THERE'S A LOT of missionary zeal in the dance world. Many dancers find themselves still fighting the battle Martha Graham supposedly won--for the acceptance of dance as a legitimate art form by the American public. Colleges have played a big part in the fight, sheltering dancers when it was next to impossible for them to make a living otherwise. (The big summer dance festivals at Bennington and Connecticut College came into existence precisely because in the off-season dance companies had no other work.) Unlike the other performing arts, dance derives a good proportion of its creative vitality from the colleges.

Happily, few words about the importance of college dance marked the meeting of dance faculty and students at the first New England College Dance Festival this past weekend at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The group gathered to attend daytime workshops and an evening concert of works choreographed by students and by faculty for students. Well-crafted, inventive and well-performed, the dances attested quietly to the vitality of college dance.

Harvard senior Andrew Borg presented "Between Two Moons," his thesis-in-progress for Visual Studies. (Its final performance will be May 7-9 with the Harvard/Radcliffe Dance Company). Huddled in heavy army-green overcoats, Borg and dancers Nancy Compton and Kat Fischer enter and traverse the dimly-lit space, establishing characters through their idiosyncratic gaits: Compton inches forward, Borg sneaks backwards, and Fischer steals sideways. They turn sharply and skulk towards the audience--sputtering, chortling, swallowing shrill screams -- then disappear into the wings. The three return, this time with overcoats hunched up over their heads, and pick up the stealthy tempo. As music by Paul Sparrow sounds, their overcoats float up into space, swaying as if alive: objects animated by creatures.

Borg builds quickly and economically to this image, then unhurriedly works away from it, first shifting his emphasis from object to character, then from character to performer. Stripping the trio of their cloaks and masks, Borg leaves them with nothing more than their power as performers to carry on the disguise--not as real-life caricatures but as apparitions, dark imaginings. The work ends with a swift reversal of the transformation: cutting short their interaction as performers, the three twirl each alone, bobbing down to snatch up their overcoats, becoming one again with their masks.

The well-known choreographer Alvin Nikolais, speaking at Harvard earlier this spring, mentioned that his work with masks and body-distorting props in the early fifties allowed him and his dancers to lose their self-conscious mannerisms and to gain access to a deeper source of movement-imagination. It seems that using overcoats and simple face masks has done the same for Borg. In his piece in the Harvard/Radcliffe workshop performance last February, "Shadowlight," he seemed to reach for a dramatic depth that wasn't there. With "Between Two Moons" Borg has found that depth, the well-springs for a drama surreal and otherworldly.

The two most-finished works on the dance festival program took an entirely different tack from Borg's. "Five Aces" by Joyce Morgenroth, guest choreographer for a company from the Five Colleges, and "1-2-3-4-5-6" by Judy Chaffee Black, a BU faculty member, aimed only at being worldly, everyday, even mundane. Both choreographers dressed their dancers in athletic garb and set their work-outs against classical music.

J.S. Bach's incessant running up and down scales turned the first motif of "1-2-3-4-5-6," holding up each finger in fast succession, into breathless slapstick. Choreographer Black added other motifs one by one--slow-motion rolling, runner's ready position, broad glissades--and bumped one into the next in various combinations. Relying on the humor of incongruity, she popped the fast-counting fingers into the most inappropriate moments.

Much more literal than Black's piece is Morgenroth's "Five Aces," with music by Liszt. Five dancers from The Moving Company began by spoofing sport and ballet antics. Morgenroth saves these familiar themes from becoming cliches by developing the parodied gestures into more suggestive and complex movement sequences, fusing the non-literal and literal into an expression beyond satire.

Brandeis and Boston Conservatory were represented by student works, and Rhode Island College by a lengthier piece, "Celebrations," choreographed by former Limon dancer Clay Taliffero. A work by two students from the University of New Hampshire, "Energy Games," took up one theme with which Black and Morgenroth, too, were concerned--using energy as speedily as possible. Rather than structure their piece into a series of discrete events, as did the two established choreographers, Jeanette Rive and Christian Swenson blurred the lines of their choreography. One could never say what was happening at any exact moment. Costumed in gray leotards and silver hoods, the two ended the piece by melting in a heap as the music of Larry Coryell and Oscar Sala petered out.

It's surprising that New England colleges haven't gathered before to recognize student choreography and performance. A glance at the back of the program--"MIT Women's Athletics Presents:"--might tell why. Students there and here at Harvard have some overdue battles to fight, and it seems Andrew Borg has just clinched the first.