Troupe performs energetic feet feats> Georgian dancers translate spirit into deft movement

If you saw the Georgian State Dance Company on Wednesday at the Maine Center for the Arts, you might have the impression that Russians don’t actually walk. Hop, yes. Glide, yes. Leap, bound, fly, march — yes, yes, yes. But walking is simply too pedestrian for these masters of acrobatic precision.

The company of 70 or more dancers stormed the stage with dances for war, weddings, work and chivalry. The unforgettable feats belonged to the men, who performed pirouettes across the stage on their knees and catapulted into the air in imagistic poses. In one dance, three men held arms and whirled in a kind of hyperactive version of “Ring Around the Rosie,” except they moved so quickly, they looked like a spider spinning with innate and certain speed.

Elsewhere in the show, the men worked together as if they were a Russian version of the Rockettes, mechanically kicking their legs and filing across stage with factory-worker regularity. In the most heroic of these dances, they puffed out their chests and became a clogging war machine of fighters preparing for the enemy.

When the men danced on their toes, they did so in soft boots. Sometimes, they would land out of a high jump right on the knuckles of their toes, push themselves into the air again, and land on their knees.

The women, in a complete antithesis of this frenetic activity, were memorable for their own fluid style. They moved in controlled, graceful gestures, and created tableaus of royal symmetry. They were no less nimble than the men, just less unleashed.

Artistic director Tengiz Sukhishvili and chief choreographer Nina Ramishvili (a son and mother team) are bodacious and disciplined thinkers when it comes to dance. They have caught the massive energy of the human spirit and combined it fearlessly with the agility of the human body — both male and female. If a painting by Wassili Kandinsky could come to life, it would look like this dance troupe.

One man in the audience expressed his astonishment at this group by remarking that it was hard to imagine Josef Stalin was from the same part of Russia as these dancers. Not really. Stalin was a mind gone awry, another type of terror in motion. The Georgian State Dance Company is creativity gone miraculous. It would be naive to promote wars that were fought with dance instead of weaponry. And this troupe doesn’t promote that position. Nevertheless, its overpowering strength is to inspire thoughts far away from assassination attempts of government leaders and the looming presence of real war.