MIDWAY through the business meeting, an executive gathered his courage and stood up. Facing his colleagues across a blue conference table, he spoke briefly about an idea, opened his briefcase and began distributing a report that laid it all out.

But his colleagues quickly saw that the executive had simply dusted off a pet project that senior management had rejected long ago. So as he gave out the reports, the men passed them to their left and around the table until the last man just replaced them all in the executive's briefcase. Then they started shouting at him.

As the executive crawled under the table in embarrassment, the men jumped out of their seats and began skipping around the table. Was that ''Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, It's Off to Work We Go'' they were humming?

As a business meeting, it seemed horribly familiar, but as a modern dance performance, it was truly something different.

The 12-minute piece, ''The Meeting,'' will make its debut on Saturday at a benefit for the Peter Pucci Plus Dancers, a nonprofit Manhattan group. The performance will be at the Greenwich Academy's Wallace Performing Arts Center in Greenwich, Conn.

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''The Meeting,'' created and choreographed by Peter Pucci, is a satirical look at business meetings, portraying their regimentation and politics, even accompanied at one point by the sound of bleating goats.

''There is so much huffing and puffing in business meetings,'' Mr. Pucci said. ''There was a lot of material there.''

No kidding. Meetings are the Rodney Dangerfield of the business world: While many good ideas come from them, meetings get no respect. They are often dreaded, even side-stepped. Some companies are installing conference tables with no chairs so that no one gets comfortable during meetings. In and out, the thought is.

After all, did Gutenberg need a meeting to invent moveable type?

But Mr. Pucci is not just taking an easy shot at a large target. He has asked the very targets to perform the piece. The five performers are businessmen from Greenwich, the town that probably has more chief executives per square foot than the average big city. And four of the five performers, all over 50, had no dance experience until Mr. Pucci got them skipping around that table.

''He's got it: the pulse of a business meeting,'' Malcolm Decker, 71, an advertising executive who performs in the piece, said of Mr. Pucci. ''He really gets to the core of the thing -- the savagery, the competitiveness, which is, of course, masked in a gentlemanly way.''

MR. PUCCI, 44, has been dancing since he was 19 and has been choreographing since 1980. He has danced in the Joffrey Ballet and with the Pilobolus Dance Theater. He has composed works for the Joffrey and for a Sam Shepard play. But people with two left feet are nothing new to him: He once taught a man in a seven-foot bear costume to dance for a television show and had the entire cast of ''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' dancing the mambo at a theater in Washington.

''One may find that there will be more left feet than could be expected,'' Mr. Decker said of his performance in ''The Meeting.'' ''But we rehearsed and rehearsed, and I now know that I do have a right foot.''

Actually, Mr. Decker cheated. For the first few rehearsals, he tagged his right pants leg with a safety pin. He said it helped.

Bill Thompson, 56, the only professional dancer in ''The Meeting,'' said: ''To take people with no training and do this is brilliant. It ended up being a very nice piece.''

All the men are physically fit. They regularly taking exercise classes at Mr. Thompson's studio and are active skiers, golfers or tennis players. Mr. Pucci said he chose only men because he figured that, as neophyte dancers, they would feel more comfortablelearning their moves, and making mistakes, in a men-only environment.

Mr. Decker, the advertising executive, recalled a meeting many years ago when he worked for the Walt Disney Company. At the meeting, he said, a Disney executive began yelling at ABC network officials.

'' 'You're third rate in everything you do because you're third-rate people,' '' Mr. Decker remembered him saying.

''He said that with force and conviction,'' Mr. Decker added. ''I kind of fell off my seat. I've never heard that before. The ABC people demurred, of course.''

''The Meeting'' is just as contentious, and Mr. Decker gets to fall off his seat again.

The piece begins with the five men going to work, walking across the stage with their briefcases. They move to a score recorded by Mr. Pucci that is a cacophony of voices, street noises and train sounds. The men meet at the conference table, where, after precision drill movements with their briefcases, they sit down to start the meeting.

The first order of business is to cluck like chickens. After that, the meeting becomes rowdy as the men try to get the attention of the chief executive, played by John Tamerin, 61, as if he were Donald J. Trump. After Earle Cote, 69, is forced under the table, Mr. Thompson presents his report by tap-dancing on the table.

THE piece ends after the chief executive takes control and forces everyone to read his report. While in real life, fawning executives would probably praise their boss, the men on stage throw the report into the air like confetti and fall on the floor asleep. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

Dr. Tamerin, a Greenwich psychiatrist, said the show was unlike any meetings he had ever attended because he has attended so few.

''My whole life is dedicated to avoiding meetings,'' he said with a chuckle. ''I treat people who have meetings like this.''

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