I'm glad I'm not a trained critic of the arts. Otherwise I'd feel self conscious if I told you what I saw and heard Friday night in the other- worldly natural light inside Eastern State Penitentiary. This was a dance performance. And then it wasn't. It was the lonliest recital I have ever attended. At 7 o'clock the June sky was bright as afternoon, but it was dusk in the big house. And it smelt like prison. Forgotten mold over human smudge. Sweat, ghosts, half seen images in smear-caked windows. Inutterable grime. Ancient pain. Temple bells. Saxaphones. Rainspouts. Truly weird. Hypnotic.

And then the dancers, thank God, did not dance. They labored and resisted and lined up just like any con had to. There was probably jailhouse sex themes going on that I didn't recognize, but the unbearable yearning was as obvious as the walls 30 feet high and twelve feet thick. The task of the dancers was to make these walls recognizably human. This was the Leah Stein Dance Company, incidently, in a production called Gate, which continues through next weekend at the famous penal fortress on Fairmount Avenue. It starts, as these things must, with a lot of reachy arms tugging invisibly toward other reachy arms against a darkened doorway, but behind the blackness of the iron-barred door is the pale arc of a hellish corridor that seems to reach past memory, past suffering. A beige kind of death waiting for the forgotten at the end of eternity. You could almost feel the souls these moist crumbling walls have absorbed through the osmosis of a century and a half of incarceration. The dancers channeled the raw despair and masked fury of countless thousands locked in solitary cells behind these gothic walls from 1829 until 1971.

What was really cool was the way the dancers (and audience) were surrounded by human images, by real people, actors, in shadow, behind mottled glass, in sillouette against a distant open doorway. One women stood motionless, I thought, not far from where I stood. But the whole time she was rotating a round wooden spool, about half the size of a rolling pin, around the outside rim of a bronze bowl, creating a bass-note Ah-aum vibration. It was like hearing Buddhist scat jumping in a jazz session where all the cats are jamming.

By the end of the hour-long piece, where audience and actors roamed over the 11 acres of cellblocks and exercise yards, the dancers stank. And well they should have. Running, jumping, rolling in dirt. They worked hard. But not a hero in the bunch. In character always. They stank of prison sweat, the doomed and fearful stench of effort with no escape. And then, Deus ex Oshkosh, B'gosh-like, a chorus of blue shirted women prisoners singing "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" walks through the scene and leads everyone to follow them to, presumably, heaven, but dependably off stage.

Of course, in this version"Sweet Rosie" is a nursery rhyme turned nasty about a botched abortion that left sweet Rosie a corpse. "She walked into an alley, and died by the yard," they sang. "She wanted to die by inches, but dying by inches was hard." And these are the words that echoed as they walked out unlocked gates.

Yes, I was tempted to start the slow clap.

But after a lingering, but not uncomfortable silence, as people realized that was the end, sincere applause began spontaneously, and I joined in for, I don't know how long? Twenty minutes, max. But it seemed like inches.