DANCE TROUPE’S LOCAL DEBUT : GARTH FAGAN’S ECLECTIC BUCKET

In its first visit to California, Garth Fagan’s Bucket Dance Theatre proved two things in a performance Thursday at Cal State Long Beach:

First, Fagan is a strong company builder. His 12-member New York troupe danced with rare power, clarity, energy and style.

Second, the all-Fagan program revealed an inventive, eclectic choreographer who successfully could blend elements of ballet, jazz, modern and Afro-Caribbean dance.

But his choreography also proved uneven. Fagan succeeded better in the short run than in sustaining interest for long periods.

In the brilliant opening of “From Before,” five dancers took turns mirroring the lilting speech-song rhythms in choral-and-steel-band music by Trinidad composer Ralph MacDonald. The dancers’ rapid, complex body articulations prevented the deadening effect latent in such on-the-note movement.

But a sense of unified impulse soon petered out, and Fagan only offered a series of unrelated virtuoso solos interrupted by group friezes to fill out the music.

The program had opened with a similar sequence of unconnected display passages (“Prelude”), but that seemed more acceptable as an easy way to introduce the dancers.

“Dance Psalmody 137,” “Dance Psalmody 69” and “Rainbow Ballroom Romp”--all part of “Never Top 40 (Juke Box)”--also offered sharp, sensitive continuity of dance impulse and were splendidly danced by Steve Humphrey, Shelly Taplin, Norwood Pennewell and Regina Smith to various scores.

But these works lasted only a few minutes. In anything longer, the choreographer’s seemingly prodigal inventiveness led to splintered, incoherent effects. Less would have been more.

Moreover, Fagan could be strikingly unmusical. In “Court Dance Contemporary,” he set a quartet of dancers spining across the floor or shaking spastically to the soaring, lyrical line of “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.” In “Oatka Trail,” Humphrey’s jogging in circles and body shudders looked ill matched to the dreamy adagio from Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.

For all that, the dancers’ superb control in slow, excruciatingly difficult one-legged balances and extensions (occurring often enough to be considered a Fagan signature motif) merited the highest respect.

The company also will perform tonight at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa and Sunday night at Wadsworth Theater, UCLA.