Dance : Bella Lewitzky Company at Irvine Barclay Theatre

The program for the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Saturday read like a score card: “Impressions 3,” “Episode 1,” with the words “Game Plan” adding to the illusion of UC Irvine team playoffs.

Of course, what seemed statistics and notes on strategy turned out to be dance titles, but Lewitzky’s athleticism and tactical ingenuity gave the sports connection a certain validity--except that “Impressions” never would have outpointed “Episode.”

In her ongoing “Impressions” series, Lewitzky responds to stimuli from the visual arts: painter Paul Klee in this whimsical 1989 ensemble suite for her full, 11-member company.

In the “Dots and Dashes” and “Thither” sections, the dancers wear or carry large arrows and other graphic symbols from Klee’s works. Indeed, in “Mask,” Dawn Stoppiello and Walter Kennedy tap-dance while holding a huge cutout face in front of them and we see only their feet.

The synthesizer score by Larry A. Attaway often sounds like a music box, reinforcing the childlike naivete, though much of the time Lewitzky explores Klee’s ideas in genuine dance terms rather than settling for cute, arbitrary effects and “Pageant of the Masters” pictorialism.

The result looks unfinished, however, like notebook entries rather than a cohesive statement.

There’s a spectacular solo for Lori McWilliams that inventively deconstructs and reassembles ballet batterie, but also a sketchy, unfocused mock-Arabian quartet that belongs back in the choreography lab.

Most of all, “Impressions 3” looks overproduced, glutted with Klee souvenirs but missing his essence: what he called “the reality that is behind visible things.”

Ironically, Klee’s concept of latent reality informs Lewitzky’s newest creation, “Episodes 1,” the first work in a new low-tech, live-music series intended to showcase individual dancers. Working in a stark, early modern-dance style that Attaway’s piano score strongly parallels, Lewitzky shows a woman coming to terms with her past.

After a taut, forceful women’s trio on a bench, Lewitzky introduces her protagonist, Theodora Fredericks, who interacts with the others and then moves away. After they vanish behind a scrim, she expresses her anguish and anger, which emotions are calmed in a lyrical, gymnastic adagio with John Pennington. He too disappears, but in the end Fredericks finds her way back to all of them--in the memories that this piece so artfully depicts.

Fredericks dances powerfully, but nothing matches the bench trio in its mastery of coordinated motion and high-definition imagery. Lewitzky seems to be revealing secrets here--not of her personal life but of a dance era that we’re taught to revere without fully understanding. Some of us wish she’d never go near another art gallery again, but we’d follow her to any bench any time, anywhere.

Accompanied by Attaway’s piano and drums, “Game Plan” tests the company’s technique and gives us a glimpse of the dancers as people. This “dance design in a game structure” dates from 1973, a period when many American choreographers tried to demystify dance. Thus we find difficult, formal tasks executed in a breezy, offhand manner and a bare stage gradually transformed into a palace of illusion.

As they change from T-shirted individuals to leotarded abstractions, the dancers play tag and follow-the-leader.

But when the leader is the coolly accomplished Pennington, the game becomes a series of bravura turning jumps and other spectacular feats that leave the audience as fundamentally mystified as ever. On stage, virtuosity is magic. “Game Plan” proves that demystified virtuosity is simply a contradiction in terms.