Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project opened the 70th-anniversary season of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival last week with a fascinating program that included two recent works by a postmodern-dance icon, an old work by a modern-dance rebel, and a new but familiar work from the downtown New York scene. White Oak has been performing an eclectic repertory since its inception, in 1990, and by now its collected works amount to more than seasonal novelties.

Modern dance and its offspring, postmodern dance, are by definition disappearing species. In our culture that means the work usually enters the realm of mythology once the originators are no longer here to perform it. White Oak can’t exactly be counted among the handful of modern-dance repertory companies because it doesn’t keep productions around for more than a season or so. But with each program we get new ways to look at modern-dance history from new angles.

Lucinda Childs has supplied White Oak with several pieces over the years. Of all the postmodernists, she was the most austere and at the same time the danciest, a combination that suits Baryshnikov very well. He opened the program at Jacob’s Pillow with Childs’s 2001 solo Largo, to music by the Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli. With simple walking steps and port de bras, a few easy turns and elevations, he casually contradicted any hopes the audience might have had for a shot of virtuosity.

What he gave instead was a pure and essential classicism, the part that has to be there before a great artist displays any tricks. He performed every change of direction, every subtle response to the music, every beautifully placed unfolding of the legs and arms, as both completely natural and expertly crafted. One of Baryshnikov’s special qualities, even when he was the king of ballet stars, has been his diffidence, his refusal to seduce the audience with his personal magnetism alone. You always had to consider what he was doing — a role, a style, a choreographic scheme. And this immersion in the dance itself has not only served him as an older dancer, it’s given new dimensions to choreography we might have pigeonholed long ago. I’d underestimated Lucinda Childs’s musicality, for instance, until seeing Baryshnikov working to Corelli.

In her early work, Childs adopted several techniques for avoiding the type of audience manipulation that the postmodern dancers declared decadent. With a minimal movement vocabulary, repetitious and geometric patterns, and a strictly neutral performing attitude, she submerged her musical and theatrical expressiveness. But now these austere non-sequiturs don’t seem shocking. They even hint at meaning, in the old-fashioned expressive artistic sense.

Childs contributed dance and movement to several big theater pieces of Robert Wilson, and by coincidence I was able to see Wilson’s big installation 14 Stations at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), in North Adams, just before going on to Jacob’s Pillow. Wilson’s piece, commissioned in 2000 to be shown during the famous Oberammergau Passion Play in Germany, doesn’t have any direct relation to Lucinda Childs, but the installation reminded me of the early sensibilities of the two of them. Neither one has changed his or her basic approach, but the audience now is probably more tolerant of art that swerves away from the obvious.

14 Stations is Wilson’s meditation on the Crucifixion and the penitential journey that commemorates it, the Stations of the Cross. In an immense gallery, which is actually a whole building in the museum’s converted mill complex, 12 small houses are set facing one another along a boardwalk. When you enter, you look down this avenue toward a kind of altar, an arched structure enclosing the pale figure of a man suspended upside down over a flat, squared-off set piece that could represent a bed. You take it all in first as an environment, a stage set perhaps, or a village. I felt I had entered a huge church; my friend thought of Auschwitz.

Then you pull in your attention from this panorama and begin your passage. At the head of the aisle there’s a metal cylinder set in the floor. You look down into it. Crimson liquid swirls in the bottom. There are threatening voices, a sucking sound, like a volcano or a geyser, implacable forces running in the ground. Each Station has a title. This one is " Jesus Condemned to Death. "

A single four-paned window invites you to peek into each of the 12 houses. You find a tableau or scene made of objects, sounds, lighting, a whole picture like no other picture you’ve ever seen. No. 5, " Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus carry the Cross, " is a gloomy gray room. A dark red Shaker chest of drawers hangs at an angle in midair. Below it, a white wrinkled robe is arrested in flight, with lots of motion in it but no person. A man’s voice is heard, not really talking, but making sounds as if he were considering someone else’s argument: " Hmmmm. " " Hmph. " " Okay. "

These mysterious spaces may convey Robert Wilson’s dreams, but they also evoke ours. Boulders hang by ropes over tiny, crushable objects. Female mannequins with smooth, plastic faces do peculiar things with knitting needles. There are disembodied hands and eyeless red wolves. Real grass is starting to grow under the bed at the end of the room: " The Resurrection. " These bizarre and theatrical images, so seemingly concrete and immobile, release our visions, our imaginings, our fears and longings for comfort, maybe even our reasons for needing religion, or rejecting religion.

Lucinda Childs’s dance and movement interludes in such Wilson epics as Einstein on the Beach (1976) translated his pictorial universe into physical terms. Where he tampered with shape and scale, she altered time and sequentiality. Childs also made surreal theater pieces of her own, like the 1964 Carnation (performed by Emily Coates of White Oak a couple of years ago), where the juxtaposition of seemingly random objects and tasks created an oblique comment on women’s work.

The Experts, by Sarah Michelson, confidently followed the line of dadaistic theater work instigated in the ’60s by Fluxus group and the Happenings that assumed if you put a newspaper, a bathtub, and two parakeets on a stage, you’d automatically have theater. Seven dancers dressed in outlandish costumes performed outlandish actions on a floor covered with bubble wrap while a racing car sped in laps across a screen above the proscenium. There’s a difference between calculated incongruity and unworked zaniness, and to me, Michelson’s piece looked dopy. Maybe it’s a generational thing.

Certainly dance ideas make a different kind of sense when we encounter them later on. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that Erick Hawkins and composer Lucia Dlugoszewski (they died in 1994 and 2000 respectively) began their major collaborations during the same years as the postmodern dancers, except that White Oak revived Early Floating (1961) on this program. Although Hawkins made a determined break from his first partner, Martha Graham, his choreographic style was modern rather than postmodern, artistic and philosophical rather than objective. Hawkins’s movement stresses an open torso, expansive but not complicated legs, curving shapes, and a serene trust in the ground.

Dlugoszewski’s percussion accompaniments supplied all the fireworks, and I missed her diminutive figure in the background knocking on drums, stones, and prepared piano. I thought Emily Coates best captured Hawkins’s contradictory body: the almost disconnected airiness of the arms versus the soft weightiness of the lower body. I admit that I never thought this style was terribly interesting, but seeing White Oak’s accomplished, contemporary rendering of it, I missed its eccentricity.

The evening ended with Lucinda Childs’s 2002 Chacony, which is set to Benjamin Britten string quartets. The nonstop traveling movement in a constantly changing array of group patterns for four women and two men seemed to echo her best-known dances. What I often thought of as dry and formalistic looked more classical with this music. The floor patterns and groupings didn’t seem arbitrary; rather, they kept unfolding into new configurations, exchanges, surprises. The straightforward walking theme with which the dance started expanded into detailed articulations, jumps, backward runs, and partner work with lifts. Each movement of the Third String Quartet ended on a sudden resolution, and the dancers swept from whatever they were doing into a preparatory fourth position.

Baryshnikov entered during the last movement, and as they left, he began a solo to the " chacony " final movement of the Second String Quartet. Suddenly what had seemed cool and methodical became unbearably dramatic. The music stumbled from false starts to false endings, grew more and more excited, less and less conclusive. Baryshnikov stepped with tenser and more adventurous changes of direction, sudden leaps, until he was wrenching into tight turns and almost out-of-control jumps that pitched him off center. Then, with the music, he came to a sudden stop and the lights went out. He seemed to have traveled to the opposite pole from the perfection with which he’d started the evening.