Compania Nacional de Danza.

Nacho Duato clearly has a lot he wants to say in dance. He is a talented, inventive choreographer with a wide vocabulary and a notably liquid flow of movement. The sheer quantity of dancing, movement invention, and emotion onstage was staggering in the six pieces, all by him, that comprised the U.S. debut of his Compania Nacional de Danza--Spain's national ballet company, now remade into a modern dance troupe.

Duato was born in Valencia on Spain's Mediterranean coast but trained and performed in northern climes, where he was a charismatic dancer in Jiri Kylian's Netherlands Dance Theater. For his company, he emphasizes his Mediterranean heritage, its folklore and music. But his Mediterranean is a place from which the sun seems to have fled entirely. Avoiding the picturesque to get at an underlying spirit, a closeness to the soil, a sense of folk history, he ends up working at a constant fever pitch of tension. Even the most abstract and beguiling piece, Duende, becomes hectic as it tries to account for every note of the normally unharried Debussy.

The nearest analog of Duato's high anxiety in traditional Spanish terms might be flamenco's canto jondo. But perhaps it also stems from working in northern Europe. Both the dark moods and the vocabulary, certainly, are related to Kylian--the rooted, wide stances in second position or parallel, the nervous lunges into angular positions.

Duato's steps, however, range wider (once, even cabrioles). They take ample possession of both the air and the floor, from jumps to gymnastics: shoulder stands, somersaults, two women rotating a man on his head.

He also ventures into works of more overt political protest. The best of these seen here was Rassemblement, with a score based on Haitian slave songs, and full of bent backs, furtive slithering, and writhing. The fervent Tony Fabre, with his catlike pouncing, emerged as a fugitive who threw himself upside down on a mass of people in a final heroic image.

Duato's explicitly Mediterranean pieces included Arenal, set to the soul-seraching music of the Mallorcan singer Maria del Mar Bonet. Its set, with the sun sinking behind forbidding carved pillars, and its edgy, hard-driven atmosphere, made me think of the old Soviet Sacre du Printemps. In Mediterrania, touches of humor contrasted with the austerity of its ultimate impression. It opened with women in black before a black background and ended with what looked like Armageddon.

Although the choreography often allows the dancers a physical expansiveness, psychologically and gesturally they are constricted, knotted, and rushed, never having time to relax into the rhythms. They twist through the air in sharp-angled attitudes, lift each other the better to hurtle across the stage. Two men often hoist a woman head over heels, ever faster into new tangles. What saves these frequent pas de trois from looking sexist is that the women are equally active as movers, sometimes like ecstatic victims, but always strong characters, as exemplified by the lone seeress in Arenal (Caty Arteaga the night I saw it).

Other vivid impressions came from the impassioned authority of Catherine Allard, the nervous intensity of former New York City Ballet member Marisa Cerveris, and the knife-swift legs of Patrick de Bana. The dancers' appetite for moving, their deft speed, and their strength as well as flexibility made them deservedly popular with the City Center audiences. Duato's choreography is always engrossing, if cumulatively exhausting to watch, and the dancers are right there on top of it.