Invited to a party full of emotions

Choreographer David Parsons’ new pop suite, “Shining Star,” has nothing on its mind but creating a seductive party fantasy for 10 members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater -- and, of course, the audience.

At this party, everyone is welcome, dresses beautifully in gleaming white, behaves with a natural elegance and dances like a dream to a collection of Earth, Wind & Fire records.

Nobody drinks too much, stays too long, spills the guacamole, stinks up the bathroom or hits on someone else’s date. It’s all perfect, with a row of stylized footlights at the back of the stage casting a magical glow on the guests -- proof positive of the line in the title song, “You’re a shining star, no matter who you are.”

At the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday, this glossy diversion -- with its sleek Ann Hould-Ward costumes and prismatic Howell Binkley lighting -- featured Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell and Dion Wilson in the central duet, a compilation of showy lifts ornamented with sensual stretches and playful floor poses.

Mostly, though, “Shining Star” belongs to an ensemble that can effortlessly strut, slink and swirl, as well as make us believe that we too could have danced like this if only we’d been on Parsons’ invitation list. (Hey, David, I’m in the book.)

Parsons serves up another kind of escapism in the 1982 solo “Caught” (music by Robert Fripp), on the same program. Here Clifton Brown looks locked to the earth, though glimmers of bird-motion -- arms like rippling wings, for instance -- suggest a transformation in the offing.

Sure enough, Brown suddenly flies in the air through flashes of light: a spectacular illusion that relies on the same quirk of human perception that enables us to see a rapidly changing series of still photos as a moving picture. Although strobes and jumps are the raw materials of “Caught,” Brown makes the result a vision of freedom rather than a mere stunt. And though his timing could be better, his hold on our imagination never falters.

At the opposite extreme from escapist illusions, the choreographies of the late Ulysses Dove abstract human struggle, focusing on everything that Parsons so artfully smooths away. Like Parsons (who began his career as a Paul Taylor dancer), Dove had links to Martha Graham, and something of her capacity for fury gives his 1986 women’s sextet, “Vespers,” its powerful inner drive.

After a solo by Fisher-Harrell and a duet for her and Asha Thomas that introduce the contrast between trapped rigidity and desperate lunges toward an impossible escape, Dove expands the piece. The one wooden chair we saw in the opening section now becomes a cluster of six on the left and a line of six on the right. Sitting in them with a terrible tension, running between them and sometimes collapsing on the floor, these women trace a hopeless path.

As Mikel Rouse’s percussive score pounds at them, moments of tenderness and mutual support along with flashes of defiance lighten the sense of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives -- generations of women -- forever imprisoned by destinies they never chose.

That’s what fine dancing does so brilliantly: show us the unseeable, whether that’s a society’s notions of upscale affirmation (“Shining Star”) or evidence of how it enslaves people in the name of stability (“Vespers”). The best abstract dance is never meaningless; the moves and patterns give us direct access to uncharted realms of emotion and experience.

Beyond the many accomplished performances on view, the feel-good and feel-bad dichotomies on Thursday’s program -- which also included Ailey’s “Revelations” -- told us truths about a world that alternately delights and scares us.

And also about a company that Ailey created to make us see and feel more than ever before.

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 2 and 8 p.m. today, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $25 to $75

Contact: (714) 556-2787 or www.ocpac.org