A joyful, creative finale

For a decade, the award-winning American Repertory Dance Company has been indispensable for its vivid revivals and reconstructions of early modern dance classics. On Saturday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, the company, co-founded in 1994 by Bonnie Oda Homsey and Janet Eilber, unfortunately gave its final performance.

But while there were tears -- justifiably -- the company also went out in a joyful, creative way with a program titled “Dreams” that enlisted 80 ecstatic students from Los Angeles, Glendale and Pasadena and additionally offered four short premieres.

A former Martha Graham star dancer, Homsey actually has been at this project since 1978, when she founded Los Angeles Dance Theatre. She worried even then that masterpieces of modern dance were vanishing down the memory hole. Unlike ordinary history, which people are condemned to repeat if they forget, creative lightning strikes once and never again. How could younger generations of dancers progress if they lost track of their own lineage?

But modern dance also has a tradition of rejecting tradition. “I have finally realized that in part, the art-form is a victim of its own principle: Do not look back,” Homsey wrote, explaining in an e-mail why she was shutting down the company. She gave as other reasons diminished federal and state funding and fewer touring opportunities. Finally, she wrote, there was the issue of the company’s “trademark roster of ‘mature’ artists. My defiant stance on ageism can only go so far.”

Let’s dispense with the last reason at once. In Eloy Barragan’s tango duet, “Dancer to Dancer” -- one of the four premieres -- to music played by the Kronos Quartet, Homsey showed the arresting stage presence that has always compelled attention. All her movements were crystal clear, invested with a paradoxical mix of seamless energy and seeming relaxation. Other dancers, by comparison, often looked splintered and prismatic, although Barragan proved a lyrical partner here.

Homsey choreographed “Wish,” another premiere, to music of Bach, as a lovely Garden of Delights ensemble piece for five buoyant dancers -- Lillian Bitkoff, Diane DeFranco-Browne, Susan Gladstone, Tim La Viano and Julie Shulman.

Nancy Colahan and Christopher Pilafian danced their own new “Dream Dancing” (Cole Porter as sung by the male a cappella ensemble Chanticleer), which would have fit right into an Astaire-Rogers film.

Laurence Blake’s new “Decisions” (music by Giovanni Sollima) posed -- and left unresolved -- thorny questions about individuality and relationships among a group that included Blake, Bitkoff, Shulman, La Viano and Debra Noble.

Grammy Award-winning singer Bunny Hull led the dancers in her upbeat “Peace in Our Land” finale. Still, no one would begrudge ultimate honors going to the students of the Atanian Art Center, Pasadena Civic Ballet Center, Marlborough School (with poet Karen Malina White) and Rosemont Avenue Elementary. Homsey and company gave them much to dream on.