There are many ways to be wonderful as Giselle. Diana Vishneva, for instance, is exemplary--technically formidable, highly dramatic, impeccably polished. When you watch her, you're watching a major dancer, a ballerina, a star performing Giselle. When you watch Cojocaru, you're watching Giselle herself, who happens also to be a great dancer. There she is, and you love her. This is what happens to her, and your heart goes out to her. You see how her absolute love for Albrecht purifies and redeems, a love that never wavers, starting with the innocent way her radiant face and her body tilt towards him in the first scene; the way her eyes never leave him. His betrayal, her madness and death, cannot affect that love. And her return to the grave is so moving not because she's gone forever but because she'll never be with him again.

And, oh yes--the perfect, flickering feet, the buoyancy of the jump, the fleetness of motion, the unaffected charm, the selflessness of performance; never a moment of showing off. She demonstrated all these qualities earlier in the week as Kitri in Don Quixote, a role less natural to her than Giselle but in which she also triumphed. In this romantic comedy, which defines the word "lightweight," with its lovable tum-ti-tum Minkus score and its colorfully nonsensical action, she was dancing with José Manuel Carreño, retiring this season (just in time). Her attentions to him were tuned differently from those she showed David Hallberg, her Albrecht, but reflected the same innate courtesy and generosity of spirit.

As for Hallberg, what can we say that we (and everyone else) haven't said countless times already? Here was an ideal Albrecht, from those uniquely arched feet to those extraordinarily delicate entrechats to that noble carriage and countenance. His careless charm at the start, his bewilderment and remorse, his anguished loss were all conveyed on the highest level of conviction and expressivity. He rose to Cojocaru's heights--and she to his. Can't we beg, borrow or steal her from the Royal for more than two or three performances a season? That's the way for ABT to fill the Met!

The Don Q's and Giselles were interrupted by the company's ambitious quadruple bill of three premieres and a major revival, Antony Tudor's puzzling and unappealing Shadowplay, which he made for Anthony Dowell in 1967 and in which Baryshnikov appeared for ABT in 1975. The action reflects elements of Kipling's Jungle Books, centering on a young boy trying to grapple with the world and himself in a jungle setting--banyan tree, vines--populated by monkeys and predators (male and female) who are wearing Cambodian-like tea cosies on their heads. This new revival was intended for ABT's incomparable Herman Cornejo who, alas, is injured. Second-cast Daniil Simkin is more Peter Pan than Mowgli but he made a game try at making sense out of this muddied concept ballet--at least he has star presence and the necessary virtuosity. Craig Salstein bravely acted rather than danced his way through the role, but he just doesn't command the technique it requires.

But why the empty, Buddhisty Shadowplay to begin with? Arlene Croce, referring to it as "this rusting hunk of junk jewelry," nailed it: "An enigma supposedly lies at the center of the ballet's events, but the events are manufactured with such coarse efficiency that long before you know you're not going to guess the secret you don't care what it is."

The new ballets included a brief (but not brief enough) Benjamin Millepied romp for three playful guys to decidedly unrompish unaccompanied Bach cello music. There's no governing idea--Troika was just another busy, empty Millepied exercise.

Far more substantial were pieces by our two leading ballet choreographers. ABT's Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky, delivered Dumbarton, a modest company piece for five non-star couples which once again revealed his unerring fluency and sense of structure. As with almost all his work, this piece invites repeated viewings, so subtle and original is his level of invention. The surprise here is that he ignores the pronounced jazzy elements of his music--Stravinsky's 1938 "Concerto for Chamber Orchestra" (the "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto")--in favor of an evocative lyricism. The jazzy approach paid off for Jerome Robbins in his long-vanished, amusing Dumbarton Oaks, created for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival. Ratmansky, however, has made a useful and appealing work--a gift to the company as a whole.

Finally, Wheeldon has come up with the ambitious and large-scale Thirteen Diversions, to Britten's "Diversions for Piano and Orchestra." The stars came out for this one: Gillian Murphy at her technically brilliant best (those lightning-tight turns!) with Hallberg; Marcelo Gomes, that beautiful partner and commanding presence, with the swiftly up-and-coming Isabella Boylston; and on, through both casts, down the ranks of the company's leading dancers. Plus a cherry-picked corps of sixteen, effectively used though sometimes nearly invisible in their black costumes against a dark background. Brad Fields' lighting, with its shifting panels of color, was bold, dramatic, and vexingly intrusive.

The heart of Diversions lies in the duets that dominate it. Here Wheeldon displays his largest talents in the sympathetic and diverse ways he shows us couples meeting, interacting, separating. The relationship between these duets and the constantly appearing and reappearing corps is a touch mechanical, but there are grand pleasures to be had from the piece. This is a return to form for Wheeldon. My only caveat: I don't feel it finally arrives anywhere. The parts are greater than the whole.

editorial@observer.com

The Royal is honoring its greatest legacy-its Ashton ballets; ambitiously exploring Balanchine (this season, Symphony in C, with Ballet Imperial and Jewels on the horizon); holding on to its MacMillan traditions (Mason was a particular favorite of his); and cautiously experimenting with newer choreographers while, of course, working to maintain the classics. After all, it was with The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake that the company conquered the world 50-odd years ago.

Two recent performances of Swan Lake at Covent Garden were both satisfying and unsatisfying. To begin with, the company's production of this ballet, known for its unsteady performance history-everyone has a Swan Lake, and they're all different-is solid, serious and as close to the 1895 version as any we know. There are touches that, as far as I can tell, are uniquely authentic: the introduction of young girls from the school into the ranks of the swans; certain formations of the corps. The Odile holds a long balance, interrupting the famous Black Swan pas de deux. The four cygnets are blessedly uncute. It all adds up to a welcome integrity of style, one that's confirmed by the superb poise and gravity of the women in the corps. This is the 1987 production overseen by Anthony Dowell, then head of the company, with its ornate late-19th-century designs by Yolanda Sonnabend. Dowell's aim was to reveal, not rethink, the ballet, and he succeeded.

But Swan Lake requires a great Odette-Odile, and the Royal, like everyone else, is short of great dancers. Its senior and beloved ballerina, Darcey Bussell, has been out with an injury, and neither of its most important young stars, Alina Cojocaru and Tamara Rojo, was on view at the two performances I caught. Half a dozen or so dancers took on the role this season; of the two I saw, neither Marianela Nuñez nor the American Sarah Lamb was more than competent in this role that must be lyrical, mysterious, exciting, tragic. You don't expect to see a Fonteyn today (she was my first Odette-Odile, back in 1949, and still the greatest I've ever seen), but you have a right to expect to be stirred and moved. These swan queens were bland. Nor were their Siegfrieds any more vivid, although Siegfried is hard to make anything of-that's why Nureyev and so many others have interpolated extended solos into the text, boring everyone but themselves. More disturbing than the underpowered leads were the unexciting casts of the first-act pas de trois, an important training ground for future stars. Only the up-and-coming (I assume) Lauren Cuthbertson made much of an impression.

It was wonderful to see Ashton's The Dream with Cojocaru and her regular partner, Johan Kobborg, although I found his Oberon a little too feral. Anthony Dowell is in charge of this masterpiece-he recently staged it for A.B.T.-and he and his regular partner, Antoinette Sibley, on whom Ashton made it, remain the standard. But no complaints. The Dream fits today's company beautifully, although in some regards A.B.T. outdoes them-the Royal just doesn't have the amazing roster of male virtuosos that A.B.T. boasts and that this ballet, with the two demanding roles of Oberon and Puck, requires.

Kenneth MacMillan's The Rite of Spring, the ballet that made a star out of a very young Monica Mason-she was MacMillan's Chosen Maiden-suffers the fate of all ballets made to this score (except Paul Taylor's brilliant spoof): It's overwhelmed by the music. No wonder Taylor used Stravinsky's two-piano version of the score. And no wonder both Balanchine and Ashton steered clear. Sidney Nolan's imposing décor suggesting the heat and aridity of the Australian desert, the scores of dancers in clinging orange and white, the endless agitations of the choreography-for me, they've always been just an irrelevance and an annoyance. Nor, on this occasion, did an uninspired Chosen Maiden help matters.

But MacMillan was a master compared to the youngish Christopher Bruce, a modern-dance choreographer who this season gave the company Three Songs-Two Voices, set to the-violinist-known-as-Kennedy's "arrangements and improvisations on original compositions by Jimi Hendrix." There are three couples and a small corps; everything is derivative; Bruce doesn't know how to deploy principals in front of a corps-all is confusion; it's too long; and it takes itself far too seriously. The astounding Zenaida Yanowsky (she's in the Plisetskaya-Guillem tradition) dominates the stage-she would dominate any stage-but to what end? The music, despite its fancy trappings, works like almost all rock music in ballet-against the dancing. Here is Kennedy on the subject: "Like Beethoven, Miles Davies [sic] and others, Hendrix was a hugely influential composer and, as with his famous forebears, he managed to reflect his fears and feelings through his music: such major composers are truly society's mirror upon its times." Think what the musical godfather of the Royal, the brilliant, witty Constant Lambert, would have made of this idiocy!

Finally, the main event of the season: the revival of Ashton's three-act Ondine, which he created for Fonteyn in 1958 and which has been out of repertory far more than it's been in. Presumably, Hans Werner Henze's "modern" score has been partly responsible for Ondine's lack of popularity (or for Ashton's reluctance to see it revived during his lifetime), yet when you listen to it away from the theater, it's a beautiful and effective piece of music. It can't, however, claim to be at one with the highly romantic 19th-century story.

Very briefly: Palemon is all set to marry Berta when he encounters the sea nymph Ondine. If you know your Romantic ballet, you know that when a mortal falls in love with a magical creature, no good can come of it: La Sylphide loses her wings and dies; Siegfried and the Swan Queen are doomed from the start. In Ondine, in place of La Sylphide's Madge or Swan Lake's Rothbart, we get the vigorously anti-Palemon Tirrenio, Lord of the Mediterranean, and the jealous Berta, counterpart of Giselle's rival, Bathilde. There's the famous Shadow dance, when Ondine, beginning to grow human, plays with her new shadow; there's a storm at sea, with the sailors and principles swaying back and forth to suggest the motion of the waves; there's an innocent betrayal, à la Swan Lake, when Palemon forgets Ondine and marries Berta; there's his death through Ondine's fatal kiss. No doubt Ashton meant it all as a tribute to the period he so loved, but you can't create a real 19th-century ballet 100 years after the fact any more than you can write a true Victorian novel today: It comes across as pastiche.

Ondine was, however, a perfect role for Fonteyn, and she held the ballet together and gave it life. Even so, the one time the Royal brought it to New York, in 1960, I found it peculiar and unconvincing. By 1966 it was gone, and it stayed gone for 22 years, when, at Dowell's request, Ashton sanctioned its first revival. Of course, being by Ashton, Ondine has endless felicities, and perhaps if I had seen it with Cojocaru I would have succumbed to it, or at least to her. Tamara Rojo is a very different kind of dancer (the London public and critical establishment are divided into a Cojocaru camp and a Rojo camp); she's strong, secure, on top of things, while Cojocaru is feminine, romantic, radiant.

Rojo worked hard to suggest Ondine's sea-nature, and stayed consistently and persuasively in character. Yet the magic wasn't there-the magic with which Fonteyn made you believe, against your better judgment, that the ballet made emotional sense. Nor did her Palemon, Jonathan Cope, help. He's been a principal for just under 20 years, and he still has his long, beautifully shaped legs, but that's about it. The much younger Ricardo Cervera, as Tirrenio, outdanced him by a mile.

Of course Ondine should be performed by the Royal-we need to see it, just as we need to see Balanchine's comparably problematic Don Quixote (which Suzanne Farrell will shortly be reviving at the Kennedy Center). But neither will ever be central to the repertory.

So if there were obvious weaknesses among the principals and soloists and a washout of a new ballet, why be upbeat about the Royal? Because there are enough strengths to compensate. And because the company is performing with unmistakable optimism and appetite. Strong, intelligent leadership, even when it makes mistakes, pays off. The Royal is beginning to look not only as if it knows where it's come from, but where it's going.

How appropriate-and how welcome-has been Lincoln Center Festival's decision to celebrate Ashton so elaborately and generously: four companies sharing the honors, and several major works back in town after an absence of far too many years. But do we need the artificial boost of an anniversary to remind us of this great artist?

The highlights of the season were the Birmingham Royal Ballet's recensions of Enigma Variations and The Two Pigeons and the Royal's Scènes de Ballet and Cinderella . But let's dispose of the lowlights first, the lowest of which was the K-Ballet (of Tokyo) doing Rhapsody , a meretricious trifle Ashton made for Baryshnikov in 1980. More interesting from an historical point of view was Birmingham's version of the wartime Dante Sonata , an overwrought work in bare feet and flowing tresses set to some overexcited Liszt: The Children of Light battle the Children of Darkness. (It comes out a tie, but not before someone has been crucified.) This work struck me as wholly risible the only previous time it has been seen in America, during the first Sadler's Wells season in 1949-50, and I had hoped that either I or it had matured since then. But, no.

Of a different order of disappointment was the contribution of the Joffrey Ballet, which decades ago had a strong Ashton wing. The years have not been kind to the Joffrey, much as some loyalists would like to think otherwise. I found their Patineurs studied and joyless, its Boy in Blue, Masayoshi Onuki, too young, too spindly and too uncentered. Remember Baryshnikov? Bujones? The early Wedding Bouquet , with its oddly charming text by Gertrude Stein and its highly uncharming narration by Christian Holder, is very much a period piece: a rompy 19th-century wedding in the French countryside. The "slightly demented" Julia, a castoff of the "rakish" bridegroom, makes as much trouble as she can, while her friend Josephine gets tipsier and tipsier. Everyone rushes about, there are amusing moments, but all in all it comes across today as tiring, even tiresome. An Ashton masterpiece, Monotones I and II -each of its two plotless sections featuring only three dancers-is set to orchestrated piano pieces by Satie, and in its calm, compressed and mysterious way manages to suggest the workings of the universe. The company approached Monotones with due solemnity, but didn't do it full justice. I'm afraid the Joffrey is an idea whose time is gone.

The Birmingham Dante Sonata may have been a misfire, but their double bill of Enigma Variations and The Two Pigeons was a complete triumph. Enigma , created in 1968, is-like Wedding Bouquet and A Month in the Country -a company ballet, a story populated by a large group of individualized characters. In this case, they are Edward Elgar, the composer of the Variations , his wife, and the friends, associates and locals who drift in and out of their garden during a period of stress: Elgar is waiting for word from a great European conductor who either will or won't choose to premiere the very music we are listening to. The material of the ballet is mostly everyday-a girl in a hammock and her suitor; an eccentric visitor on a tricycle-yet Ashton imbues everything with his inexhaustibly rich humanity. There are not many moments in recent ballet as moving as the famous "Nimrod" variation in which, in the fading light, Elgar, his wife and his close companion A. J. Jaeger explore the essence and ambiguities of love and friendship. We are in Liebeslieder Waltzer country here-the heart lifted and transfixed with joy and pain. Joseph Cipolla and Silvia Jimenez as Elgar and his wife displayed the maturity and suppressed emotion the ballet requires; the entire company rose to the occasion. One shared in their relief and pleasure when the fatal telegram arrived-with good news!

As for Two Pigeons , with its delectable (and very danceable) André Messager score and its two real pigeons, how not to love it? The Young Man is an artist; the Young Girl is his model and his mistress. We're in their studio-in Paris, of course. She fidgets while posing; he's annoyed. Some Gypsies drop in, they whirl and twirl, and our boy falls for the Gypsy Girl-or at least for Adventure. Off he goes to their encampment, leaving his girl behind, in tears. Yes, there's too much Gypsy dancing in the second act-almost any amount of Gypsy dancing is too much-and it's more or less generic. But you're not supposed to take it seriously-until the hero is suddenly betrayed, cast off by his seductress and roughed up by those Romany swaggerers. Humiliated, he crawls home-the Prodigal Pigeon-where the Girl is waiting for him and forgives him, their reconciliation the occasion for one of Ashton's most ecstatic love duets. (How beautiful they all are, and how different-this one so touching; the one in The Dream so clearly ushering Titania and Oberon to bed; the one in Fille so ecstatic and big-hearted.) If there were any dry eyes in the Met when, at the end, the two pigeons flew back in and perched on the chair where boy and girl were entwined, mine were not among them. A sentimental valentine? Maybe. But what a corrective to the Children of Darkness!

The Two Pigeons was made in 1961 on Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, and to my knowledge no one has ever matched them in it. Even so, Robert Parker as the artist, all impatient and ardent youth, and Molly Smolen as a smoldering Gypsy Girl made particularly strong impressions. In the first performance, one of the pigeons made an unscripted appearance, but no harm was done.

Apart from the dreaded Marguerite and Armand -with the athletic dominatrix Guillem unable to convey any feeling at all as the dying courtesan, though she gave good cough-the Royal Ballet made a strong showing throughout the Festival's second week. Because it's been gone from New York for so long, we're unfamiliar with the company, except for a few of the principals. Darcey Bussell, for years a favorite, performed two pas de deux-beautiful as ever, holding her own technically, always pleasing, but to me more a gracious presence than an interesting dancer: She always reminds me of minor royalty acknowledging her subjects. The great pleasure of the season came from Alina Cojocaru, the ravishingly lovely girl from Romania via Kiev who became an instant star in London several years ago. She's the great hope of classical ballet today-exquisite, perfectly proportioned, technically impeccable, lovable, modest, brimming over with a pure love of dancing. She brought a light, happy virtuosity to Ashton's showoffy Voices of Spring pas de deux; she caught much of the elegant, edgy musicality of his most important Stravinsky piece, Scènes de Ballet ; and-most important-she found a way to animate the title role in his superb three-act version of Cinderella , the first full-evening ballet ever created in England. (It was made in 1948 for Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer.)

The singularity of this Cinderella is that its genius is invested less in the romantic action than in the magnificent architectural designs with which Ashton structured the big scenes, and with the comic play of the two stepsisters, who dominate so much of the proceedings. These sisters were danced for decades by Ashton himself and England's leading dramatic dancer, Robert Helpmann, who made them into silly, bickering, man-crazy zanies, far from malevolent, just ridiculous and even touching in their outrageous drag. No one else onstage could compete with them, and the material for Cinderella herself-a lot of waltzing around with a broom and dreaming of her late mother-seemed weak in comparison. The Prince is even more of a complete zero-on top of everything else, he has a dynamic Jester to upstage him. The Fairy Godmother, the Four Seasons whom she introduces to Cinderella with a series of enchanting variations, their cavaliers, the 12 Stars (or Hours) for whom Ashton created thrilling group passages, even the be-robed and bewigged courtiers are more consistently gripping than the central couple, whose climactic Act II ballroom duet is undermined by the stridencies of the score-Prokofiev's music here at odds with the action.

Cojocaru's shining radiance triumphed over the thinness of the material. The tribulations of Cinderella's situation, not all that severe to begin with, hardly penetrate her happy nature and goodness. Cojocaru's unforced technique-those glittering yet easy piqué turns, those 180-degree arabesque penchées that never look forced or acrobatic, just a natural expression of her generosity of spirit-seems always a reflection of her inner self. She's completely lovable, exactly the way you want Cinderella to be. And like her characterization, her musicality is fresh and simple rather than subtle and witty. Because she and her Danish partner, the elegant and spirited Johan Kobborg, are so felicitously matched, such a glowing pair, they held the audience enraptured, at least partly reclaiming Cinderella for Cinderella.

There were two other Cinderellas: the nuanced and intelligent but uncharismatic Leanne Benjamin and the very fine Tamara Rojo, who is the Royal's only legitimate young rival to Cojocaru. Rojo is a strong and convincing classicist, and in the ballroom scene she was very beautiful, with her lovely body and legs and her purity of approach. But she was not only joyless, she was affectless-more like a girl in a vision scene, disembodied, than a girl who has been magically transported to a palace ball and has fallen in love. But then who could blame her, given the clunkiness of Iñaka Urlezaga, her stolid Prince?

The chief pair of sisters were two Royal favorites of the past, Anthony Dowell and the onetime dynamo character dancer Wayne Sleep. They went all the way-and then some. Lots of pratfalls and knockabout pranks, but sly sweetness was sacrificed to crass farce. The ravishing solos for the four Seasons, with their soft port de bras and surprising lunges and shifts, were so wonderful to watch that you could forgive the inconsistent level of performance. And the new production, though more than a touch glitzy, didn't get in the way. Cinderella emerged a big winner.

But the biggest winner, of course, was Ashton himself. Though we see him so intermittently in America, we begin to think we understand him. There is the love of music, the endless felicity of invention, the signature steps and style. But most of all, I think, we love his love of love. Balanchine told us that ballet was woman; Ashton tells us that ballet is woman and man, in intimacy, passion, playfulness, sensuality. There must be more kisses in Fille Mal Gardée and The Two Pigeons than in all of Balanchine put together, because what moves Ashton-and us-is love fulfilled. Which is why, in this post-ironic, postmodern world, we need him more than ever.