At first glance, the Tulsa Ballet is not what you’d expect from Oklahoma – first, because its 27 dancers are all from somewhere else. Directed by the Italian Marcello Angelini since 1995, the troupe consists of émigrés from other states plus South Korea, Colombia, Jamaica, Sweden, Venezuela, the Netherlands, Brazil, Russia, Italy, China, and Japan. “How New York!” I think, impressed to find that the reddest state’s governor has flown out to see this largely foreign crew at the Joyce.

Modern heart: ‘Por Vos Muero’

But then the show begins, and though the dancing is fine and sometimes even beautiful, the dances seem as distant from extraordinary as Tulsa is from New York.

Kenneth MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations, to Joplin rags, belongs to the seedy-bar genre of Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue or Tudor’s Judgment of Paris. But Tudor and Balanchine endow their guns-and-bodies-for-hire with a level of detail that wrings pathos out of the world-weary scene; Macmillan merely comments on the category, as if completing a school essay test: “If ragtime were ballet, what would it look like? 30 minutes.” Nevertheless, Kate Oderkirk and company star Karina Gonzalez pour themselves into the steps with sexy slitheriness.

Young Hue’s This is Your Life, created with the Tulsa dancers last year, is still more disappointing because the South Korean choreographer’s New York debut starts from a promising conceit. The title alludes to the 1950s proto-reality show that accosted unsuspecting stars with their pasts. The ballet begins with six dancers confiding their real names and pretend life-stories – in their native tongues. If the ingratiating host had left the confessions untranslated – at once raw and opaque, as in Pina Bausch – the dancing itself would have had to spell out those foreign thoughts and might have avoided cliché: the gay hairdresser, the grey-souled businessman, the “perfect” couple who despise each other.

Only the Spaniard Nacho Duato’s 1996 Por Vos Muero hints at what the company might be. The ballet suffers from the usual problems of work in the Jirí Kylián vein: elaborate allusions – in this case, to courtly love – that don’t add up. But the dancers suddenly move with breadth and weight and joy. You can tell what a company is about by the choreography that sets it free. Tulsa Ballet has a modern European heart.