Dancing cowboys. What a preposterous idea. Riding cowboys: yes. Singing cowboys: conceivable. But dancing cowboys? Hardly.

Yet in a pleasing evening of song and dance Saturday at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono, the Tennessee Dance Theatre brought a great big western howdy from a troupe of dancing cowboys. If you’re picturing weathered men in worn jeans and leather coats and chaps and beards, then you don’t have the picture. Under the flamboyant artistic direction of Andrew Krichels and Donna Rizzo, TDT showed a more elegant side to cowboydom. The modern dance side, you might say. A kind of Aaron Copeland and Martha Graham meet “Hee Haw.”

First came “Blue Shadows,” a roundup of cartoonish images from the prairie. With accompaniment by Riders in the Sky, a twangy string trio of harmonic daredevils, the TDT dancers were terminally pert and smiling as they danced “the cowboy way” to well-known, oatsy tunes such as “Blue Shadows on the Trail” and “Yippie-Yi-Yo and Away We Go.”

The dancers had an elegant technique of ballet moves blended with funky struts, loping arms, sauntering walks and high-stepping kicks. Above all, the seven dance vignettes jingle-jangle-jingled right merrily along through archetypes of Western life. There were cowboys with thumbs under their arms, cowgirls with bows on their backsides and, just so it didn’t fall into tacky stereotypes, a pair of dueling sleeping bags (zipped up on all sides and dancers within).

The most amazing element of this theater-dance troupe is that it has every opportunity to fall into sentimentalized parody. But it didn’t. Its artistic staff has a good sense of humor and an eye for poignancy, and knows when to stop with each. The balance was refreshing and inviting, particularly for a major production such as “Quilts,” a second regionally specific piece in which the dancers took their moves from images of quilts projected on the wall. With large stitching movements, angular hands and pounding feet, they told the narratives behind quilts — the bows and patterns, the marriages, the passages, the burials and memories that go into American quilts.

Both Riders in the Sky and featured quest artist, virtuoso fiddler Mark O’Connor, offered solo musical segments. Riders, including Ranger Doug on guitar, Too Slim on bunkhouse bass, and Woody Paul on fiddle, were as much a comedy act as a right-jamming band. Their harmonies were snickeringly sweet and celebratively cornball.

In a routine called “Palindrome Man,” Ranger Doug interviewed Too Slim, a “palindrome cowboy” who spoke only in sentences that can be read forward and backward and mean the same thing. The most clever of his comments came about when asked if he wanted something to eat. His response: “Go hang a salami. I’m a lasagna hog.”

Riders were a fiesty, smart-mouthed and thoroughly friendly group of singing cowboys who bid farewell with “Happy Trails to You” — but not before offering some handy advice: “Don’t squat with your spurs on” and “Always drink upstream from the herd.”

As the final act, Grammy-winning O’Connor shared his God-given talent on the fiddle. He was at once graceful and persistent as he played excerpts from mountain-music violin concertos and caprices he wrote. For a West Coast boy (born in Seattle), O’Connor sure has the Blue Ridge Mountains in his blood. Never was that more apparent than in his “Appalachia Waltz” and “Olympic Reel,” which was performed at the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Atlanta last.

O’Connor also played an intricate guitar solo and provided accompaniment on violin for “String and Threads,” a piece commissioned by Nashville’s Summer Lights Festival. Tracing the evolution of music and dance from the British Isles to the Appalachian Mountains, “Strings and Threads” ends in a lovely tableau of freedom, flight and transcendence — a perfectly suitable image for this lighthearted theater-dance group.