Avaz troupe shows its stripes with revised ‘Guran’

With its mythic fantasy “Guran,� the locally based Avaz International Dance Theatre greeted the millennium by discarding the usual mission of folkloric performances in our immigrant nation -- reconnecting with a lost homeland -- and instead creating a bold theatrical vision that drew its resources from many different cultures.

On Sunday, Avaz designer/choreographer Jamal brought an 80-minute revision of “Guran� to the Aratani Japan America Theatre. Titled “The Golden Mask of Guran,� it again focused on ancient Persian hunters and wild zebras but proved clearer in its narrative and more artful in its incorporation of Western ballet.

New characters heightened key issues -- especially the Roman slave girl Azadeh (Karen Ochoa), who not only embodied Jamal’s sense of pristine Persian classicism but became a witness to the tale’s embodiments of magic (Carolyn Melson as a golden zebra) and violence (Genaro Diaz-Caamal as a brutal king).

Spinning slowly and steadily in place, her hands reaching up and out, Ochoa served as the center of calm: a peacemaker in dramatic function and movement style. Always subordinate in the royal court and the zebra forest, she helped bring the audience into the imaginative world on display.

Structural problems still weakened the work, especially a long court interlude midway through that would have been welcome much earlier but here suspended the plot for far too long. The ending also seemed incomplete: a preliminary skirmish rather than a final battle.

However, the zebra dances remained thrilling, blending tribal urgency and enormous sophistication of expressive detail. The thin strips of fabric on the dancers’ skirts (3-D zebra stripes) always shimmered in these ensembles, and Jamal added exotic finger-vibrations to perhaps the most memorable of them.

His costumes once again gleamed against his bamboo forest, the dancing of the 18-member cast reflected Avaz’s vaunted versatility, and the music by Ahmad Pejman added its own luster as well as considerable rhythmic force.

As a humane spectacle about several kinds of endangered species, “The Golden Mask of Guran� is one of the most distinctive achievements of the Southern California dance community, an index to how cultural diversity can inspire artistic innovation.

A repeat performance is scheduled at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on April 30.