Ann Arbor Summer Festival: Dance Gallery/Peter Sparling and Co.

Does travel change us? Or are we immutable? Former Martha Graham principal Peter Sparling ponders these questions in Travelogue, the evening-length work that premiered with his new company, Dance Gallery/ Peter Sparling & Co.

Subtitled "A Pligrimage for Dancers, Narrator and One-Man Band in Three Acts," Travelogue is what you hope your neighbors might offer, in lieu of the typical slide show, on returning from abroad: a witty, thoughtful consideration, in text and movement, of the exhilaration and dislocation pilgrims and accidental tourists experience alike.

Chronicling Sparling's sabbatical journey to Australia, Indonesia, and Italy, Travelogue largely succeeds in transforming the highly personal--the ailments, the ache for an absent loved one--into the theatrical and universal. Drawing on his journals and on letters lovingly written home to his partner, John Gutoskey (the show's superb costume designer), Sparling has crafted a poetic performance text whose rhythms could power several jet planes, to say nothing of eight dancers.

The text is occasionally difficult to understand, and it wavers in its arguments for travel's transformative power. Still, it's great theater as delivered by guest narrator Malcolm Tulip, extraordinary as the speaking double of pilgrim-hero Sparling.

Indeed, the clever, reinforcing relationship between movement and speech is one of Travelogue's triumphs. In the third act, "Italy," dancers Gayle Bailey, Lisa Catrett-Belrose, Renee Grammatico, Lisa Johnson, Julianne O'Brien, Jeremy Steward, and Josef Woodson disport themselves before set designer Janice Gordon's church door to sultry, whirling music by Frank Pahl, the show's composer and astonishingly inventive one-man band. "Rome," Tulip intones, strolling onto the stage. As if we hadn't guessed.

Throughout Travelogue the dancers suggest the landscapes through which our hero passes. Sparling's centerpiece ceremonial solo in "Indonesia" feels long, but it's a chance to see a great dancer working sculpturally, just as Travelogue is a chance to see text and movement really enlarge each other's horizons.