principal dancer Tiler Peck, it is sturdily constructed and deliberately if somewhat thoughtlessly derivative, peppered throughout with quotes from Balanchine. But the audience liked it. —Apollinaire Scherr