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One of the many fine things about the New York City Ballet's Stravinsky Festival was that it was like old times at City Center, albeit on a more magnificent scale. Each night of the week, the State Theater was packed with knowledgeable and wildly excited balletomaniacs; hopeful gatecrashers panted in the Plaza; the dancers, who had had to learn up to 20 new ballets and polish up some old ones, challenged their own mental and physical fatigue by dancing with a bold and feverish confidence. The week was full of surprises, unexpected beauties, dance jokes, and a kind of camaraderie between the audience and the company that the grandeur of Lincoln Center usually doesn't encourage.

The audience played one-up games with each other: “I didn't see you last night. You missed the Duo Concertante then? It was incredible, just incredible...” Some people, unwilling or unable to store up too many impressions, raced through intermissions trying to get ratifications for their own opinions so that they could clean out the closets of their minds before they got too full: "Wasn't that beautiful?", "Did you hate that as much as I did?" I only went twice, and my mind is bursting.

It was fascinating to see how the different choreographers involved approached the vitality and rhythmic complexity which make Stravinsky's music so splendid to dance to. Two of the company's fledglings, Richard Tanner and Lorca Massine, tried to keep up with Stravinsky's wiles by contriving difficult movement or complicated patterns. Tanner approached the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos in the Balanchinian manner; he created a neo-classic dance concerto, but grafted spikes and angles and thorny partnering onto the basic vocabulary, just as Balanchine often does when he choreographs Stravinsky. Tanner's flexed-foot positions, turned-in knees were more blatantly displayed, however, and this gave his work a coarser texture. Also, in this ballet, he followed the broad gestural shape of the music, rather than any of its inner parts. For a time, the dancers had to perform movements that looked as they should have been done twice as fast, and toward the end the ballet began to feel thick and shapeless, even though its basic structure was obvious.

Lorca Massine's Ode blunted Stravinsky in a different way. Massine is a neo-Romantic, turn-of-the-century French in sensibility. Long, churning diagonals of dancers; vague, but intense emotion; a continual flutter of arm gestures; everyone moving differently, moving all the time. The hectic, undirected activity and lack of repose were linked to the most obvious ingredients of the music, so that after a while Stravinsky's music began to sound as cluttered as the dance looked. Christine Redpath and Colleen Neary danced excellently for both Tanner and Massine, and so did everyone else. Robert Maiorano's muscularly poetic looks were ideal for his odd-man-out part in Massine's work.

Todd Bolender has always been capable of wittiness, both as a dancer and as a choreographer. Jerome Robbins, eclectic and unpredictable and sometimes magnificent, can always deliver a good number-so sleek, so clever, so beautifully paced and directed that Broadway producers must be going crazy trying to lure him back to choreographing musicals. On Friday evening, Bolender and Robbins offered light, slightly outrageous, very loveable ballets-sparked by the fragments of ragtime, jazz syncopations that Stravinsky often inserted so wittily into his music. Bolender's Piano- Rag –Music was a romp made wholly out of John Clifford's brash, but likeable style, the serene and happy whorishness that Gloria Govrin can summon up, and the odd-couple look of these two together. The gags were, of course, predictable: the small, aggressive Clifford being effortlessly lifted out of the way by Big Gloria, and so on. What made the ballet worthwhile was that the jokes popped quickly and casually in and out of a texture of fast and intricate and friendly dancing.

Robbins's setting of the Dumbarton Oaks concerto surprised everyone - horrified some - with its irreverent treatment of the music. The curtain went up on an elegantly trellised garden tennis court. The corps of six-and-six skipped on, looking ready to do The Boyfriend but with a sweetness and modesty that kept the ballet from being just another clever '20s parody. Robbins shaped the ensemble passages into meticulous unison phalanxes with an occasional impetuous solo twist, or clear-cut antiphonal contests between the sexes. There were even a couple of high kicking chorus lines. Allegra Kent and Anthony Blum circled the stage in a light, busy-footed couple dance full of silly, suddenly-we're-in-love charm, which ended with a sportsmanlike handshake and a retrieval of tennis rackets. For their second entrance the men and women put on soft, heeled shoes so that they could patter out intrepid little rhythms, emphasizing crannies in Stravinsky that we might have missed. I sometimes feel that Balanchine is excited mainly by creating-by the training of those tall bodies he likes, by making movement for them. But Robbins, I think, is excited by the process of direction, by being able to make a step look a certain way according to how it is performed. The dancers in Dumbarton Oaks looked especially stylish, well-rehearsed, and - considering the idea of the piece - remarkably free from overt camp or aggressive performing.

The other ballet of Robbins's which I saw, Scherzo Fantastique, was interesting chiefly for his way of (when he wishes) making you see more space on stage and between the dancers than actually exists. The dancers in Scherzo used rapid birdlike port de bras and a sharp, but soaring way of punctuating the music. Gelsey Kirkland's tireless, unstrained brilliance has a reassuring effect on an audience, and Bart Cook has a warm lithe quality; I liked them together. I also like the way Robbins chooses young dancers from the company and makes you look at them and like them. Suddenly in this dance, Bryan Pitts, Stephen Caras, and Victor Castelli emerged as interesting, distinctive, men to be remembered and watched for again.

Then, a special joy, two new Balanchines: Symphony in Three Movements and Violin Concerto. Here again was the wonderful sweep and formal clarity of the great Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations. Here again the fresh teams of agile, clever bodies in practice clothes-spelling each other in Balanchine's delicate contentions with the music. I can't say that every single moment of both works excited me, but the broad impact of both was thrilling.

Symphony employed rather ornate versions of the basic Balanchine-for-Stravinsky vocabulary that I mentioned earlier. I was more than usually aware of those alternately rising and pressing-down arm gestures, the pussycat paws, flexing feet and wrists, those brief turnedin positions with the weight on one foot which remind you of World War II cheesecake. I sometimes don't enjoy the movements per se, but accept them as Balanchine's way of forcing Stravinskian angularities into his long, straight classic line. On the other hand, Symphony also employed a few surprising space patterns-unusually unbalanced and tugging for Balanchine. The basic plan involved the manipulation of 16women, 10 secondary couples, and three principle couples (Sara Leland and Edward Villella, Helgi Tomasson and Linda Yourth, Marnee Morris and Robert Weiss). Although the ballet began with Tomasson dancing extravagantly in front of regrouping diagonals of the 16 women, and although he and Yourth were especially prominent in the first movement all of the soloists kept popping in a very asymmetrical way and getting mixed with the 10 couples. The effect was both spacious and complex, but occasionally one of those easily graspable Balanchine space games would crop up to reassure everyone-like pairs of girls leaping in a counterclockwise circles while Leland spun a clockwise chain of turns that split through each pair. The second movement duet for Leland and Villella was gently tricky and featured many isolated twinings of heads or arms or feet. Even the finale was less symmetrically stacked than usual with the group suddenly snapping into an end pose straight out of a high school yearbook.

The effect of Violin Concert was lighter and less complicated than Symphony. Four soloists, Karin von Aroldingen, Kay Mazzo, Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, and Peter Martins, took turns leading on little squadrons from the corps-first the opposite sex, then the same sex (or vice versa?). Interesting to watch the way the different dancers approached the tricky steps. Martins, for instance, is so nobly erect that you feel every deviation from a cantered position is a triumph for him, while Bonnefous, mobile, almost sly, swings dangerously from one of those fallen-away Balanchine poses to another without even appearing to pass through center. The duet for von Aroldingen and Bonnefous was jazzily acrobatic, while that for Mazzo and Martins was ample and tender with some lovely leaning poses outlined with looping, embracing arm gestures. Both duets, oddly, ended in oblique, questioning positions-bodies arched back or upside down.

The Balanchine-Robbins-Berman-Stravinsky-Pergolesi Pulcinelia was a great sloppy, bawdy concoction that must have been fun to perform and certainly was fun to watch. There seemed to be hundreds of Pulcinellas, roistering around in red caps, white floppy suits, beakednosed masks. The principal one was Edward Villella, who lumbered splendidly, and some were very small children. The commedia dell'arte escapades appeared to involve a welching on a contract with the Devil (Francisco Monción) who kept appearing in drag (Shaun O'Brien) but with horns showing. Violette Verdy appeared as a kickable peasant girl and reappeared later looking very spicy and did a long sprightly solo that was the only "ballet dancing" in the work. I liked a funeral procession of pall-bearing Pulcinellas who abandoned their job by twos and threes, returning just before the corpse crashed to the ground. I also liked an insane surfeit of spaghetti that threatened to cover the stage and did in fact entrap the Devil. (The baby Pulcinellas munched with contagious glee.) Oh, and in the middle of an elaborate final celebration, Robbins and Balanchine marched on as two beggars, pretended to thwack each other with big sticks, did a fumbly dance, and generally thrilled the fans.

One night I also saw a nice little sweet-16 duet for Sara Leland and John Clifford, choreographed at the last minute by Balanchine to a fragment of early Stravinsky which Madeleine Malraux had ferreted out and which she played with great style. I also saw the Robbins-Balanchine Firebird, in which Karin von Aroldingen stalked about in a stiff white costume like a pea-hen and Peter Martins ran around after her in awe. I was awed too and thought almost longingly of the earlier version (which I never liked much either) in which Maria Tallchief spun around in a minitutu in a red spotlight and Francisco Monción had one hell of a time holding her down.

So what started out as a loving tribute to a splendid composer and a shrewd publicity gimmick for a splendid company turned out to be a little treasure trove of new works, many of which will be taken into the repertory in the fall. And then we can start all over again.

When I saw Symphony in Three Movements later, I cringed at my image of the dancers forming a "high-school yearbook" pose. What I had remembered was a tableau of kneeling men and standing women. But the men are squatting tensely as if waiting for the starter's gun, and the women's arms branch up and out stiffly. This inaccurate description is a good (bad) example of what happens when you take in pattern and don't notice focus or dynamics. At the second performance, I wondered how I could have missed so much of the violence that pervades the ballet.

Re-reading this article now, I notice something else: I never mentioned that Stravinsky was dead. As Balanchine said in his opening night speech, we were celebrating Stravinsky's 90th birthday-and his genius and Stravinsky himself had simply taken a "leave of absence". Only after that week was over did I fully appreciate the wisdom and the gallantry of that dancing against death.