America Songbook.

Stephen Pelton's latest work, America Songbook, doesn't have his earlier works' sense of fluid structural integrity. Set on an ensemble of eight dancers (three of them guest artists from ODC/San Francisco) this intermittently convincing full-hour look at American history is a dreamy evocation of specific times and places. The work proceeds from a honky-tonk frontier town to the high-pitched intensity of a 1920s metropolis, then turns back to the last days of the Civil War. With no connecting narrative, either explicit or implicit, the logic of this nonsequential arrangement remained unclear.

After a short proloque the lights come up on a motley group of characters framed in doorways, as though they were posing for nineteenth-century portraits. At first stiff-legged and knock-kneed, they become increasingly animated until they turn into a crowd of drunks rhythmically crawling in unison. A dance-hall girl's solo of spacey diagonal leaps and lush plies smoothly incorporates cancan steps and ends with her sinking into the obligatory split. Careful shaping by Pelton and nuanced dancing by Katie Moremen made this the evening's most convincing piece of choreography.

The mindless motion associated with big-city life is evoked by dancers striding in and out of the wings, a crowd hopping in unison (as if waiting for a traffic light to change), and -- very effective -- by some hinge-like sit-ups and flopping torsos rendered with alarm-clock precision. While pleasing for a short time, the unrelenting staccato rhythms soon become tedious. In the Civil War section the earth itself becomes the enemy, rejecting its bouncing corpses. People jump into each other's arms to avoid contact with the ground or skip desperately as if trying to find a safe place to land.

Pelton and his collaborator, composer Robert Maggio, make good use of American vernacular culture. Snippets of popular dance steps and songs filter through the original material, like specks of sunlight into an enclosed room. Waltz steps explode into the four corners of the stage; strutting melts into a puddle of bodies; bumps and grinds smooth into abstract unison passages.

Despite the richness of its invention -- pelton makes excellent and repeated use of the floor as a source of energy, for instance -- America Songbook is flawed. Too much material is packed into a limited time frame; nothing is allowed to breathe. The work's unremitting forward propulsion creates a monochromatic mood which obliterates many of its imaginative details and ultimately chokes Pelton's ability to communicate.