NEWPORT — History takes the stage. But first, it walks the streets.

Island Moving Company premieres its Newport Stories this weekend in the city’s Great Friends Meeting House. The work merges music and movement, singing and speaking, which is notable for a dance troupe.

The undertaking is ambitious, a show about the history and identity of Newport. Equally ambitious is the show’s collaboration: one composer, one writer, two choreographers, six musicians, nine dancers and 32 chorus members.

What’s also unusual, although not to those familiar with Island Moving, a contemporary ballet company that embraces site-specific performances, is that this performance is very specific to its site: Newport. The show starts outdoors at the historic Colony House in Washington Square and roams to the indoors of the historic Great Friends Meeting House about a quarter of a mile away.

“People know who we are,” says Miki Ohlsen, Island Moving’s artistic director. “When they see pied pipering down the street, they’ll think, ‘Oh, that must be Island Moving Company.’ ”

The one-hour, one-act show is made up of 14 sections, some songs with dances, some songs by themselves.

The songs began as poems. Christopher Eastburn, a composer living in Arlington, Mass., conducted the literary research, which he then set to music. “Some of them rhyme; some of them don’t,” Eastburn says. “For me, words and imagery are really powerful in triggering music in my head.”

The music, according to Eastburn, ranges from thoughtful to touching to amusing. The song subjects include such things as beaches, shipwrecks, the slave trade and high-society functions, with historical periods and topics moving backward and forward.

“It’s very much about the flow of Newport,” says Michael Bolger, an Island choreographer and dancer. “It’s like the time and the tides.”

The project, Eastburn says, lends itself perfectly to the participation of the 32-member Family Folk Chorale, a multi-generational group in Boston he has worked with previously.

“They could represent townspeople, visually and sonically. They could look and sound like multiple generations.”

Some songs and dances are preceded by introductory narration about Newport history. This includes talk about the America’s Cup. “All the dances are interpretations of ideas,” Ohlsen says. “This particular dance is about competition.”

Throughout the show, dancers offer information about people and events from Newport’s past, as well as aspects of Newport’s present and foreseeable future: tourism.

“Where’s the Breakers?” says one dancer, impersonating a tourist. “Where’s Cliff Walk?” says another. And “Where are the public bathrooms?”

John Pantalone, a professor of journalism at the University of Rhode Island, provided the project with text, profiles, interviews and historical summaries, much of which were distilled to their essence.

“Normally I would hate it if people were cutting my stuff all up,” Pantalone says. “If I wrote a 2,000-word story for a magazine and it used 150 words of it, I’d be out of my mind. But they know what they’re doing. The amazement was I wasn’t angry that they chopped 90 percent of what I did. People will see the show and say, ‘Wow, you did that?’ Yes, I did that.”

A portion of Newport Stories was presented as a work-in-progress last September. The project got started last spring when Eastburn, who collaborated with Island Moving in 2005, proposed a collaborative Newport-based work similar to one he had just done for the city of Brookline, Mass., which celebrated its 300th anniversary.

“It’s rooted in Newport and the Newport experience, but it’s very humanistic and speaks of the notion of a sense of place,” Eastburn says. “It speaks to people’s experience in other places.”

Ohlsen liked the idea. Beauty and calamity, love and loss are part of Newport, and everywhere else.

“All these ideas transcend time and place. Any ship can go down in Newport harbor. People walk on a beach, meet each other, fall in love for a summer and geography takes them away.”

Newport Stories will be presented Saturday at 4 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. in the Great Friends Meeting House, 21 Farewell St., Newport. An optional pre-performance processional begins 30 minutes before each show outside the Colony House in Washington Square. Newport third-graders, who worked on a winter project with Island Moving Company, will be admitted free. For tickets, $23, call (401) 847-4470 or visit www.arttixri.com.

brourke@projo.com