sarma

American Ballet Theatre is a restless, nervy kind of company. The management, confident about the varied repertory and the fine dancers, is often daring: company members like Dennis Nahat and Michael Smuin create new works; revivals are mounted of unusual ballets, like Antony Tudor's morbidly beautiful Romeo and Juliet; "modern" choreographer Alvin Ailey is asked to choreograph one - now two - new productions. Some of these pay off in spades, either commercially or artistically or both.

ABT is also in the hot property market, and one of its ongoing problems is finding roles for its small bevy of charismatic European ballet stars who can't, won't, or shouldn't make their company debuts in Rodeo or Les Noces or Pillar of Fire. The glossiest new attraction is Paolo Bortoluzzi, the Béjart superstar, and ABT is offering him up in a revival of Michel Fokine's Le Spectre de la Rose (staged by André Eglevsky, who was assisted by Annabelle Lyon).

Spectre, as everyone probably knows, is a delicate, understated pas de deux, suffused with the kind of willful Romantic thinking that prefers its heroes and heroines to loll about (or even race about) yearning after the unattainable, rather than working toward the possible. In this ballet, the dreamer is a Young Girl just back from a ball. Overstimulated, she dozes off in a large armchair with a rose in her hand, and the Spirit of the Rose suddenly thrusts itself through the window of her safe, white room and dances for her and with her. More courtly and undemanding than any real young man might be (the one who gave the rose, for example), he leaps out of the window and leaves her alone.

In Le Spectre de la Rose the Romantic aesthetic has been divested of possible wildness and covered with sugar, white tulle, and rose petals. It's pink and white, sweet and cozy - a proper dream for any jeune fille Yet what I find intriguing about the ballet is that the role of the Rose was made for Vaslav Nijinsky - by all accounts a brilliant jumper, heavy-muscled and somber, with an almost feline sensitivity. Performed by him, the image of sexual power, thinly disguised by the flower image of the Young Girl's safe dream, must have been arresting. Several years ago, at Jacob's Pillow, I saw Edward Villella perform the role (with Lone Isaksen); he was careless of his line, impetuous with the jumps, handsome and unruly. He didn't wear the rose-suit.

Paolo Bortoluzzi is a very different sort of dancer from Villella, from my picture of Nijinsky, from Eglevsky and Youskevitch, who used to dance the role for ABT. He's a slight man, dapper and elegant. Jumping is not his thing; he has none of the weighty, elastic pouncing of the big jumper. Instead, he excels in achieving a faultless line in brief, lightweight flights. His Spirit of the Rose is just that-an otherworldly and quite asexual being. His rapid, neat leg beats, his broken-wristed gestures, his politeness with the girl impart a tame charm to the ballet. In the pink tights and petal-strewn leotard and gauze helmet, he looks like the Pease-blossom from an art nouveau Midsummer Night's Dream- alert, sweet, helpful. What could be the harm in having such a lover around all the time?

However, I think that audiences will love his perfection, love the prettiness of the idea, and love Carla Fracci's Young Girl. She contrives to look happily sleepy most of the time, drooping confidingly against him, faltering lightly as he guides and leads her, a girl who is easily tired by real exertion-just the sort of girl, in fact, who would have this sort of a fantasy. Perhaps the Rose was never meant to have thorns ...

Another revival of the current American Ballet Theatre season at New York State Theatre is a more recent foray into Romanticism: Eliot Feld's lovely Intermezzo. Feld has worked at making a kind of visual emblem for the impetuous pulse and bittersweet coloring of a series of Brahms intermezzi. Some of his dance phrases are tender, suspended, questioning; some are tumbling, marked by dashing accents of heel, hand, head. The three couples are dressed for a ball. There is a piano on the stage. Some of the time, they actually seem to be at a ball; the rest of the time, they are in a countryside made only of music and feeling and the large shadowed space. The young men and women are by turns formal with each other, tender, absent-minded, daring. Two of them, although holding hands, almost lose each other in the Romantic mist through which they have chosen to grope.

Feld's now defunct company used to dance Intermezzo with the vulnerability and slight awkwardness that was part of its charm (and one of its problems). The dancing in ABT's production is much silkier and gives the work a darker, richer, tone. (Pianist Howard Barr is an important part of this.) Cynthia Gregory uses an almost reckless amount of space when she dances, but has a suppleness and a poise usually associated with tamer attack. Mimi Paul has a touch of strangeness about her, is cool but extravagant, lvan Nagy is smooth, elastic, courtly. Jonas Kage has more of a darting quality. Of the original cast, only Christine Sarry and Feld himself are left. Sarry is as extraordinary as ever. She appears never to finish phrases, but instead to arrest them on the way up. This gives her an almost incredible lightness and a restless, clever look. Surely no one else can make fast dancing look so fast. When Feld first took over one of the male roles from David Coil, I was distressed. In trying to set the right tone of passion and daring, he became what I thought was too rash. Everything he did looked hasty and misjudged. When he hurled Sarry up in the air in one of his most surprising lifts, I felt worried instead of excited; she looked ready to die for him, but did it have to be right now? This season, Feld dances more fluently, without having lost any of his impetuosity. In that same lift Sarry now reaches the peak with a paradoxical slow rush, seems to hover there for a second, then turns in the air and plunges into his arms. The symbolic peril is more thrilling than what used to look like real danger.

During ABT's first week, I saw two performances of George Balanchine's Theme and Variations with two different sets of soloists: Natalia Makarova and Ted Kivitt; Eleanor D'Antuono and John Prinz. When I saw the work fast season I was struck by the warmth and liveliness and precision of the way ABT's dancers perform it compared with the elegant nonchalance of Balanchine's own company. This time I was first struck all over again by the brilliance of the choreography-by how the brief, polite theme really does engender all the variations that follow, by how inventive those variations are, by how much diversity Balanchine can suggest even though he uses the space in an absolutely symmetrical manner almost ail the time.

Then I became fascinated with the differing approaches of Makarova and D'Antuono. Makarova finds ways of emphasizing what must strike her as odd or unusually beautiful about the movement. On supported arabesque turns, she begins very quickly and with erect carriage (as I remember), and then is able to show you a great sweep of leg opening into position. On a sprightly diagonal progression, there is a moment when the toe starts to take the weight, then doesn't, then does. She makes it look clever and almost treacherous by actually putting quite a lot of weight on the toe before she lifts it, thereby creating an elegant little stumble in the rhythm of the phrase. She is careless, wanton even, with time, as if she were more concerned with interesting ways of filling the larger musical units than with being precise about beats. With this approach, she can, and did on this occasion, actually finish her variation early. Her partner, Ted Kivitt, looked (was it my imagination?) slightly harried by her unruly splendor, but rose to the challenge. It was his doing as much as hers, that in one of the lifts she appeared suddenly hung on him as if she had been inadvertently caught up in his progression and carried along. In comparison, D'Antuono is very well-behaved. She is musically accurate, and many people who were in the audience both nights preferred her to Makarova in this role. Certainly she has developed a proud and sparkling manner, but she keeps to herself-that is, she is never very daring with space or time or her own weight. She dances tastefully, as if she were trying to smooth out or de-emphasize the same choreographic irregularities that Makarova celebrates.

Maybe next time I see Theme and Variations I'll get around to speculating on the male role. Comparative viewing is the only thing I envy the daily critics for.