Last spring, reviewing one of the dutifully correct and deadly dull performances that have come to characterize Mikhail Baryshnikov’s American Ballet Theatre, I wrote that it almost made you long for the bad old days of Lucia Chase.

I was kidding. Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones, apparently, are not. In an odd program entitled “Together!,” self-produced and presented at City Center for a week in late September, Gregory and Bujones, like White Russians wistful for a more glamorous brand of authoritarianism, invoked the final years of the Chase era, which came to an abrupt halt in 1980 with the forced transfer of power from the aging company co-founder and benefactress to the young Soviet-defector superstar.

Baryshnikov had been a thorn in Bujones’s side from the moment of his defection in the summer of 1974, when news of the Soviet dancer’s leap to freedom overshadowed the American’s achievement of becoming the first of his countrymen to win a gold medal at Varna, the most prestigious international ballet competition. (Baryshnikov had won it in 1967.) And despite Bujones’s shameless self-promotion—he once said in an interview in the Times that “Baryshnikov now has the publicity, but I have the talent”—he would forever remain in the other dancer’s shadow. When Baryshnikov became Bujones’s boss, it was only a matter of time before a showdown. The decisive moment came in 1985, when Bujones, frustrated by a lack of new roles, asked ABTto hire Maurice Béjart to create a work on him.