Polish Folk Dance Troupe’s Joy Ride : Performances: While on rough 3 1/2-month, 86-city tour, complaints are left on the bus. If it’s Monday, the group must be in Costa Mesa.

Members of the Mazowsze Polish touring folk dance troupe are allowed to moan about cramped quarters on the bus, grouse over hotel accommodations or bellyache even during rehearsals.

But in accordance with an ironclad company mandate, once the curtain rises on a performance, “You just cannot complain anymore,” says deputy director Brygida Linartas. “These songs and dances bring joy, and you have to express this joy, sheer joy.”

Mazowsze (pronounced mah-ZOFF-shuh), appearing this evening at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, will perform centuries-old native Polish folk dances--from the fast-paced heel-clicking mazurka to the stately chodzony --each accompanied by traditional music and song.

Being on a 3 1/2-month, 86-city tour of the United States and Canada, the troupe’s 85 singers, dancers and musicians often have reason to grumble. They typically spend no more than one day in each city where they perform, reboarding the bus after each show for another long ride that stiffens already-sore muscles.

Missing loved ones back home causes even greater discomfort, especially with the cost of transatlantic phone calls.

Nevertheless, the first rule that company co-founder Mira Ziminska teaches newcomers is to put on a happy face, Linartas said through an interpreter during a recent phone interview.

The look of jubilation isn’t faked, she added. “You cannot perform these dances without a smile. This is something very close to us, very precious; we feel it.”

Mazowsze, presented here by the Orange County Philharmonic Society, was created in 1948 by Ziminska, once a leading Polish actress, and her composer-folklorist husband, Tadeusz Sygietynski, who wanted to preserve stories, songs and dances from the country’s many regions.

The couple traveled across Poland finding their first troupe members through church organ players who knew talented youngsters. They established an academy 20 miles outside of Warsaw in the great plains region of central Poland. (Today, company dancers must approve new repertoire, since they are closest to the original folk sources, Linartas said.)

The area, after which the company is named, is also the home of the country’s best-known native folk dance, the mazurka, familiar to ballet fans through choreographers who adapted it for classics such as “Coppelia.” Mazowsze members dance it in festive dress from the 19th-Century Empire period--handwoven garments decorated with vivid geometric patterns of sharply contrasting colors.

“Normal clothing is very poor, very plain--just something that you work in,” Linartas said. “But this dance is done on holidays or celebrations when you can express your emotions, your joy, your dreams, and the colorful costumes express this change from everyday life.”

Mazurkas, popularized when the Polish army traversed Europe under Napoleon’s charge, have a “military character,” she said. They were often done by soldiers going off to war who “clapped and clicked their heels to express their vitality and will to win the battle.”

One of the troupe’s oldest dances is the chodzony , or “walking dance,” which originated in the 12th Century. “It is an old Polish folk dance of slow tempo and sullen character,” a dignified affair with one slow and two quicker steps, Linartas said.

The troupe also does a comical dance about a sorry swineherd, a routine that the company enacts “like a folk party on stage” in which musicians as well as dancers perform, Linartas said. The swineherd, according to the text from a popular song, is deeply devoted to his pigs but falls in love with a maiden, she said.

“He writes to her professing his love and says his love for her is as great as his love for his pigs. So she writes back suggesting he marry one of them.”

Mazowsze’s 24-item program is designed to dazzle audiences with a kaleidoscopic variety of dance and song and with the myriad handmade costumes of lace, shiny beads and painted silk, Linartas said. The company, which tours internationally, travels with about 1,000 costumes, and the dancers change up to nine times an evening.

One reviewer, however, criticized the troupe’s presentation for its hectic pace and overcrowded, variety-show style. But Linartas, noting that the company is now making its ninth U.S. tour since 1961, good-naturedly rejected that assessment.

“Everybody tells us that the most fantastic thing is how quickly the dancers change costume” and perform so many dances, one right after another, with only a moment’s pause in between.

What the troupe won’t ever change, however, is its emphasis on tradition, Linartas said. No contemporary choreography will be added to the repertoire, despite the momentous political and social upheavals in Eastern Europe recently.

“For modern music, people go to the disco,” she said. “This is a question of preserving artistic heritage.”