How many women live in New Jersey, perform at Mikhail Baryshnikov’s gala in New York city one week, then in the next travel to the Vineyard to lead school kids in movement and the art of the spoken word?

It’s Claire Porter — here under the auspices of The Yard and its artistic director, Wendy Taucher — who is ratcheting up excitement this week in all the Island schools.

Ms. Porter is known as a dancer, spoken word artist and comedian — but to that I must add chameleon, for when I first laid eyes on her across a room of sixth graders at the Oak Bluffs School on Tuesday, I took her for one of the students. Petite, with light brown hair pulled back from a momentarily expressionless face, she wore faded black yoga pants, a gray hoodie and lace-up ankle boots.

The teacher, Beth Flaherty, called the class to attention, ranged as it was over a number of round tables. Ms. Porter, still looking kid-like and nondescript, stood before the students and told them to open their notebooks, her excitement level roughly that of a proctor getting ready to administer SAT tests. And yet, as the saying goes, she had them at “hello.”

They began by writing words describing something that grows from the ground. Ms. Porter instructed them to circle the action words, pick a favorite, then form a circle, and act out the chosen verb. All at once, seventeen 12-year-olds were wriggling, leaping, expanding, gesticulating and laughing through their own personal expressions of the rites of spring.

Ms. Porter kept the movements varied, slotting the students’ self-styled choreography into shoulders and arms, torso, legs — bigger! smaller! — now feet, legs, torso and arms. Now try contrasting movements. Soon she had the kids forming partners and applying titles to each other’s actions: Deadly Rainfall, Flower Unfolding and Dying, Seeds Containing Ballet Movements, and Global Warming were some of them.

Ms. Porter asked the students to shuffle the words they’d been given into seven new titles. One boy moaned to two taller girls, “You have entire sentences to work with. I’ve got three words!”

The dancer had the kids demonstrate their movements, freeze and announce the title, then perform the movements once more. A tall, thin girl with long dark hair, in jeans, a long-sleeved pink top and pink flip flops, put a hip hop motion into her Blooming Plant. A boy in a gray T-shirt, without dramatic dance moves, nonetheless demonstrated a knack for words as he named his piece The Delusional Flying Super Plant That Smells Like Anchovies.

Claire Porter had been booked this week into school sessions with kids of all ages, but later on that same Tuesday, I caught up with her for a private gathering of Yard supporters at Sally Cohn’s new studio in Edgartown. Here we met the glamorous avatar of the chameleon, dressed in tropical-print capri pants, a tight, long-sleeved red shirt, high heels and big red, yellow and green hoop earrings. The name of Ms. Porter’s first piece was Happenchance, and she set in motion a series of gestures in combination with a friendly gab-fest, the moves filling in words and vice versa, in a kind of Absurdist playlet about meeting, greeting and changing one another in the process.

In her second folie à une , Ms. Porter appeared in a navy blue business suit, black stockings, black pumps, hair slicked back, a portfolio-shaped purse in hand. Her situation was a job interview and her basic prop was a red metal chair upon which she sometimes sat primly, other times wielded like a lion tamer, and on still other occasions sexed it up like Liza Minnelli with her own chair in Cabaret. The hilarious piece is a blend of the conscious and the unconscious, the sheer terror, and the unmentionable content of the personality under the microscope as the job applicant tries to intuit what’s desired and not desired from a hiring committee who may as well be the Second Tribunal of the French Revolution. At one point the dancer literally stands on her head to get this job, her severe black skirt plunging over her shoulders to reveal a goofy pair of blue and purple bloomers.

Adding a new twist to performance art, for her third piece, entitled See You Around, Ms. Porter drew two volunteers from the audience to read the script of a set-piece she normally enacts with a fellow dancer, who happened to be in Cleveland on Tuesday. Musician Carol Loud and Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School teacher Roberta Kirn gamely took up the challenge, and read the playlet about two cloak-and-dagger bureaucrats watching their colleagues come and go around them. Ms. Loud and Ms. Kirn were so professional in their roles, you had to wonder if the whole thing was a set-up!

Finally Ms. Porter asked our help in dredging up from our stream-of-consciousness words to describe journalism, for a new piece for which she’s been commissioned, to be titled Back Story. As a journalist myself, I provided “Lois Lane, deadline, word-count, and the inevitable protest that arises in every interview, ‘But don’t write that!’”

Before bidding Ms. Porter farewell, I had to get the down-low on the gala with Baryshnikov: “What was he like to work with?”

It turns out Misha couldn’t have been more charming. After his new best friend, Claire, introduced the event and the venue (one of her specialties in performance art), Baryshnikov caught up with her back stage, jogged maniacally in place, pumped his arms and cried, “Yes! Yes! Yes! They loved it! Loved it! Loved it!”

Later the great Russian dancer took Ms. Porter aside to introduce her to Lauren Bacall. We can only assume that in that moment this dancer-comedian-chameleon radiated pure movie star mega-wattage herself.