Newport’s Island Moving Company celebrated its 20th anniversary last week with a program of community-based events including three site-specific pieces created during the week and performed for an itinerant audience on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The following is a day-tripper’s first impression.

After trafficky turnpikes and strip malls, I arrive at the Newport Gateway Center in time to board a Toonerville Trolley for the journey to the first performance site. We bump through downtown blocks crowded with strollers, parking lots, antiques shows, T-shirt emporiums, quainte shoppes, banners, and food; then out into the neighborhoods and finally to fenced-in estates. Near a school we find Ballard Park, where Boston choreographer Daniel McCusker and composer Chris Eastburn have made Field Work.

The site is an acre of scruffy open field surrounded on two sides by rock walls that maybe used to be a quarry — the program’s information about the sites isn’t overwhelming. McCusker leads a line of 16 performers, mostly local high-school girls, into the space. They sing a harmonized, William Billings–like solfege tune. The 20-minute piece consists of simple movement gestures and low-key calisthenics, accompanied by Eastburn’s pleasant, outdoorsy hymns. Spaced around the field are tree branches stacked together like tepees; the design is by visual artist Bob Rizzo. The dancers sometimes stand beside them, but they don’t refer to them otherwise.

We file back to the trolley and rumble into town past stately homes, lodges, and cottages reposing under immense specimen trees. We arrive at the Elms, an elegant manor house in a landscaped park with marble fountains and majestic imported trees that have never inhaled car exhaust. Weeping beeches, Turkish oaks, silver maples, no elms.

A bearded man who looks like an academic on rustic vacation is talking to the assembled audience. I miss the first part of it because I’m off exploring the park. He seems to be lecturing about some inhabitants of the premises, past or present. The Linophytes and the Beach Mice, they seem to be called. One group are " remaking the borders of their domain " while the others are " unwilling to leave their territory and approach the Other. "

Beneath this anthro-speak there’s a story, part archæological reconstruction, part satire on the Newport mansion-building tribe. A group of teenagers and college students lounge in the elephantine branches of a beech canopy; others pretend to march in defense of their formal flower garden. Montana choreographer Amy Ragsdale made this piece, Caught Between Two Worlds.

There’s been a lot of wafting so far, and I get to wondering why so much " community dance " looks so careful, so pallid. This is the age of physical extremes — the skateboard, hockey, hip-hop. So why, when they get to doing modern dance, do kids waft?

Next stop is Rough Point, Doris Duke’s gothic manse, which is now maintained by the Newport Restoration Foundation. Hot damn, the ocean at last! By now it’s five o’clock and the wind is kicking up. We’re led out back to a lawn that sweeps down to some rocks and bushes. A bridge crosses a rift in the rocks, and you can see the tide surging in below it.

At the beginning of Vignettes au Port Nouveau, which is created and performed by New York duo Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer along with students from Rhode Island College, a woman appears out near the rocks. She’s dressed in a white Victorian dress and carries an umbrella. We click back to the late 19th century, when Vanderbilts lounged away their summers in Newport.

Other white-clad women emerge from behind the rocks and gaze out to sea. They cavort in a skipping, romping dance; they fling themselves on the grass to roll down the slope. They curl up under red silk banners for a nap. They spread a tablecloth on the clipped, flat top of a hedge and produce wine glasses. While these revels are going on, Bridgman and Packer enact some kind of doomed-lovers drama down on the bridge. After he carries her away, tourists walk across, wondering about these demented strangers.

We trolley along beaches and back to the harbor, where the Island Moving Company dancers do a neat little pointe ballet on an outdoor stage in a corner of Fort Adams. I have no information about Fort Adams, except what I see: an immense stone ruin encircling a parade ground. It seems to be IMC’s summer quarters. Saturday evening the wind is chilly and the floor is probably slick, but the dancers look relaxed.

It’s getting dark. and I have a long drive home. As I’m leaving the Fort, one of the many company volunteers gives me a box lunch to eat in the car.