The Folkloric Fantasy of Colombia.

Colombia: Folkloric Fantasy 2, Fri.-Sun. through Aug. 3 at Thalia Spanish Theatre, 41-17 Greenpoint Ave. (betw. 41 & 42 Sts.), Queens, 718-729-3880.

Past midnight on the Fourth of July, a couple in the building across from mine were having a fight. He began low and steady, his words coming faster and faster until?thud?a heavy object hit the floor, which was her cue to talk. She sobbed her broken words. They tumbled all the way down the musical scale to silence, at which point he began again. The duet kept on for a long time, until he'd run out of heavy objects.

It sounded nothing like any terrible fight I've ever had. Despite the dire feelings, the couple took turns! I live in Sunnyside, a peaceful patchwork immigrant Queens neighborhood that could challenge all sorts of notions if it just flung open its windows more often. Most of the time, though, the windows are shut, and I'm struck only by how little I know about my neighbors' ways.

Which makes Ballet Mestizo's Colombia: Folkloric Fantasy 2, at the Thalia Spanish Theatre a few blocks from my apartment, a rare treat. Non-Colombians are warmly welcomed, but this folk-dance travelogue doesn't cater to outsiders the way "ethnic" dance events at large Manhattan venues like Symphony Space or City Center often do, polishing up and smoothing over the dance's weirdest and most appealing aspects. Faced with a huge, uninitiated audience, the directors of these large events, I'm guessing, are no longer sure whom they're talking to. Colombia directors Harold Puente and Armando Moreno know exactly whom: Colombians.

At the Saturday matinee I attended, there were two non-Colombians in an audience of about 75 mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers and children. When the band of seven expertly multitasking musicians launched into the lilting popular song, "Black Christmas" ("the fishermen of my land, the fishermen of my land," goes the beautiful chorus), everyone but me and my date sang along, raising their clapping hands to the band in praise and encouragement. The illuminating program notes were written in English, because there was nothing this audience didn't already know.

Colombia wins over outsiders not by trying to accommodate our ignorance but simply by going about its own intricate business.

Over the course of its two absorbing hours, it moves seamlessly from number to number?25 in all, most of them dance, a few purely musical. The show starts in the Andes, where the dancers' slightly pigeon-toed bare feet quietly pump up and down in an easy rhythm; the women fan their flower-strewn dresses in a wide arc, the men open their arms overhead as if embracing a faraway sun. The show travels to the plains, where flamenco turns cowboy, then down to the Pacific, where driving drums and maracas replace melodious guitar and flute. It ends at the Caribbean, with mermaids bedecked in cockleshells performing the speedy steps and winging arms of West African dance.

Many of the dances commemorate specific occasions: coffee harvesting, flower picking, the killing of a snake or, in one very funny instance, river fever. A man enters a happy circle-dance scratching fiendishly. His itch soon spreads. By the end, everyone is laid out on the ground dead while the music plays joyfully on.

Most of the dances don't have such well-defined conclusions. Like their gorgeous accompaniment, each features a few simple motifs repeated until we're carried toward pleasure?or heaven, according to the Talking Heads: "The band in Heaven plays my favorite song/They play it once again, they play it all night long."

The dance I would have been happy to watch all night long begins with three women and their rag-doll infants. Art has dwelled on mother and child for centuries, but I've never seen the duo in a dance. To the sweetest, saddest music in the world?Andean flute music?each woman lifts her baby up in the air and down to the ground, up and down in a slow, full arc. Soon the fathers enter, carrying a wicker basket for the babies. Each father stands behind a mother, one arm on her shoulder and the other under the infant in the basket that she also supports. Together, gazing intently at the baby and rocking to and fro, they become a single boat on a gentle sea.