FESTIVAL ‘ 90 : Matachina: An Awakening of the Spirit : Dance: The Turquoise clan performs a timeless American Indian ritual pitting good against evil. The group performs tonight at UCLA.

Patches of frost crunch underfoot as Randolph Padilla walks through Jemez Pueblo to the Turquoise clan’s meeting hall, a long adobe structure with white and aqua interior walls, a dirt floor and a low roof supported by round wooden beams. It is New Year’s morning.

Firewood is piled near the single doorway and some stump-like logs are used for stools as people arrive. They greet one another warmly, embracing or shaking hands, before gathering for a communal prayer.

A fire crackles in a low, stepped oven as they finish the business at hand: preparing for the Matachina dances, an annual pueblo ritual that originated in Spain as a celebration of Christian victory over the Turks and Moors.

It is widely performed throughout the American Southwest and Northern Mexico in different versions--with Jemez notable for preserving two contrasting styles.

Accompanied by violin and guitar, the Turquoise clan dances a Spanish Matachina, festooned with scarves, ribbons and fringed shawls that somehow suggest the shape and splendor of antique Catholic and Turkish attire. (Silvia Lozano’s Ballet Folclorico Nacional de Mexico included an excerpt from a similar Matachina dance in its January program at Ambassador Auditorium.)

However, the Jemez Pumpkin clan dances in traditional pueblo costumes (moccasins instead of shoes, for instance) to male choir and drums. Each of these Matachina features the same characters: a young boy (the bull, representing evil) and girl (the malinche , representing purity), along with an adult leader (the monarca ) who dances with them between double lines of six men each.

There are also clowns--often more threatening than funny--and a masked old man (the mongala ) who dances with the young girl in a refined, even courtly manner.

Just as the Matachina music has been traced to 16th-Century Spain, many of the dance steps are clearly European in origin. Some scholars detect medieval Spanish dance forms now obsolete in Europe, others define the whole experience as a composite of aboriginal Mexican dance-drama and an old Spanish miracle play.

No matter. Out on the sunlit plaza of Jemez Pueblo, the Matachina dances become a living religious experience, celebratory, life-affirming, yet deeply mysterious too, as befits a timeless struggle between good and evil.

As the leader of the Turquoise group and a dancer in the performance, Padilla doesn’t have time to explain American Indian culture. But, while inviting visitors to sample his wife’s spectacular red-chili enchiladas, he manages to define the context of the Matachina ritual: dance as an awakening of the spirit.

“We don’t do our dances just to do them,” he said. “All our dances have power. All of them are like a prayer to the Great Spirit for certain things. A lot of them are for rain, snow, long life, to have a prosperous year--and we pray for these things before, during and after all the dances.”

Repeated periodically during the day, the performance draws the entire community onto the plaza. Some watch from their rooftops (executing the fast, intricate footwork along with the dancers), others set folding chairs against the buildings and a few visitors from nearby Albuquerque huddle in doorways to avoid the chill.

Los Angeles Festival curator Judy Mitoma said that she was attracted to the Matachina dances because of their beauty and “the notion of dancing as a vow, as an act of dedication that makes us think about the motivation for dancing.”

Mitoma originally intended to bring both the Turquoise and Pumpkin versions to Los Angeles, but, she said, “the Pumpkin clan wanted to consult the astrological calendar and this couldn’t be done until June. We simply couldn’t hold the programming and budget that late on the chance that the signs would allow them to do it.”

Padilla acknowledged that festival audiences may not get the message. “People will see us differently,” he said, “will get different things from what we do.”

The Jemez Pueblo Turquoise clan performs tonight in Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, UCLA.