From the Royal Ballet, a heaping serving on a hot summer night at Jacob’s Pillow

BECKET — Ballet and landscape merged beautifully but too late in the Royal Ballet’s first-ever appearance at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. By the time the barn doors behind the stage slid open, washing Wayne McGregor’s world premiere in mountain breezes, I felt so restless I wanted to leap onstage and fly through them.

The Royal Ballet’s five-day engagement at the Pillow’s woodland dance mecca in the Berkshires was a major event in many ways: Twenty-two top-flight dancers (out of a roster of 104) performed nearly 20 works on the Pillow’s indoor and outdoor stages. Planning took five years.

The works were all cast from strength, but the company tried too hard to impress with style in absence of substance. McGregor’s frictious “Figures in a Landscape” capped a long night on Saturday as the last of nine — yes, nine — works. “Figures” was an ordeal and an anticlimax, memorable for repeated, painfully blinding light effects and a music collage that included pieces by Nicholas Becker, John Cage, Ben Frost, and Abraham Marder. It felt unfinished, while the program’s cumulative effect was oversaturation. Hence my relief when the rear portal opened onto trees, sky, and metaphorical escape.

Granted, the cooling system in the sold-out Ted Shawn Theatre had more or less collapsed. Added to that was all the heat flaming in the ardent pas de deux, including “Giselle,” scenes from Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” and “Carousel,” George Balanchine’s “Diamonds,” and, the emptiest and most expendable, the Agrippina Vaganova/Marius Petipa mishmash from “Diana and Actaeon.”

The two cooler contemporary works that bookended the program — an excerpt from Pam Tanowitz’s “Secret Things,” in its American debut, and the McGregor — ought to have been the standouts amid so many love stories. Indeed, Tanowitz’s piece for eight women and men, which premiered last year in London, was the most interesting piece on the program. It is a subtle work, inventive and profound but in an offhanded way, which made it an awkward opener.

Tanowitz, a modern dance choreographer, takes us into her fascination with ballet as she splinters the technique into pieces. Small fragments of rudimentary training froth to the surface. At the beginning, the tall, reserved Hannah Grennell circles in place with little steps, looking out at us over her shoulder as she pads around. It’s a slow breakdown of how a dancer spots her turns to avoid dizziness, fixing her gaze on something in front of her and with every turn finding it again with her eyes. Later, when other dancers repeat this slow process, it feels slightly hostile. They glare over their shoulders. Don’t they want to be watched? Perhaps this is one of the secrets of the title, a glimpse into a moment of women at work who’d like a little privacy.

The music, Anna Clyne’s string quartet “Breathing Statues,” performed live, also flashes with darkness. Sometimes silence punctuates the lush, Beethoven-inspired melodies, or squealing high notes, enhancing the sense of deep waters being stirred. Meanwhile, the dancers may be hopping heavily on the downbeat, or they may appear unchained from the music. Often they respond in unexpected ways, lying down when the melody soars, or dangling an arm dreamily as the quartet rages.

At one point two different duets are happening at once; a third couple pauses to watch one of them, and then the other, before starting their own. One woman touches the shoulder of a man she passes, a slight gesture that isn’t about performing — it looks like friendship.

The dance sways between casual moments like that and more performative ones that quote from various ballets. The costumes capture this tonal mix: colorful, translucent rompers over sequined leotards, sparkly knee-high compression sleeves on their legs, with multicolored pointe shoes.

I wish there had been more unexpected work such as this, less of the standard gala fare. Amid the more conventional ballet works, what impressed me most was the storytelling strength — the dancers’ ability to create characters and relationships in brief minutes ripped from context. Mayara Magri is a tender misfit in Frederick Ashton’s character study, “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan.” She circled an arm and one sensed hidden passions; she clapped her hands around flotsam as if she’d captured a wondrous new world. On piano, Kate Shipway’s flowing Brahms was its own soft dance.

The “Diamonds,” pas de deux, excerpted from Balanchine’s full-length ballet “Jewels,” can often be a chilly display, the ballerina dazzling but remote. Yet Sarah Lamb, the former Boston Ballet principal, glowed with warmth, drifting on Tchaikovsky’s music, not so much dependent on Lukas B. Brændsrød’s velvet partnering as buoyed by it. At the end, fire: She flashed Brændsrød a look of electrifying gratitude.

Ethereal lightness also lifted the Act II pas de deux from “Giselle.” Has this ghostly character, risen from her grave, ever taken flight as effortlessly as Anna Rose O’Sullivan, or skimmed the stage so silently? Marcelino Sambé brought a searching quality to Albrecht, the remorseful lover with a tinge of inner growth.

Christopher Wheeldon’s “For Four,” accompanied by a Schubert string quartet (performed live), was in this rapturous mold, too. Here, the loose and fluid sensuality of four men suggested liberating emotions and the tossing away of gender norms. Wheeldon’s command of space and transitions is masterly, his relish of the music infused this work with joy. None of the men stood out as individuals, yet they were warmed by simple human grandeur.

Sarah L. Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic and author of “The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life.”