THEATER REVIEW : A Dancing Ode to the Music of Work : ‘Stomp’ opens the new season of the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts with a hub cap serenade.

If “Stomp”--the dance/theater/bang-or-jump-on-what-ever-you-find ode to rhythm--is about anything, it’s about finding unexpected music in everyday tedium.

The all-percussive, new vaudevillian theater piece began in the early 1980s as part of the act of a British busking band called Pookiesnackenburger.

“Stomp” had its official premiere at Edinburgh in 1991 and has since played much of Europe and been a hit off Broadway. On Friday at the Wadsworth Theater, it opened the 1994-95 season of the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts as part of UK/LA ‘94; next is a 19-city American tour.

The eight appealing performers all dress in work boots and the clothes of people who labor with their bodies and hands. But their real bond is in their curiosity and their joyful response to the potentiality of sound that they find in virtually every object on the littered stage. They make symphonies from hub caps, brooms, newspapers, trash cans, the tat-tatting of wooden matches rubbing against their paper boxes, even from a corrugated metal wall. Although their music is more dance club than theater music, the spirit is pure Gershwin (Ira, that is), as in, “I got rhythm . . . who could ask for anything more?”

The dramas are tiny; the human interaction minimal. One dancer may bristle at another’s hot-dog moves or lack of ingenuity, but essentially they enjoy playing together, displaying the power of people who move well and love doing it. No whistles are thrown at the two women; no distinction is made between their innate sexuality and the men’s.

The performers never give their names; they come to be known to us, variously, as the cute one with the curly hair, the angry one with the flip in his bang, the tomboy, the womanly one, the goofy one with a flat-top cut, the guy with earring and ponytail, the embittered Bolshevik.

The group leader, an angel-faced, ruddy-cheeked Brit named Luke Cresswell, has the Bill Irwin gift of silently manipulating and engaging an audience. Cresswell co-created “Stomp” along with co-director Steve McNicholas.

There are nods to the great, inventive dancers of the past; dances on sand and in little puddles of water recall, for instance, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. “Stomp” also has links to more narrative, contemporary Broadway choreographers such as Susan Stroman who haul found objects into numbers just for the hell of it.

Even as the performers retain their idiosyncrasies when executing simultaneous steps, so too do the standard-issue objects that they stomp with come in different shapes and materials and, most importantly, different timbres. While others push average mops, the Bolshevik (perhaps to ease his inferiority) enters with a super-sized, two-handled one, which he commandeers like a dog sled. A bunch of workers soon discovers that rubber tubes of different lengths produce different notes when banged on the floor, providing percussive melodies that surprise and delight.

Other numbers evoke war dances, sword fights, childhood games of chicken with made-up rules. In the most electrifying bit, two men strapped like window washers by belts and a rope to a high grid rappel their way down it, swinging like Spiderman, drumming every object in sight, dancing in mid-air, floating on sound.

In another, the men strap huge oil drums to Robocop boots and stride, thundering, across the stage. This dance says something about the ability to soar above hard labor, about not letting anything weigh you down.

“Stomp” is a meditation on the primal desire to entertain ourselves, on camaraderie and natural artistry. But it has the most to say about manual work--the joy in work, the power in work and the music in work. It says the music is always there if you can find it. It proves every theory on tedium and uniformity wrong and triumphs in the infinite variety of the human experience.

* “Stomp,” Veterans Wadsworth Theater, UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Saturday, 2 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 23. $25-$35. (310) 825-2101. Running time: 90 minutes.