If you seek space for contemplation in these times of painful world conflict, go toAlonzo King Lines Ballet’sfall home season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend.

Not a single line in the program or sentence spoken from the stage at the Thursday, Oct. 12, opening addressed the horrifying escalation of conflict in the Holy Land, yet the performance was relevant. The musical sources are disparate, ranging from Baroque to jazz — and reflecting Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist traditions. King’s awareness of the shared vulnerability of humanity unites them, as does the Lines dancers’ extraordinary commitment.

Nothing on this program, which closes Sunday, Oct. 15, is new, and that is to the company’s credit. Too often, Lines seems to get swept up by the pressure to offer another high-concept, highly packaged evening-length premiere. (Last spring’s collaborationbetween King and photographer Richard Misrach was one such extravaganza, a lengthy spectacle with a sheen of eco-consciousness and a dearth of trajectory.)

King has been making dances for more than four decades, and his catalog teems with masterpieces. Why not dedicate a season to his repertory?

Fortunately, that’s what the company’s creative director and co-founder Robert Rosenwasser has done, selecting six of King’s best works from the past 24 years, some presented in full and some excerpted.

Just what kind of dancing the night will bring is clear from the opening duet of 2009’s “Dust and Light,” as Lorris Eichinger drops his face into Madeline DeVries’ clutching hands. In this intimate way she supports his balancing on one leg, rotating on his axis in a shape known in ballet as “attitude.” In King’s world, the shape is creaturely, an image not from the dance studio but from nature.

Harpsichord music by Correlli intersperses with haunting choral works by Poulenc, as the dancers recouple or triangulate. Romantic love is not the subject here. What the dancers seek in a trio for Eichinger, Joshua Francique and the mesmerizingly fluidBabatunjiis more like that higher love, agape.

The ensemble finale from “Dust and Light” features Shuaib Elhassan’s roiling shoulders and leads straight into the pas de deux from King’s 2000 work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, “Following the Subtle Current Upstream.” The sassy joy of South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba’s voice rings out through the sound system, and Babatunji and Maryusa Madubuko deliver a spirited partnership that feeds energy into the full company climax, set to drumming by tabla virtuosoZakir Hussain. Maya Harr flew through this section with gale force.

Post-intermission brings the vision of DeVries in a glistening short tunic (all costumes by Rosenwasser), her long red hair a curtain that seems to fall between her face’s vacillations from joy to overwhelm in “Child of Sky and Earth,” a solo King made for New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck in 2021. (The equally glistening music is by afrequent King collaborator, jazz composer Jason Moran.)

More jazz follows in the pas de deux from 1997’s “Suite Etta” (as in Etta James), where Adji Cissoko’s unreal extensions shape-shift in slow motion.

Another searing solo for Harr set to Sephardic Jewish music, from 2011’s “Resin,” leads naturally into “Writing Ground,” a 2010 commission from Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo set to sacred early music from four major religions. The last piece of music here is a Tibetan Buddhist chant, with an underlay of synthesizer. The lama’s voice is low, intensely looping, almost stern. Cissoko’s white tunic is tattered. She is helped around the stage and sometimes flown through the air by five men, her eyes wide with something like delirium.

The sight is both beautiful and terrifying. She is preparing to die, but the end of the dance does not find her collapsed upon the ground. Instead, the ensemble holds her so that she can keep reaching beyond.

Too many people have just been killed in the Middle East, and too many people there are about to die. This Lines Ballet season serves as a kind of prayer for peace.

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.