DANCE REVIEW : Hawkins Dance Company Performs ‘Hero’ : Erick Hawkins creates an austere parable for children about ruthless heroism. The myths about monsters, drawn from the Navajo and Apache, challenge the imagination.

Poetic distillations of myth form one major wing of Erick Hawkins’ creative output. But “Killer-of-Enemies: The Divine Hero” represents something more extreme for the 82-year-old master choreographer--a one-act parable in which he boils narrative down to a series of disarmingly cryptic visitations linked by a spoken text.

Created for children, it’s like “Peter and the Wolf” on the level of basic storytelling and characterization, but with so many tantalizing ideas planted but left undeveloped that it virtually demands that the audience complete the experience in imagination and afterthought.

Hawkins’ dancers and musicians introduced this daringly elliptical hourlong work to local audiences Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center--the institution that co-commissioned it (along with the Kentucky Center for the Arts and the Kennedy Center in Washington). Hawkins himself remained in New York, recovering from the exhaustion that left him briefly hospitalized at the end of his company’s recent 40th anniversary season.

As a result, the Wednesday performance found Robert Engstrom combining Hawkins’ role (Ancient and Talking God) with his own (First Storyteller), portraying an elder teaching tribal legends to his grandson. Drawn from Navajo and Apache cultures, the legends involve the conquest of monsters, an opportunity for designer Ralph Lee to devise masks based on tribal artifacts but with nightmarish dimensional distortions all his own.

Sometimes Lee’s costumes defined the movement. As Spider Old Woman, for example, Cynthia Reynolds moved within a web of hanging sticks with every twist or turn launching spiky tendrils into the air. However, Michael Moses in the title role danced more freely, making Hawkins’ compressed, inventive jumping sequences into virile cadenzas and his combat duet with Big Giant (Othello Johns) into the triumph of joyous, darting velocity over implacable weight.

Conducted by David Briskin, the score by Alan Hovhaness sometimes seemed unduly sweet or reassuring--for adults, anyway--but helped endow Moses’ quest with a nobility the action didn’t convey.

Indeed, since Hawkins never showed his monsters being monstrous, we had only his word (the text) that they were evil. Why kill these spectacular creatures, some of us wondered. Why not tame them? Even if you accepted them as symbolizing “daily challenges of life” (a program note), couldn’t their threat be eliminated but their unique beauty survive?

Obviously, “Killer-of-Enemies: The Divine Hero” never intended to make us consider monsters an endangered species, but it did raise questions about living in harmony with nature. Hawkins’ Killer may have been handsome, muscular and daring--but, for some of us, his ruthless heroism left the world a far less interesting place.