DANCE REVIEW

A potted plant falls from the heights onto the UCLA Royce Hall stage, galvanizing nine meditative, heavily cloaked Ballet Preljocaj dancers into action. They throw off their weighty covers, glory momentarily in their youthful nakedness, turn upstage to don colorful briefs and muscle shirts, and begin yelping and hooting as they cavort to the music of Vivaldi.

Spring has sprung, with a vengeance.

So begins Angelin Preljocaj’s “Les 4 Saisons . . . ,” an 85-minute fantastic excursion through the Red Priest’s most famous score, intercut with periods of silence and movements from other, unidentified Vivaldi concertos, including some of the weirder music that the 18th century Venetian composer wrote.

The performance was seen Saturday as part of the UCLA Live series.

The potted plant was the work of French sculptor Fabrice Hyber, and constituted one of the many hanging and onstage props -- or, as he calls them, “POFs” (Prototypes of Functioning Objects) -- that contributed to the whimsy of the piece. However, they were intended to do more than just that. Like changes in the weather, by falling from the top of the stage or otherwise interacting with the dancers, they disrupted order and introduced elements of chaos into the dance. Correspondingly, Hyber received credit in the program booklet for his “chaosgraphy.”

For his part, Preljocaj wrote that he had four themes of interest -- “bursting forth, exultation, suspension and vibration.”

Not all the dozen or so episodes illustrating these ideas sustained equal interest, but the majority were imaginative and compelling.

Caroline Finn proved a master of Beckett-like comedy as the Queen of Greeny’s, emerging from a cocoon first to marvel at four lithe, phosphorous-green suited men and then to entice a sequence of charming kisses around her body from one of them (Damien Chevron).

A tug-of-war game between two groups developed into a captivating jump-rope sequence in which dancers showed off their bounding, virtuosic talents. The audience rightfully rewarded them with bursts of applause, as if it had seen a sequence of 32 Black Swan fouettes.

Nagisa Shirai and Claudia de Smet danced a curious S&M-tinged; duet (manipulating each other by pinching or tugging at exposed skin) to an unidentified Vivaldi concerto. They returned for the evocative Mask Trio, in which they slowly took undisputed turns, pulling each other away and re-positioning themselves in a mask fixed to another worn by Julien Thibault. The competition was tranquil and strange.

Ayo Jackson and Emilie Lalande proved rock solid in a series of classically cool balances and high extensions in a section called “Perles” (Pearls). In contrast, Chevron and Yang Wang were the friends wearing curious pants costumes in the comic but oddly inconclusive closing movement of “Winter.”

The piece came to a gentle, tender close, to another unidentified concerto, as all the characters reentered to affirm gorgeously costumed porcupines (De Smet and Baptiste Coissieu) slowly making their way toward each other to answer the perennial question of how do porcupines do it. Carefully. Lovingly.

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Ballet Preljocaj

Where: Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $45 to $50

Contact: (562) 985-7000 or www.carpenterarts.org

Also: Friday, La Jolla Music Society; (858) 459-3728 or www.lajollamusicsociety.org