Olympic dance: from puppets to Pilobolus.

Along with playing host to Olympic athletes from around the world this summer, Atlanta this month will also welcome the first of twelve dance companies to the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival. Offerings range from Miami City Ballet to Royal Thai Ballet, from a German work about marionettes to the rubber-boned intricacies of Pilobolus. Discussing what Atlanta has scheduled for visitors this summer, Jeffrey N. Babcock, director of the city's Cultural Olympiad which is producing the festival, says, "It's a total Olympic experience that includes both art and sports. There will have been some three thousand participants at forty-one sites when our nine-week festival closes on August 4.

"Our audience is the people who will be here for the games, and we tried to have something for everybody. Some three hundred thousand people are expected to attend cultural events each day. We strove to feature performers from former Olympic host cities, as well as the five Olympic rings: Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania--that is, Australia and New Zealand."

Here are the dance companies that will be performing at the 1996 Olympics Arts Festival, starting July 10:

* Three companies from the Atlanta area: Atlanta Ballet, Ballethnic Dance Company, and Soweto Street Beat Dance Company.

* Four other U.S. groups: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Pilobolus Dance Theater, Miami City Ballet, and Dallas Black Dance Theatre.

* Five international troupes: Phoenix Dance Company (England), Royal Thai Ballet, Netherlands Dance Theater, Gregor Seyffert and Company (Germany), and Karas (Japan).

"We wanted to showcase the best of our region and bring some of the best companies and individual artists in the world to Atlanta," Babcock says. "Miami City Ballet is one of the best in the Southeast. The work Eddie Villela has done there is excellent."

After many years as a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, Villella could be said to be transmitting George Balanchine and his Miami City Ballet dancers to be receiving. Since its inception in 1986, the company has showcased Balanchine's work, as well as that of resident choreographer Jimmy Gamonet De Los Heros's neoclassical style infused with Latin energy. Their Olympic program includes Balanchine's The Four Temperaments and De Los Heros's Nous Sommes.

Other companies will present five world premieres at the Olympics. Karas and Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT) are based in cities that were past Olympic sites: Tokyo in 1964 and Amsterdam in 1928. Hailed as a rising star of post-Butoh dance, Saburo Teshigawara founded Karas (Japanese for raven) in 1985. His 1992 Noiject, which presents an "alienated existence in an overly mechanized twentieth century," will be danced under blue lights around a corroded metal set to a deafening roar created by "noise operators."

NDT's offering, Kaguyahime, is also Japanese inspired. This full-length ballet choreographed by artistic director Jiri Kylian is based on a tenth-century Japanese folk tale; it will be danced to music played on traditional Japanese instruments by the drummers of Circle Persuasion. Its central character, Kaguyahime ("She who shines through the night"), is a spirit of radiant beauty whom a bamboo cutter adopts as his mortal daughter. She attracts the attention of the emperor, but his attempts to possess her are thwarted by a blinding full moon which draws her up to itself.

The third-century B.C. Hindu epic Ramayana is the source of the Royal Thai Ballet offering, The Khon Masked Dance. This two-hour performance re-creates the battle that Rama fought against the demon king who had abducted his wife and brother.

Gregor Seyffert and Company will bring two works from Germany. Clown of God, inspired by Nijinsky's struggle with mental illness, is Dietmar Seyffert's 1990 solo for his son, Gregor; the great dancer's rise to fame and descent into madness is set to Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. Joined by three puppeteers, the troupe will also present Dietmar's Theater of Marionettes, a world premiere. The choreographer says it "illustrates the differences and similarities between the realms of humans and technology." He notes that, unlike humans, marionettes can pivot from the center.

Two black companies embody the theme of hope that runs through several Olympic dance programs. Their founders say that England's Phoenix Dance Company and Atlanta-based Soweto Street Beat Dance Company were created to give hope to underprivileged youth.

Speaking from Phoenix's headquarters in Leeds, general manager Gill Cooper says that the company, directed by Margaret Morris, is Britain's only black modern dance troupe. Members are British and of Afro-Caribbean descent. Three members of Harehills Youth Dance Theatre in Leeds formed the group fifteen years ago, and most of the present company still come from this city. Cooper says, "If you told people in Leeds ten years ago that they would have an internationally renowned dance company from the poorest section of Leeds, they would never have believed you--and yet they have that."

Longevity, on their Olympic program, speaks to the hope of rising, like the mythical phoenix, from the ashes. Choreographer Gary Lambert based the work on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which serves as the score. Cooper says his dancers can relate to this message of "hopes, aspirations, and dreams, and making what might seem impossible possible. What we do is very energetic, very strong, very powerful contemporary dance. Do you Americans use the word pizzazz?" Cooper asks. The company is especially thrilled to be performing the work in the Martin Luther King Jr., International Chapel at Morehouse College, Cooper adds.

Energetic also describes Soweto Street Beat Dance Company, which maintains a training company in Johannesburg, a school in Soweto, and, since 1992, a company in Marietta, Georgia, which qualifies it as Atlanta-based. Soweto-born founder Peter Ngcobo tells how he convinced his wife, Isabelle Doll, then a ballet-trained dancer in Sun City extravaganzas, to help him form the township's first black company in 1989. He said to her, "We must help these poor kids. We need a performing arts company to teach upcoming generations and give them a direction." He adds now that "our mission is to give underprivileged kids a chance to come to America."

The dancers, ages eighteen to twenty-two, are all high school dropouts who now attend school in Marietta. "We use the company to try to give them hope," says Doll. "Some of the kids have seen their parents killed in front of their eyes." She says her dance, Combo (Africa Is Back), another Olympic world premiere, reflects hope for South Africa and asks questions about its fate. "There's a lot of healing to be done," she says. "There's a lot of sacrifices we'll have to make. Every time you go one step forward, you go three steps backward." Her two-hour dance draws on animal movements and on the Xhosa miners' competitive gumboot dance, the Xhoy bushmen's rattle-shaking ritual, and Mapantsula's township jive.

Hope also forms the backbone of David Rousseve's new work, Yellow-Tailed Dogs, performed by Atlanta Ballet. "It gives a sense of rebirth and hope. It's about a region, but has a universal theme," said the company's artistic director, John McFall. He adds that Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground during the Civil War, yet look at the city now. Rousseve based characters on people he met during several visits to Atlanta, says McFall. Actors portray three African American men from the early 1800s, 1920s, and 1996 as well as a white woman from 1964 in Rousseve's look at race relations. The hundred-member, all-male a cappella Morehouse College Glee Club will perform onstage during the dance.

Atlanta Ballet plans to leap into the future with David Parsons's Time Piece, produced under its Dance Technology Project in a collaboration with Georgia Institute of Technology which premiered the work in April in a small theater (transfer to a larger space has presented problems). Dancers perform with computer-generated, three-dimensional images based on Parsons's prerecorded movements. Says company manager Amanda Lester, "This techno-man does all kinds of things a human body couldn't do." Lester says the pace changes in Lila York's Rapture; dancers slowly cartwheel against a black, starry sky.

Ballethnic Dance Company, the third Atlanta troupe performing this summer, will premiere Irene Tassembedo's Trouble. Cofounder Nena Gilreath-Lucas described it as "an allegorical tale of suffering, hope, and redemption." In it, dancers try to make it rain. "It's about a drought--a drought of the human spirit," she says.

Ballethnic's blend of classical ballet, African, and other dance styles make it a good match for the fusion of ballet and African movements in Trouble, although the dancers did have to get used to Tassembedo's style--"a smoothness, more like a snake," Gilreath-Lucas says. Three members of Tassembedo's Paris-based Compagnie Ebene will join Ballethnic for its Olympic performances.

Gilreath-Lucas and Waverly Lucas, both formerly of Dance Theatre of Harlem and Atlanta Ballet, founded this six-member multi-cultural company in 1990 to introduce young people to dance. "Giselle just wasn't that interesting to them," Gilreath-Lucas says. The company began infusing ballet with African-inspired street dances and in the process found new freedom--even in ballet. She continues, "We're straight and upright, but not stiff and stagnant. We have the freedom to take off our shoes--and go--and put our shoes back on and still have that grounded feeling."

Dallas Black Dance Theater will present two world premieres, commissioned for the Olympics, that address what its artistic director, Ann Williams, decribes as "universal concerns." George Faison's Mad Pain, set to music by Sade, Dr. Dre, Stevie Wonder, and others, presents the helplessness youths feel in the face of drugs, teenage pregnancy, homelessness, and violence. Williams says it underscores the fact that "everybody needs help and support--that the mistakes that are made don't have to end a life." Kevin Iega Jeff's Walls depicts sociopolitical barriers such as the Berlin wall and other obstacles and suggests how to overcome them.

Williams says that she founded the company in 1976 to give black dancers a place to perform. Today the company is multiethnic but still predominantly black. The twelve-member company performs "lyrical modern dance." She says, "There are lots of jumps and leaps, and our movements travel. Most of the time, you can't tell what movement comes next. That adds excitement and mystique." The company performed at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. "We feel that this is another stamp of approval," Williams said of their appearance at Atlanta.

Babcock admits that the selection of Pilobolus and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was influenced by their international reputations. More than eighteen million people the world over have seen the Ailey dancers since Texas-born Alvin Ailey founded the company in 1958. Choreographer and former dancer Judith Jamison has directed the company since 1989, and its Olympic program includes her 1995 Riverside as well as Lar Lubovitch's 1990 Fandango and Ailey's classic masterpiece, the 1960 Revelations.

Pilobolus, too, has crisscrossed the globe, and continues to do so in this, its twenty-fifth year. In its first--and so far, only--visit to Russia in 1992 as part of the American Dance Festival's Moscow project, the troupe's acrobatic antics and startling images drew much applause. The Pushkin Theatre audience seemed to especially identify with one dance that the company is including in its Olympic program, the 1991 Sweet Purgatory, danced to Dimitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 in an arrangement for chamber orchestra. One woman in the Moscow audience was heard to say, "It reminds us of our Russian life. We also go through torture."

Pilobolus choreographer, artistic director, and former dancer Michael Tracy says that the troupe also received kudos from athletes when it performed at the 1990 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid: "We were all sports people before, when we started. In a sense, we feel like we're outside of the dance world." They've had plenty of training, or, as Tracy put it, "It's an entirely different way of partnering and moving through space. Dancers are asked to wrap themselves in contortions no one else would ask them to do." If there were an Olympic competition for unusual human linkages, Pilobolus might win the gold hands down--or up.