One minute the room was careening between frenetic, kinetic and balletic - and then 11 little girls 8,400 miles from home walked in quiet as whispers and everything turned copacetic. Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble - and the rest of Colorado, for that matter - meet the Mesgana Dancers from Ethiopia.

Chris Schneider © The Rocky Five members of the Mesgana Dancers sit with their dolls on a swing at the home of a benefactor in Littleton before heading downtown to perform at Strings Restaurant on Thursday. The 11-member Ethiopian troupe of preteen girls is on a fundraising tour of the United States.

Which is just what happened Thursday as the former were rehearsing for the September premiere of Katrina Jones and the latter were doing a bit of performing, munching and schmoozing in preparation for their performances tonight and Saturday.

Not that the day had been a piece o' cake for the young dancers from Africa, who range in age from 7 to 12 and are so sweet they almost make your teeth hurt. In the midst of their summer U.S. tour, the girls fell prey to some airline snafus and wound up arriving at Denver International Airport after midnight, 12 hours behind schedule. They didn't make it to their lodgings until 2:30 a.m.

But, with the resiliency of seasoned troupers and the energy of kittens, there they were not eight hours later - kicking a soccer ball, playing cards, fiddling with Barbie dolls, scarfing down Frosted Flakes, watching cartoons - neither dazed nor fazed by the logistics headaches. Loving the fact they got to sleep next to each other on the floor, snuggled into their sleep sacks in the basement of the Littleton home whose owner has welcomed them.

"Tired? Not tired," said Semehar Alebachew, 12, offering that the reason for this was "Everything is fun in America."

Nearby, Sofia Kedir was flashing that two-front-teeth-missing smile that turns audiences into puddles. Part fairy, part firecracker, all magic, 7-year-old Sofia is considered by many of her peers to be the best Mesgana Dancer. "A little diva," is how one adult described her admiringly, a view Arthur Mitchell subscribes to.

Mitchell, the artistic director of the famed Dance Theatre of Harlem, saw the Mesgana perform in New York City last week. And after after watching the energetic- yet-controlled way Sofia was rolling and roiling her head, shoulders, hips, arms and legs to each Ethiopian song, he enthused to tour organizer Norman Perdue, "I never saw a kid that young that talented."

While Perdue is rightly proud of his charges' adorableness ("They are the cutest kids you've ever seen in your life.")and dance prowess, he is probably more pleased that "The girls all have to be good students, too."

The educational component of the Mesgana Dancers is not to be overlooked. The two beneficiaries of the tour are Perdue's Children of Ethiopia Education Fund and the Denver-based Ethiopia Reads, groups that aim to better the country's schools and literacy rate.

Hopefully, along the way, the crushing poverty that so many Ethiopians - and all the Mesgana Dancers - live under will also be lifted. As he wraps an arm around Dagmawit, Perdue talks about how she lives with her grandmother in an eight-foot-by-eight-foot stall in the back of a marketplace in Addis Ababa. He looks at the backyard deck they are standing on and says, "Her home is probably about one-third the size of this."

The wonder of it all is that what swims in the eyes of the girls isn't sadness or resentment but joy and hope. Joy over their current lot, hope about their possibilities.

Abeba Desalegn, 12, whose English is so good she recently did an interview on Voice of America, wants to be a doctor. So does the ethereally beautiful Selamawit Wondemu, 12, who, at this moment, has folded her arms in a protective, loving embrace around Mekedes Awgesho, 9 - who, by the way, intends to become an airplane pilot someday.

But when you're 12 or 9 or - like Sofia - 7 going on 20 ("All the girls laugh that she speaks like a grownup person," says Perdue), life is lived in the present, not the future.

Which is why without a shred of attitude or resistance, the dancers pile into their rented van and are whisked to String's Restaurant. String's owner, Noel Cunningham, has been such a friend to various causes in Ethiopia he decided to create his own foundation to oversee his efforts.

Today, he has invited the Mesgana Dancers to a late lunch that is prefaced by a short performance.

In a small space cleared on the restaurant floor, the girls appear, dressed in one of the nine different outfits they wear at each show, each outfit matched to the regional dance they perform. As they introduce a few surprised-but-delighted diners to some of the joyous and intricate nuances of the Wello dance, cool professionalism is blended with girlish enthusiasm.

Nobody appreciates this more than Cleo Parker Robinson, the doyenne of Denver dance, who has arrived at the restaurant to greet the girls. And greet them she does, her larger-than-life personality and warmth enfolding each girl, her hands cupping each young face, her ebullience more than compensating for the fact that some girls probably don't speak English well enough to know what she's saying. But then they read her eyes and they know.

After lunch it's time to visit Parker Robinson's dance theater. The girls sit quietly, transfixed - and maybe a little perplexed at times - by the gyrations, the flowing limbs and undulating bodies. In some ways, it's all so different from the Oromigna, the Guragigna, the Keffa, their dances. But in some ways it's not so different at all.

The Mesgana girls continue to watch.

The afternoon veers towards evening. They soak it up, eyes wide. In another day they will have their turn to dazzle Colorado. Then it will be on to Utah, then California before the tour ends in September and they return home to their schools and their families and the poverty that others make a big deal over but which they accept and don't bother about because, really, they have so much.

But Friday's performance and an autumn return are not on their minds at the moment. And so for now the cutest kids you've ever seen in your life are content to sit and learn. Little girls who happen to be big dancers.