"The Bacchae."

Romeo and Juliet is easy—we know the story, after all. Still, choreographers can’t resist it, and the latest of them—Edward Clug (Romanian), head of Ballet Maribor (Slovenian)—does offer a new slant. First of all, Juliet survives. (Actually, we’ve encountered this approach before, in a spoof in which R. & J. both live on, in nearby Mantua, trapped in a bickering, after-the-bloom-is-off, you-take-out-the-garbage kind of marriage.) The new work—tricked out with handsome Renaissance-y back projections—also pulls a switch musically: not Prokofiev, not Delius, not Tchaikovsky. Instead, we have Radiohead, that portento-pop supergroup—which explains why the name of this ballet is Radio and Juliet. (Among the Radiohead numbers deployed: “Idioteque,” “Like Spinning Plates” and “We Suck Young Blood.”)

Like its music, the choreography is deadly serious—it’s one long flashback, as Juliet, kneeling beside dead Romeo, recalls her story. There are seven dancers: Juliet herself (in a variety of corsets) plus six guys in black, their bare chests peeking out from their open shirts. She doesn’t seem much more interested in Romeo (Radio?) than in the others, but then Mercutio always steals the show. Nothing is literal, but we can infer the ball scene (white masks), the balcony scene (pecking in silhouette), the fight scenes. A lot of the movement is exciting—fierce kicks, violent twitching; snatches of break-dancing. This Juliet is far from passive—she’s snappy. The guys whip through things ardently. This is far from the worst R. & J. we’ve ever seen, and it’s been successfully playing around the country over the past few years.

The most interesting thing about it in New York was the audience, which filled the big Skirball theater down at N.Y.U. This was no ordinary ballet audience though: I’d guess that three-quarters of it was young adult. They’d come for Radio, not Juliet, but they had a good time, and I had a good time watching them have it.

I had a different kind of good time a few nights later watching Luca Veggetti’s interpretation of (he calls it “a meditation” on) another great play, Euripides’ The Bacchae, one of the most powerful and mysterious of Greek dramas. This was the first offering from the newly reconstituted company called Morphoses since Christopher Wheeldon suddenly abandoned it to his co-founder, the beautiful, one-time Balanchine ballerina Lourdes Lopez. Now it’s bringing in a different artistic director (and mostly different dancers) every year.

Mr. Veggetti is one of those European choreographers who’s everywhere—slick, efficient, sometimes effective, and most of all, productive. As is true of Radio and Juliet, there’s no attempt at the literal here, and because Euripides’ play not only is less well known than R. & J. but is deeply obscure in itself, creating a danced version of it is a daunting challenge.

As a dance work, Mr. Veggetti’s Bacchae only partly succeeds; for one thing, it certainly doesn’t make its narrative intentions easy to grasp. But as a theater work attempting to suggest the nature of ancient Greek drama, it has remarkable intelligence, and many powerful effects. There are countless ways of presenting Greek theater, since we know so little of what the Greeks themselves did, and much of what I’ve seen has struck me as utterly spurious. Here the combination of the mysterious lighting, the resonant and gnarly music (featuring an amazing contrabass flute, taller than the woman playing it) and the semi-stylized, semi-hieratic movement gave me at moments the sense that this might be the real thing—or at least one possible real thing. Only the moments of speech seemed inadequate—dancers, for the most part, just aren’t vocal actors. No one understood this better than Martha Graham, our foremost interpreter of the great Greek stories, who always brought in an experienced actress to speak whatever text was involved. (Who could forget Marian Seldes striding across the stage trailing bolts of cloth in something called Mendicants of Evening?)

Mr. Veggetti’s dancers were uniformly strong and committed. With her supple and strong body, magnificent Frances Chiaverini as Dionysus dominated the stage, and City Ballet soloist Adrian Danchig-Waring, as the doomed King Pentheus whom Dionysus lures to his destruction, revealed a force that we haven’t previously realized was in him. All in all, this inventive and mostly persuasive Bacchae bodes well for the new Morphoses.

There’s no one the New York dance world honors more highly than Suzanne Farrell, always (and rightly) referred to as Balanchine’s greatest muse. She’s not only remembered as a great dancer and a great artist (not always the same thing), but for the past decade she’s been recognized as both a superb coach and a leading force in preserving Balanchine ballets and style. Her company—the Suzanne Farrell Ballet—has been supported from the start by the Kennedy Center in Washington, where she most frequently performs, although we’ve also seen her in New York over the years.

Recently she brought her dancers to the Joyce for an all-Balanchine program that, alas, was a disappointment. In Washington, a week or so earlier, she had successfully presented two major works, Serenade and Concerto Barocco, both too large for the Joyce stage. In addition, in Washington she had a live orchestra, and a wider choice of dancers. The constricted New York stage plus dancing to taped music inevitably diminished the effect her company made, but there were other negative factors as well.

Yes, it was good to see the 1947 Haieff Divertimento, last performed here in 1993 as part of a City Ballet Balanchine retrospective, but this is not a major work. Acknowledging that fact—supremely practical and always a genius at recycling; a firm believer in “waste not, want not”—Balanchine cannibalized it in a number of later pieces, most obviously Square Dance: the jaunty youthfulness, the relaxed yet formal courtesy of the dancers to one another. (Even the pale blue costumes are related). The Farrell company presented it respectfully, almost clinically, but could not make a case for it (and its less-than-great score) as more than an historically interesting addition to the Balanchine repertory. It barely survived the cautious, stiff dancing it received.

When it came to the “Diamonds” pas de deux—one of Ms. Farrell’s greatest roles—the results were disastrous. The ballerina I saw, Violeta Angelova, was hopelessly out of her league, with absolutely no amplitude—perhaps the defining Farrell characteristic. She was correct, but correctness isn’t the secret of “Diamonds,” on top of which, although this is a work for only two dancers, it looked cramped at the Joyce. With Balanchine it’s not a question of how many people are on the stage; it’s that his works require air and space.

As for Meditation, the rapt duet Balanchine created for Jacques d’Amboise and Farrell back in 1963, the male partner is meant to be a seasoned man looking back at a girl he’s never forgotten. In this performance he looked less experienced than the young girl he was remembering. Even so, Ms. Farrell’s girl—Courtney Anderson—gave the one thrilling performance of the season. She underlined what was lacking in the rest of the company: large-scale intensity. Agon, which closed the program, got a clean, careful reading, with Michael Cook a standout in the man’s pas de trois; it too, though, looked uncomfortable on the Joyce stage.

Finally, the program itself was unfortunately constructed. The two short pas de deux were book-ended by interminable intermissions—13 or so minutes of dance surrounded by two black holes. We need Suzanne Farrell in New York, but we need her unhampered by a constricted stage and what is essentially a brave but second-level pick-up cast.

What’s the right word for William Forsythe’s I don’t believe in outer space? Awful? Dreadful? Let’s settle for execrable. Mr. Forsythe is dubious enough in his serious mode; when he turns zany (his own word), we’re out of the frying pan and the fire, and into hell. There are round black objects all over the floor of the stage. There’s endless running and shrieking. Also endless gnomic narrative (“As if by chance things are falling on us … as if by chance things are being thrown up”). There’s convulsing and mumbling and snatches of well-known lyrics (“I put a spell on you”; “I will survive”). On it goes, and on and on. It’s dance by assault.

This 2008 work appeared as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival, but it isn’t even New let alone Next; today it’s as corny as Kansas in August. Poor Pina Bausch is prematurely gone from us, but her melody lingers on—though exploited rather than honored. The BAM audience was besotted.

editorial@observer.com

From
the start, Don Quixote was seen as a problem, most of all by Balanchine himself—he was always fiddling with it: adding music, moving sections around, creating new dances. Audiences were perplexed by its unique and unexpected combination of drama, pageantry, religiosity, formal divertissement and the heightened passages he created for Farrell, as well as by the central character being a non-dancing role. The music, by Balanchine’s old friend Nicolas Nabokov (they went back almost 40 years, and had been discussing this ballet for almost that long), took much of the blame for what was generally seen as a flawed effort. And yet Don Quixote was compelling, especially when on occasion Balanchine himself took the central role.

Act
I is the weakest. The servant girl Dulcinea, who lovingly ministers to the Don, also appears to him in the guise of the Virgin Mary. The hero, with his befuddled grasp of reality, sets off on his quest to vanquish injustice, accompanied by the faithful Sancho Panza. There’s some generic peasant dancing in a town square, a juggler, a puppet show with children, a horse, a donkey and a remarkable solo for Dulcinea, who at this point appears as a young girl accused of complicity in a murder.

Act
II takes place at the court of a duke and duchess who maliciously welcome the mad Don as an honored guest only to encourage their courtiers to torment him.
Here we witness the bitter cruelty of Cervantes’ Spain, but also the Don’s courtesy, innocence and generosity. His innate chivalry keeps him from grasping that he’s being made a fool of. There’s an extended divertissement—a suite of ingenious formal dances (flamenco, Mauresque, Sicilienne et al.)—and finally an orchestrated assault on the Don by the masked courtiers, who prod him with their rapiers, blindfold him, leap on his back, pummel him, and leave him almost dead, after a surreally horrible final moment when one of them smears his eyes with a gout of whipped cream. During this powerful and deeply disturbing passage, Dulcinea appears as a vision of tenderness and consolation.

It’s
the third act that explodes into brilliance. Surrounded by a formal group of maidens led by two demi-soloists and their cavaliers, Dulcinea—now divorced from any direct responsibility to the plot—performs one of the most intense and thrilling dances in all Balanchine. At first she’s grave, but soon she erupts in a galvanic outpouring of ardor and despair. And now it becomes almost impossible to speak about “Dulcinea” rather than about Farrell. Here was Balanchine’s first and most indelible presentation of her astounding qualities; here, almost at the start of their unprecedented collaboration, she was fully and magnificently identified.

Fortunately,
there’s a murky film, unavailable to the public, of the first performance of Don Quixote. It features Balanchine and Farrell, and to watch it is to experience the miracle of his total grasp of her potential genius. If this were the only documentation of Farrell, you could infer her entire artistic life from it—it’s as valuable as the famous filmed passages from the first act of Giselle that give us our only glimpse of the legendary Olga Spessivtseva.
Farrell’s
performance is heart-stopping—the amazing off-balance lunges, the ravishing back-bends, the absolute fearless abandon, the total commitment to the gesture and the moment. Yes, she’s still a baby, but she’s also, already, a peerless ballerina, in complete charge of her body, her role and Balanchine.

This
dance is superbly constructed, the solos and the material for the corps effortlessly integrated, and for once Nabokov’s music is appropriate—romantic and exciting in the right way. (At other times, it’s pure movie music, and second-rate movie music at that.) The two dancers Farrell chose to portray Dulcinea carried things off with admirable aplomb and to good effect, despite the light-years disparity between their talent and Farrell’s. Sonia Rodriguez is accurate and hard-working—she’s an excellent executant—but she’s essentially
unexciting: a ballerina, but a provincial one. Heather Ogden, second-cast, is younger and freer—both more innocent and more involving. How odd that Farrell, of all people, cast her second. After all, if Balanchine had stopped to consider status or age, he wouldn’t have made Don Quixote on her in the first place.

After
the climactic third-act pas d’action, the ballet returns to its story—the final degrading assaults on Don Quixote; his famous delusional attack on the windmill; his grotesque journey home in a pig cage. His last fevered vision is of an ominous procession of church dignitaries, and then of Dulcinea, once again seen as the Virgin, welcoming the hero in his martyrdom. When he dies, she reappears as the simple peasant girl placing two wooden sticks in the shape of a cross on his body.

Balanchine,
as seen in the film, keeps the ballet from veering into self-pity—his Don is vigorous in his old age, bewildered rather than distraught or loony, aristocratic without being proud. Farrell’s Momchil Mladenov is tall and thin (Balanchine’s preference for the role), but at the start his body and movement style give him away as inappropriately young. He recovers, though, through focus and intelligence, and creates a credible Don.

Farrell
has handled the complicated stage business impeccably—scene flows into scene, the transformations and other special effects work easily, and the sets (by Zack Brown) are an improvement on the heavier aesthetic of Esteban Francés.
The
weakness in the production lies in the secondary performers. Although there are several pleasing dancers in the second-act divertissement and in the third act—Natalia Magnicaballi, Erin Mahoney, Shannon Parsley—they can’t compare with Balanchine’s 1965 company: dancers of the caliber of Patricia McBride, Suki Schorer, Mimi Paul, Patricia Neary, Marnee Morris, Gloria Govrin, Arthur Mitchell and on and on. It’s a dazzling honor roll. That Farrell succeeded as well as she did with dancers considerably below this level of talent is a tribute to her teaching and coaching skills—no surprise to anyone who has watched her guide dancers over the past several years. One of the many things she learned from Balanchine is to cheerfully and honorably make the best of whatever resources are available, and her respect for her dancers has been repaid with their obvious devotion to her, and to him.

Just
as it did 40 years ago, Don Quixote leaves us fascinated, moved—and puzzled.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s, it was less easy to see it as a link in a chain of related works—related not because they’re all dance-dramas but because they all center on a certain kind of male figure. Yes, Balanchine has given us the male glorious—Apollo, Oberon, the “Rubies” boy—and the male humorous and the impersonal cavalier. But surely we sense a more direct connection between him and a parade of men in extremis which begins with the Prodigal Son, debased by the vicious Siren, and proceeds through the romantic Poet undone by the fatal dazzle of the Sonnambula, the tragic Orpheus destroyed by Eurydice’s importunities, and the desperate Schumann, succumbing to madness. Don Quixote, despite the loyalty and solace offered by his fantasy Dulcinea, is humiliated like the Prodigal, maddened like Schumann, and driven to death like the Poet and Orpheus.

What
sets Don Quixote apart from these other ballets is that there isn’t a great deal of distance between Balanchine’s own pain and the pain suffered by his
hero: He’s so personally affected by the buffetings life inflicts on the Don—so obviously identifying with him—that he seems to be saying, “I don’t deserve this.” And then he rewards himself with Heaven.

We’re
not used to a Balanchine so humanly exposed, and Farrell, at 19, could hardly have understood what Don Quixote was revealing. Her devoted reconstruction of it makes it clear that now she understands.

The
important practical question raised by her production is whether such a large-scale, problematic work can become a permanent part of the Balanchine repertory. Certainly it will stay alive as long as Farrell has the opportunity to present it, and perhaps there are major companies—the Kirov, say—who might take it on. It’s even possible, I suppose, that Farrell and New York City Ballet might eventually accommodate each other. But is Don Quixote worth preserving? After all, other important Balanchine works have vanished—Cotillon, the full-length Le Baiser de la Fée, the early versions of Mozartiana, Balustrade, Bourrée Fantasque, The Seven Deadly Sins.

None
of these works, however, was as meaningful to him, or as revealing. The lesson we just learned in Washington is that although we didn’t know we’ve been missing it since it vanished almost 30 years ago, Don Quixote does still matter, both for its own sake and because of its unique place in the Balanchine canon. When you’re dealing with a supreme master—a Shakespeare, a Mozart—you need to be able to revisit his entire corpus of work. You need King Lear all the time, but every decade or so you also need Timon of Athens. Otherwise your understanding of a genius like Shakespeare––or Balanchine––is diminished, and so are you.

From the start, Don Quixote was seen as a problem, most of all by Balanchine himself-he was always fiddling with it: adding music, moving sections around, creating new dances. Audiences were perplexed by its unique and unexpected combination of drama, pageantry, religiosity, formal divertissement and the heightened passages he created for Farrell, as well as by the central character being a non-dancing role. The music, by Balanchine's old friend Nicolas Nabokov (they went back almost 40 years, and had been discussing this ballet for almost that long), took much of the blame for what was generally seen as a flawed effort. And yet Don Quixote was compelling, especially when on occasion Balanchine himself took the central role.

Act I is the weakest. The servant girl Dulcinea, who lovingly ministers to the Don, also appears to him in the guise of the Virgin Mary. The hero, with his befuddled grasp of reality, sets off on his quest to vanquish injustice, accompanied by the faithful Sancho Panza. There's some generic peasant dancing in a town square, a juggler, a puppet show with children, a horse, a donkey and a remarkable solo for Dulcinea, who at this point appears as a young girl accused of complicity in a murder.

Act II takes place at the court of a duke and duchess who maliciously welcome the mad Don as an honored guest only to encourage their courtiers to torment him. Here we witness the bitter cruelty of Cervantes' Spain, but also the Don's courtesy, innocence and generosity. His innate chivalry keeps him from grasping that he's being made a fool of. There's an extended divertissement-a suite of ingenious formal dances (flamenco, Mauresque, Sicilienne et al.)-and finally an orchestrated assault on the Don by the masked courtiers, who prod him with their rapiers, blindfold him, leap on his back, pummel him, and leave him almost dead, after a surreally horrible final moment when one of them smears his eyes with a gout of whipped cream. During this powerful and deeply disturbing passage, Dulcinea appears as a vision of tenderness and consolation.

It's the third act that explodes into brilliance. Surrounded by a formal group of maidens led by two demi-soloists and their cavaliers, Dulcinea-now divorced from any direct responsibility to the plot-performs one of the most intense and thrilling dances in all Balanchine. At first she's grave, but soon she erupts in a galvanic outpouring of ardor and despair. And now it becomes almost impossible to speak about "Dulcinea" rather than about Farrell. Here was Balanchine's first and most indelible presentation of her astounding qualities; here, almost at the start of their unprecedented collaboration, she was fully and magnificently identified.

Fortunately, there's a murky film, unavailable to the public, of the first performance of Don Quixote. It features Balanchine and Farrell, and to watch it is to experience the miracle of his total grasp of her potential genius. If this were the only documentation of Farrell, you could infer her entire artistic life from it-it's as valuable as the famous filmed passages from the first act of Giselle that give us our only glimpse of the legendary Olga Spessivtseva. Farrell's performance is heart-stopping-the amazing off-balance lunges, the ravishing back-bends, the absolute fearless abandon, the total commitment to the gesture and the moment. Yes, she's still a baby, but she's also, already, a peerless ballerina, in complete charge of her body, her role and Balanchine.

This dance is superbly constructed, the solos and the material for the corps effortlessly integrated, and for once Nabokov's music is appropriate-romantic and exciting in the right way. (At other times, it's pure movie music, and second-rate movie music at that.) The two dancers Farrell chose to portray Dulcinea carried things off with admirable aplomb and to good effect, despite the light-years disparity between their talent and Farrell's. Sonia Rodriguez is accurate and hard-working-she's an excellent executant-but she's essentially unexciting: a ballerina, but a provincial one. Heather Ogden, second-cast, is younger and freer-both more innocent and more involving. How odd that Farrell, of all people, cast her second. After all, if Balanchine had stopped to consider status or age, he wouldn't have made Don Quixote on her in the first place.

After the climactic third-act pas d'action, the ballet returns to its story-the final degrading assaults on Don Quixote; his famous delusional attack on the windmill; his grotesque journey home in a pig cage. His last fevered vision is of an ominous procession of church dignitaries, and then of Dulcinea, once again seen as the Virgin, welcoming the hero in his martyrdom. When he dies, she reappears as the simple peasant girl placing two wooden sticks in the shape of a cross on his body.

Balanchine, as seen in the film, keeps the ballet from veering into self-pity-his Don is vigorous in his old age, bewildered rather than distraught or loony, aristocratic without being proud. Farrell's Momchil Mladenov is tall and thin (Balanchine's preference for the role), but at the start his body and movement style give him away as inappropriately young. He recovers, though, through focus and intelligence, and creates a credible Don.

Farrell has handled the complicated stage business impeccably-scene flows into scene, the transformations and other special effects work easily, and the sets (by Zack Brown) are an improvement on the heavier aesthetic of Esteban Francés. The weakness in the production lies in the secondary performers. Although there are several pleasing dancers in the second-act divertissement and in the third act-Natalia Magnicaballi, Erin Mahoney, Shannon Parsley-they can't compare with Balanchine's 1965 company: dancers of the caliber of Patricia McBride, Suki Schorer, Mimi Paul, Patricia Neary, Marnee Morris, Gloria Govrin, Arthur Mitchell and on and on. It's a dazzling honor roll. That Farrell succeeded as well as she did with dancers considerably below this level of talent is a tribute to her teaching and coaching skills-no surprise to anyone who has watched her guide dancers over the past several years. One of the many things she learned from Balanchine is to cheerfully and honorably make the best of whatever resources are available, and her respect for her dancers has been repaid with their obvious devotion to her, and to him.

Just as it did 40 years ago, Don Quixote leaves us fascinated, moved-and puzzled. Back in the 60's and 70's, it was less easy to see it as a link in a chain of related works-related not because they're all dance-dramas but because they all center on a certain kind of male figure. Yes, Balanchine has given us the male glorious-Apollo, Oberon, the "Rubies" boy-and the male humorous and the impersonal cavalier. But surely we sense a more direct connection between him and a parade of men in extremis which begins with the Prodigal Son, debased by the vicious Siren, and proceeds through the romantic Poet undone by the fatal dazzle of the Sonnambula, the tragic Orpheus destroyed by Eurydice's importunities, and the desperate Schumann, succumbing to madness. Don Quixote, despite the loyalty and solace offered by his fantasy Dulcinea, is humiliated like the Prodigal, maddened like Schumann, and driven to death like the Poet and Orpheus.

What sets Don Quixote apart from these other ballets is that there isn't a great deal of distance between Balanchine's own pain and the pain suffered by his hero: He's so personally affected by the buffetings life inflicts on the Don-so obviously identifying with him-that he seems to be saying, "I don't deserve this." And then he rewards himself with Heaven.

We're not used to a Balanchine so humanly exposed, and Farrell, at 19, could hardly have understood what Don Quixote was revealing. Her devoted reconstruction of it makes it clear that now she understands.

The important practical question raised by her production is whether such a large-scale, problematic work can become a permanent part of the Balanchine repertory. Certainly it will stay alive as long as Farrell has the opportunity to present it, and perhaps there are major companies-the Kirov, say-who might take it on. It's even possible, I suppose, that Farrell and New York City Ballet might eventually accommodate each other. But is Don Quixote worth preserving? After all, other important Balanchine works have vanished-Cotillon, the full-length Le Baiser de la Fée, the early versions of Mozartiana, Balustrade, Bourrée Fantasque, The Seven Deadly Sins.

None of these works, however, was as meaningful to him, or as revealing. The lesson we just learned in Washington is that although we didn't know we've been missing it since it vanished almost 30 years ago, Don Quixote does still matter, both for its own sake and because of its unique place in the Balanchine canon. When you're dealing with a supreme master-a Shakespeare, a Mozart-you need to be able to revisit his entire corpus of work. You need King Lear all the time, but every decade or so you also need Timon of Athens. Otherwise your understanding of a genius like Shakespeare––or Balanchine––is diminished, and so are you.

Was it naïveté or deliberate effrontery that led Eifman to choose as his subject Balanchine himself? He writes in a program note, "This ballet is dedicated to George Balanchine. It is an expression of my admiration of him …. It is not a biographical ballet, but there is the personality of the choreographer …. I was absorbed in the world of Balanchine's ballets and, fascinated by the personality of the choreographer, was unable to free myself from this spell." It's all nonsense: The subject of an Eifman ballet is inevitably the Anguish of the Tormented Artist-and it doesn't take much stretch of the imagination to figure out who that tormented artist really is. (Oddly, in person Eifman emits a cherubic, untormented sweetness.) As for Balanchine, in real life there was never a less anguished artist; he just got down to whatever job was at hand and did the necessary, with a total absence of agony or ecstasy.

Eifman's Balanchine suffers, suffers, suffers. He's impersonated by the affectless Robert Tewsley, who is new to the company and possibly unaware of the presumption involved. We see him in a white polo shirt and black pants. He's at the end of his rope, or his tether, or his life, looking back. There's a lot of business with a straight-backed chair-he's either sitting in it (a wheelchair? a hospital chair?) or being pushed around in it by a grim attendant, or lying on the floor and manipulating it with his foot. Chair play is replaced by cat play: Wendy Whelan is Mourka, the cat famously owned by Balanchine and his wife Tanaquil LeClercq (she published a book about Mourka). There are a few ingenious moments in the man-cat duet-the only bearable moments in the proceedings. Whelan, a dancer (and person) of integrity, has been quoted as saying she was relieved to be playing a cat rather than any of the people represented in this ballet, and how right she was!

There's a large corps who dart in and out in various changes of costume, but everything they do is generic and pointless. Balanchine-Tewsley thrashes around in distress-arching his back, collapsing to the floor. And then we're shown LeClercq herself, in the person of Alexandra Ansanelli, who must be aware of the mortifying position Eifman and the company have put her in.

LeClercq, a much-loved dancer of incomparable wit, style and glamour, contracted polio in Copenhagen, in 1956, while the company was on tour. At first it didn't seem that she would survive; eventually she recovered, but was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Balanchine essentially abandoned the company for a year, to tend to her at home. To dramatize this horrible and traumatic episode involving two people who were as intensely private and dignified as LeClercq and Balanchine, to show LeClercq suddenly staggering and lurching around the stage and then being dragged off on a long piece of black cloth, and to do this on the stage of Balanchine's own theater, under the auspices of his own company, and with the excuse of celebrating him, can only be described as disgusting. People in the audience whom I recognized as old Balanchine hands were gasping in disbelief; one man was murmuring, "Oh no!" I found it as painful a moment as I've ever spent in the theater.

But that was not all. We had yet to survive watching Maria Kowroski impersonate Suzanne Farrell and, with Tewsley, act out the complicated relationship between Farrell and Balanchine. Again, the Artist in Torment, but by this time who could care? The worst had already happened. It should be noted, though, that although Kowroski bears a certain physical resemblance to Farrell, and appears to advantage in certain Farrell roles, when she attempted to be Farrell, the disparity between her real but unformed talent and Farrell's genius was all too blatantly underlined.

An even greater disparity was revealed when Eifman chose to end his ballet with a rip-off-sorry, a pastiche-sorry, an homage-to Balanchine's Theme and Variations , itself a tribute to Balanchine's great predecessor Marius Petipa. (Get it? The torch is passed down from Petipa to Balanchine to Eifman.) Here Eifman attempts a classical ballet, tutus and all, that despite its pilferings from Theme , and its pathetic allusions to other Balanchine formal works (the last moments of Symphony in C , for instance), makes it clear that he has no talent whatsoever for serious ballet. He lacks musicality, he lacks vocabulary, and he lacks any sense of how to deploy groups of dancers in stage space. You don't get to be a Balanchine by sampling his work, as Eifman does here and, indeed, throughout Musagète : If what was going on wasn't so offensive, you could amuse yourself by checking off the quotations from Apollo , Serenade , Agon , etc.

Assuming Eifman were capable of being humiliated, he surely would've been by the cosmically disastrous scheduling of his piece directly after Theme and Variations itself. It would be nice to think that the pairing was a comment on Eifman's talent by the head of the company, Peter Martins, who is, I believe, quite capable of this kind of mischief, but the likelihood is that the program was conceived well before City Ballet knew that Eifman planned to end Musagète with his variation on Theme and Variations . The larger question is why Martins brought this disgrace upon himself and the company he runs.

However one may disagree with many of his choices, and regret the diminution of his own considerable talent, he is a savvy and serious figure-he certainly knew what he was getting when he hired Eifman. When the commission was announced, there was a lot of speculation about Martins' motives: an attempt to attract the Russian émigré audience that, with its cigarettes and cell phones, flocks to the City Center to applaud the Eifman seasons there? An attempt to flatter The New York Times , which is so greatly responsible for his success?

I wish it were that simple. But for Peter Martins to choose to celebrate George Balanchine with a choreographer so much his polar opposite, and with a work that would have wounded him to the heart, goes beyond opportunism or cynicism. To encourage-even to allow-the appearance of Musagète on the stage of the State Theatre suggests an unconscious impulse of parricide or regicide-or both. Sophocles knew what he was writing about in Oedipus Rex , and Freud understood him perfectly.

And there was more to be discouraged about last Friday. To present Theme and Variations properly, with its fiendishly demanding central roles, City Ballet had to borrow Angel Corella from A.B.T. As I understand it, he was meant to undertake one performance, in a kind of hands-across-the-Plaza gesture of solidarity in honor of Balanchine-after all, Corella had already been dancing Theme at the Met earlier this season. He ended up doing three scheduled performances, because, I assume, with Damian Woetzel out with appendicitis, there was no one else available to fulfill the role's daunting requirements. (I gather that Robert Tewsley's attempt earlier in the week was a debacle.) Corella, of course, was superb-his unique combination of elegance, strength and lovability carried everything before it, though his virtuoso abilities and charm tended to distract from Miranda Weese's admirable if unthrilling account of the ballerina role.

But to those of who remember the palmy days of Jacques d'Amboise and Edward Villella, then of Peter Martins and Helgi Tomasson, this absence of major male talent is very disturbing. The corps is filled with energetic and eager young guys, but as of now, no one of them is looking like a polished classical dancer. Why this should be, when A.B.T. is bursting with male talent, is a mystery. That it is so helps to explain why A.B.T.'s Balanchine program earlier this season was so successful: Theme , Mozartiana , Ballet Imperial require first-level male dancers as well as ballerinas. That Gillian Murphy and Michelle Wiles would triumph in the latter comes as no surprise; that Herman Cornejo would give the best performance I've ever seen of the gigue in Mozartiana is both a tribute to his extraordinary skills and a reproach to City Ballet, though after Musagète , any further reproach seems redundant.

When the iron curtain finally came down and the inevitable rush to Balanchine began, the results were uneven. The spirit was willing (at least in some of the dancers), but the flesh was untrained in Balanchine style. Even so, the Maryinsky-still foolishly called the Kirov in the West-has persisted. During the recent white nights, it celebrated (together with the rest of the ballet world) Balanchine's centenary, not only with a festival of his work but with a photographic exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum and by co-hosting, along with the George Balanchine Foundation, a symposium of Western and Russian critics, scholars, dancers and musicians brought together to discuss the future of his work. As the company's official program book bluntly puts it, "The main development [of recent years] is connected with the Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine: today, the repertoire of the Mariinsky Theatre contains almost as many ballets by Balanchine as by Petipa. So that ends that question."

But not quite. The real question isn't how many Balanchine ballets they're doing, but how they're doing them. And the answer is mixed. A case in point: Their current Prodigal Son has some very peculiar touches-at the beginning, for instance, the Father makes a series of irritating fussy gestures over his children's heads as he's blessing them. Was this the idea of Karin von Aroldingen and Paul Boos, who staged it? I doubt it. Or is it a bit of scene-stealing by the famous character dancer Vladimir Ponomarev? As for Mikhail Lobukhin, the Prodigal, who encouraged him to be so relentlessly randy? This wasn't a naïve kid mesmerized by the Siren, or awed by her, or scared of her; he was just hot to trot. Well, maybe, but that's not the way Jerome Robbins or Francisco Moncion or Edward Villella saw it-and from the photographic and written evidence, it's certainly not what the original Prodigal, the somewhat epicene Serge Lifar, was all about. There are well-meaning and capable coaches at the Maryinsky responsible for monitoring the Balanchine repertory after the balletmasters sent by the Balanchine Trust to stage works have come and gone, but do they know enough about a ballet like Prodigal to intervene in such matters? And do they have the necessary authority?

Perhaps the Father's blessing and the Prodigal's libido are legitimate issues of interpretation. How steps are performed is another matter. The Maryinsky is aware that it has to achieve the speed and clarity Balanchine demands, but a recent company class conducted by the brilliant Balanchine ballerina and pedagogue Merrill Ashley revealed how much further the dancers have to go. Most of them seemed eager to learn (and embarrassed at their deficiencies)-it was touching to watch a ballerina as polished and self-assured as Diana Vishneva pushing herself to grasp what was wanted-but these are not lessons that can be learned in one session, in the middle of a frantic rehearsal and performance schedule.

Vishneva is an interesting case. She tears into roles, sometimes so fiercely that she overpowers them, but as we've seen on recent Kirov tours here, she's the most effective "Rubies" girl since the original, Patricia McBride, who in this part she startlingly resembles-she has the right provocative gleam and idiosyncratic accents. The Maryinsky's other leading ballerina, Ulyana Lopatkina, is a dominating and beautiful presence in "Diamonds," but to its original, Suzanne Farrell, she bears no resemblance. Not for Lopatkina the daring excesses, the profoundly personal emphases: She's more a conventional grand classical ballerina than, like Farrell, a revolutionary extension of what classical dancing can be. Farrell staked out new territory; Lopatkina reclaims the old. As for "Emeralds," it has seemed until recently to be beyond the musical capacity of the Maryinsky dancers, but they have now begun to claim it. (Which means there's no excuse today for their failure to perform the wonderful coda Balanchine added to it and without which "Emeralds" seems unconsummated. Please, Balanchine Trust, take action.)

Jewels is an important learning experience for the Russians, since it gives them Balanchine in three different modes, but their understanding of him is severely limited by the vast stretches of his repertory with which they're unfamiliar. They're gathering familiarity with his more dramatic works- Scotch Symphony came early, La Valse just now-and are bravely moving into "modern" repertory, Four Temperaments a first hesitant step. But the more they attempt, the greater the need for instilling basic principles of preparation and attack.

A lack of stylistic sophistication also manifested itself in the performances of the Perm Ballet, an important Russian company that took part in the recent festival. They are a very appealing, hard-working group, clearly thrilled to be dancing on the legendary stage of the Maryinsky, and thrilled to be dancing Balanchine. Their Serenade , however, was slightly off-key-somewhat stiff with nerves, and with certain things just wrong (including the off-putting greenish cast of the costumes). The dancers in Donizetti Variations were attractive, but they missed the jaunty high spirits of the piece-they were so concerned about correctness that instead of pouncing on it with Balanchinean relish, they came across as earnest. La Sonnambula fared better, partly because in Elena Kulagina they have a very experienced dramatic ballerina. Their Poet, however, seemed more involved in his flirtation with the Coquette than moonstruck by his fatal encounter with the Sleepwalker. Was it staged this way? We'll never know.

The highly responsive and responsible leaders of the Perm company, like their counterparts at the Maryinsky, are eager, even desperate, to do justice to Balanchine, whose genius they obviously revere. But how are their dancers to learn? This emerged as an ongoing concern during the informal discussions among the symposium panelists, who included ex–City Ballet dancers Stephanie Saland and Lourdes Lopez, as well as Ashley; Francia Russell, co-artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet and one of the leading stagers of Balanchine ballets; and dance historians and critics Lynn Garafola, Nancy Reynolds, Beth Genné and Francis Mason. If we reached a conclusion-and it was a conclusion echoed by the Russian authorities-it was that quick visits by balletmasters are not the answer; that only extended stays by experienced Balanchine teachers can solidly inculcate his principles. But given the economic and cultural realities, is such a thing possible?

It's hard to imagine an offshoot of the School of American Ballet in Perm, or Russian students and pedagogues spending significant time here-but stranger things have happened. In 1983, the year Balanchine died, the Soviet Union was still intact. Who could have imagined that only 20 years later he would be publicly celebrated and performed in St. Petersburg and Moscow-and Perm? That's the historical miracle. The artistic miracle would be the absorption by the Russians of his approach to dance. It's what they should be aiming at, and it should be achievable: After all, Balanchine didn't turn away from his Russian training, he amplified and modernized it. They don't have to totally reinvent themselves; they just need to catch up.

What the centenary celebrations are making clearer than ever is that even if New York City Ballet were keeping the flame more consistently than it is, Balanchine no longer belongs uniquely to our city. For the foreseeable future, he's the basic fact of ballet everywhere. Companies throughout America and Europe have demonstrated their hunger for his work and are struggling with his demands. Here in America we have his school, his company, his disciples and apostles. As for Russia, it gave us Balanchine; the least we can do is help to give him back.