After this weekend’s collaboration (Feb. 3 and 4) with the dance troupe IMAGOmoves, Ruben Valenzuela’s Bach Collegium San Diego will never be accused of keeping early music sequestered in an ivory tower.

Nine of Valenzuela’s instrumentalists and the persuasive alto soloist Angela Young Smucker brought a concert of music by J. S. Bach to UC San Diego’s Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Building to collaborate with choreographer Yolande Snaith, founder of IMAGOmoves. If this was an inspired idea in the abstract, I must confess the results were less than remarkable.

Essentially, the choice of music—movements from Bach’s monumental “The Art of Fugue”—and Snaith’s perky contemporary dance style did not prove that compatible. In her program notes, Snaith made it clear that that she was not attempting “to interpret or illustrate the music historically or emotionally.” Certainly this was a perceptive beginning, because there is arguably no body of western music more abstract and unprogrammatic than “The Art of Fugue.”

It is a staggering catalogue of the many technical ways in which counterpoint may be structured, including inversion, diminution, augmentation, and canonic imitation at both usual and unusual intervals. And each example is clothed in Bach’s inimitable, visionary sense of melody and harmonic progression.

Snaith and her three dancers, Anya Cloud, Alison Smith and Alicia Peterson-Baskel, were then left to react to these contrapuntal studies with equally abstract movements and patterns. So far, so good: in theory, this has potential. Snaith’s post modern dance vocabulary, however, is frisky and impetuous, giving the appearance of complete spontaneity, and it is graced with individual touches by the dancers, especially deft hand movements.

At times it called to mind the rambunctious games of children on a playground. But Bach’s vocabulary in this work is majestic, awe-inspiring, and transcendent—quite the opposite of spontaneous and individual.For me, it was a serious challenge then to integrate the probing quality of this music and IMAGOmoves’ whimsical dance idiom.

Given Snaith’s approach and the desire to link it to early music, I would have chosen French Baroque, say the lively dance suites of Jean-Philippe Rameau or the witty personality sketches of the great viola da gamba composer Marin Marais. Fortunately, the Bach Collegium instrumentalists imbued the eight movements from “The Art of Fugue” with a reverent intensity that touched the heart and lifted the soul.

Guest violinist Rodolfo Richter and Bach Collegium regular violinist Andrea Joubert displayed beautifully matched sonorities that combined a gentle shimmer with mellow warmth, suffusing the stark room like fragrant incense in gilded cathedral. As first violin, Richter led with understated but unambiguous direction, leaving Music Director Ruben Valenzuela to attend, stylishly, to continuo duties at the harpsichord. In that function he was ably assisted by cellist Shirley Hunt and Shanon Zusman on the violone, whose resonant pizzicato elegantly underscored the rhythmic pulse in several movements.

In the alto arias, Daniel Zuluaga also enriched the continuo with the calichon, an instrument of the lute family that German musicians of Bach's time employed to give added attack to the bass line. Between the selections from “The Art of Fugue," alto Angela Young Smucker sang with the ensemble four solo arias from different Bach sacred canatas. Her discerning interpretation of the texts matched her creamy alto sonority and perceptive traversal of Bach’s serpentine vocal lines.

In “Widerstehe doch der Sünde” from Cantata No. 54, for example, Smucker communicated an ennobling confidence, even as the text warns the listener of Satan’s alluring wiles. In Bach’s time, the liturgical cantatas preached doctrine and piety as exhaustively as did ministers from the pulpit, and Smucker demonstrated how astutely Bach fused such rhetoric into his music. It is no surprise that she teaches voice at Valparaiso University, a prominent Lutheran institution in the Midwest, where such insight is still practical.

Although this experiment with contemporary dance and the music of J. S. Bach was stronger in concept than in reality, I hope Bach Collegium San Diego will not abandon its creative edge. The staid early music scene in San Diego desperately needs such vision.