It's close to midnight when British-born dance director Richard O'Neal confides his fears about the career gamble that brought him to this ancient mountain town in Mexico.

Almost five years ago, O'Neal gave up his job as assistant director of Riverdance, the popular stage show based on Irish folk dance, when offered the chance to launch a Mexican version of the show based on the foot-stomping dance known as son jarocho, native to the southern state of Veracruz.

The invitation had come from a highly placed fan of Riverdance, then- Veracruz Governor Miguel Aleman Velasco. The politician had seen the need for a first-class theatrical spectacle that would do for jarocho music what Riverdance had done for the Irish jig. And Aleman held the cultural purse strings to make it happen.

O'Neal didn't seem like the most likely candidate. He had never even heard of son jarocho. He knew almost no Spanish. And when he was told he'd have to move to Xalapa, the drizzly capital of Veracruz, he wondered, "Where's Xalapa?"

The dancer would quickly discover just how far he had come from Coventry, the English town where he was raised by immigrant West Indian parents.

In Xalapa, a stop for Spanish invaders on their way to conquer Mexico City, O'Neal was branded a cultural interloper. To jarocho purists, this stranger with cornrows and British accent had no business tinkering with their tradition.

Despite the naysayers, O'Neal launched a local dance company he called Jarocho, a term that applies to this tropical region, its people and their culture - a blend of European, African and American Indian influences.

The flashy show, also called Jarocho, does exactly what critics charged: It offers a modern twist on cultural traditions filtered through an outsider's perspective. In one segment, the dancers even line up shoulder-to- shoulder in that iconic Riverdance formation, but they're doing a zapateado, a traditional jarocho step.

Today, O'Neal's show is at a crossroads. Aleman, the original patron, is no longer in office. The US$1 million (HK$7.8 million) O'Neal got from the state government to start the company is gone. The show is largely self- sufficient but falls short of resources to grow. O'Neal says Jarocho needs to go beyond its boundaries, both geographic and artistic.

Mexico offers limited demand for such a stage spectacular. Audiences, budgets, staffing and morale are always on the edge of collapse. Critics keep questioning whether the state-run University of Veracruz, where the company has its headquarters, couldn't find better use for scarce education resources. His only hope is to take the show on the road. "I need to get it out there as soon as possible," says O'Neal, who planned to hop-scotch Europe in a last-ditch campaign to book his 55-person traveling troupe at international dance festivals for the 2007 season. "If it doesn't go, it's going to die."

In his quest to take Jarocho international, O'Neal finds himself retracing the early steps taken by Riverdance, which also faced initial opposition from Ireland's cultural purists.

"Once it was out there making money and bringing tourism into Ireland, people were very proud of it," says O'Neal, 34. "Now, when people say `Ireland,' they think Guinness or Riverdance. So that's what I'm waiting for. I'm waiting for Jarocho to go out and come back, and then people hopefully will understand."

Making a profit is part of the challenge. So far, the show is able to repay the US$350,000 annual subsidy it gets from the university but is unable to keep its dancers and musicians employed year-round.

"Richard, as an artist and as a human being, is tested constantly by these pressures," says Javier Bryan Sanchez, a Mexican-American who conceived Jarocho's stylish graphic design. "I know he's reconsidered his position. There are so many other things he could be doing, he's such a talented man. He's definitely investing everything he has to give this show the life we all believe it has the potential of having."

When Jarocho debuted in March 2003 at a local festival at the Indian ruins in Tajin, onlookers included Aleman and other culture mavens. They were there "to give the thumbs-up or the `get out,"' O'Neal jokes.

The crowd watched silently, not knowing what to make of it. Then they clapped, as if it took awhile for the new work to sink in.

"Jarocho corrupcion!" exclaimed one local newspaper.

Since then, O'Neal has won over skeptics and wowed audiences in almost 100 performances throughout Mexico. Newspaper critics raved when it debuted in Mexico City two years ago. Excelsior called it one of Mexico's "most ambitious and original cultural projects." The Economist said the show was a surprise that leaves its audience "pleasantly captivated."

Yet hard-core critics are as passionate as ever in their opposition. One of the most vocal is one of the genre's leading exponents, guitarist and composer Ramon Gutierrez Hernandez, director of Xalapa's acclaimed son jarocho ensemble, Son de Madera. Gutierrez dismisses O'Neal's production as a "Yankee spectacle."

"I didn't want to have anything to do with that atrocity, with that ferocious way of commercializing what doesn't belong to you," Gutierrez explains in Spanish. "Why would we want them to promote our culture if they are the ones who benefit from what is ours?"

To understand the intensity of O'Neal's opposition, it helps to know the history of son jarocho, a dynamic style that came close to extinction, or at least irrelevance, in the last century.

Son jarocho was cultivated more than two centuries ago in the melange of cultures that flowed through the port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico - Spanish melodies and verses, flamenco footwork, African polyrhythm and American Indian vocal inflections. It remained a rural, regional style until the early 20th century, when it gained national popularity with the advent of recorded sound.

By the mid-1900s, the music had become commercialized, a tourist attraction as cliched as a hula dance in Hawaii. Politicians co-opted the style as a symbol of national pride. The genre's prototypical song, La Bamba, was even used as a campaign song for the man who would become president of Mexico in 1946, Miguel Aleman Valdes, father of the Veracruz governor who recruited O'Neal.

That political connection was a source of suspicion for musicians who have been leading a jarocho revival in Veracruz since the 1970s. Spearheaded by groups such as Son de Madera and Mono Blanco, they have labored to take back the music from the politicians and the tourist traps. They even have a derisive term for the trite groups in white folkloric outfits that commonly play at seafood restaurants - marisqueros, the fishy ones.

The musicians committed to genuine son jarocho were wary of O'Neal, an outsider overtly trying to commercialize their music, especially one with government backing. The cultural tension between purists and progressives rings all too familiar to Riverdance veterans such as senior executive producer Julian Erskine, who presented the Mexican proposal to O'Neal.

"Exactly the same thing happened with Riverdance," says the Dublin- based producer. "People thought this was meddling with tradition, this was going to kill it off, this was the death knell of Irish music and Irish dance. The reality was, rather than being the death knell, it was the shot in the arm that it needed."

When O'Neal arrived there, he also found a genre that had become tradition-bound. Mexican students were taught to do the same steps the same way, and every step had a name. The dances, such as la bruja or el colas, were performed with the faithful repetition of a church ritual.

"New steps hadn't been created in a very, very long time here," says O'Neal. "So we did some new things." People might be tempted to call it an "Irish-Mexican fusion" because O'Neal borrows that famous kick line from Riverdance. The problem is, the kick line wasn't Irish.

"It has become a Riverdance moment," Erskine says, "but in fact, there's nothing Irish about it. It's just pure showbiz."

O'Neal also added drums and a hip beat to the traditional ensemble. Like Riverdance, which also features flamenco and tap segments, Jarocho explores styles beyond son jarocho. One of the most innovative and thrilling moments involves a choreographed competition between flamenco and Afro-Cuban dancers, revealing the similarities in their seemingly diverse rhythms.

"With Jarocho, we're not trying to take anything away," he says. "We're not trying to say, `OK, now, it's going to be like this.' We're just saying, `This is a new presentation of something old. The old will never change and will always be there.' We're just doing new interpretations of something old. And I hope, if it's commercially successful, it will bring a lot more people here to see the real thing."

O'Neal admits he's been bewitched by the magic of his adopted homeland, "which will always be a part of my heart now." He's also found romance with his lead dancer, Vanessa Guevara. But the question is, how long can he hold out for Jarocho?

"It's now or never," he said.

LOS ANGELES TIMES *Underset by 55 lines.* *Underset by 55 lines.*