American Indian Dance Theatre.

Jacob's Pillow often seems the most American of sites. It is, after all, the country's oldest outdoor dance festival, founded in 1933 by Ted Shawn in the lush Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, the rough-hewn exteriors of its buildings belying the sophistication of the art on view within. Before his departure last year to the New England Foundation for the Arts, former executive director Sam Miller scheduled a company utterly indigenous to our continent--American Indian Dance Theatre--then gave us a world view, a tribute to the international language of dance, with companies from India (via England), Israel, and Japan. (Miller has been succeeded as director by Sali Ann Kriegsman.)

Of the companies seen on the main stage, American Indian Dance Theatre is fascinating for its diversity: it ranges from the dances of the Kwakwak'wakw peoples of the Northwest coast of British Columbia, performed with heavy wooden masks, to all sorts of competitions--between men on drums, between women in fancy shawls, and between men in marvelously ornate feathered costumes. Gathered from eighteen different nations, the varied dancers understand movement differently, use weight differently, even stomp differently.

Their performance contained a particularly wonderful moment when an obviously new performer in the Hoop Dance tried with undisguised concentration--as if he were at a powwow and not on a theatrical stage--to emulate Eddy Swimmer's intricate magic with reed hoops as the latter twined them about his limbs and torso to suggest birds in flight and other creatures of the wild.