"Dancing for me": New York City Ballet principal Miranda Weese is dancing for herself, and audiences love it.

Before I met New York City Ballet principal Miranda Weese for our interview, I felt I already knew her through her dancing. What she projects across the footlights is, after all, extremely intimate and revealing, what twenty-two-year-old Weese herself calls "the most vulnerable thing about me." Watching her, I saw a dancer of tremendous assurance and magnetism, a woman of depth and breadth whose maturity and imagination transform her dancing from being about steps to being about life.

In action, Weese can describe a world of emotion: playfulness, tranquillity, lust, surrender, fire, or mystery, depending on the particular role. She says simply, "I have something going on." Granted, her technical facility gives her the means to execute the fundamental text of any ballet. But she always goes further, putting her technique to use in order to speak of larger things.

My vision of Weese dancing had left me unprepared for a dominant facet of her offstage persona. In conversation, she reveals a level-headed pragmatist, a young woman who has always known what she wanted out of life and who was determined to get it.

In many ways, the story of how Weese came to be a dancer is a familiar one. She was born in San Bernardino, California. Her grandparents--with whom she went to live at the age of three and whom she has called her parents ever since they adopted her when she was eight--put her into dance class to correct ankle and knee problems. "My parents felt bad because I couldn't run and play like normal kids. The doctor recommended that they put me in dance to strengthen my legs," recalls Weese. That led to tap, jazz, and tumbling classes at the neighborhood dance school. As a seven-year-old, Weese began studying ballet at Laguna Dance Theatre, and she fell in love with it instantly. "I thought ballet was very elegant, more serious and quiet, which fit my personality," she says. "That's how I got into dance, and from there it just kept going."

At the age of eight, Weese met her first influential teacher, Katherine Joyce. As it happened, Joyce had seen one of her previous students, Teresa Reyes, get into New York City Ballet, so she passed on stories about the company. To Weese, "It all sounded very exciting." A few years passed, and Joyce felt that she had no more to offer her talented young student. So at ten, Weese came under the tutelage of Shery Gilbert, with whom she stayed until she was accepted at the School of American Ballet in 1990. Weese remembers well what she was like then. "I was very serious about ballet, always pushing myself very hard to be better. I really wanted to get on with it. By the time you are twelve or thirteen, you have to decide if that's what you want to do. So Shery asked, `Is this what you want to do?' And I said, `Yes, this is what I want to do more than anything.'"

On a practical level, Weese saw ballet as her "ticket to a life." But there were more private considerations as well. "I was so shy and so withdrawn," she explains. "Ballet was my way of communicating with people, and even just communicating with myself." It didn't hurt to have teachers along the way who believed in her ability to make it as a dancer and who took the time to educate her about the world of ballet. One night Gilbert sat Weese down and showed her a tape of City Ballet performing Who Cares? "I loved it,"Weese says. "It was exciting, fast, different. I said, `Wow! That's where I want to be. I can tell that's where I want to be.' And Shery said, `Okay.' "The decision had been made.

As fate would have it, Weese didn't get into SAB the first year that she auditioned for the summer session. She was told that her technique was fine but that she lacked expression and upper-body development. Upset by the rejection, Weese redoubled her determination to gain access to the school, proclaiming to Gilbert, "Next year I will be accepted." That sparked the beginning of a year of intense training--unlimited classes, private lessons, and very focused work that concentrated on strengthening exercises and the expansion of her ability to project with her upper body. It all paid off. With the second audition for SAB came acceptance and a full scholarship. Weese didn't stay at the school for the following winter session, feeling that she wasn't quite ready to leave her parents, but she did come back the next summer, at age fifteen, and never went home again.

After her years with Gilbert, who, says Weese, emphasized the development of artistry as much as the perfection of technique, ballet classes SAB-style were something of a shock. "I came here, and it was very impersonal, very fast, very cold," she recounts. "That was scary, and I hid in the back of the room. It was an intimidating, overwhelming environment. You are with a lot of girls who look the same and are after the same thing. You can feel it the second you walk in. Here I had fifty girls to compete with, anal had never really had that before. It really forced me to learn how to survive and how to stand on my own feet."

Though Weese admires the incredible technique of the young dancers who continue to come up into the company out of the school, she mourns the absence of the subtler arts. "At SAB, it's very-physical. Now they're into a certain look, a certain body type. I feel there's a huge loss of the love [of ballet] and of the expression of individuality. It's very uniform, almost like u breed. That's not at all what dance is meant to be. But that's how life in general is now. It's very mass-produced."

Once in the school, Weese was determined to get into the company. Near the end of her first year, teacher Suki Schorer pulled her aside and told her that if she really wanted to get ahead, she would have to push and get herself out in front, where she could be seen. Weese still remembers the conversation. "Suki said, `If I have to look for you, you're never going to make it.' " And her immediate internal response was, "Oh, I have to make it." Bolstered by Schorer's evident interest in her, Weese pushed--and was rewarded. That spring she danced a solo role in the school's annual workshop performances, which feature advanced students. Success fed success. In half a year, Weese found herself with a featured part in the school's less-publicized winter workshop. And company director Peter Martins praised her for her work. Then she knew that her dream was possible. She was sixteen.

Realizing the dream of being in New York City Ballet has humble beginnings. First, young hopefuls are invited to take company class. If they're lucky, they are then cast in small roles in The Nutcracker. After that, they are often asked to stay on as apprentices as the regular season of repertory gets underway In due time, their position might be made official with the coveted corps de bullet contract, which assures a place on the roster and a check in the bank. All this happened to Weese, with one major glitch along the way. Just as she made it through the Nutcracker season, she broke her foot. "I was in a rehearsal, pushing off to do a jump, and I heard a big crack," she says. "I looked around. I thought for sure someone else heard it, because it was so loud. Nothing stopped. No one noticed. I crawled out of the room."

Her injury meant five difficult months of rest, rehabilitation, and soul-searching. "I thought, `That's it. They're not going to take me now,"' Weese recalls. But from her present vantage point, she looks back on that time as her biggest period of growth, in which she learned to "open up and find my voice as a person, not just as a dancer." Weese also feels that the damage she did to her foot was more than a physical event; it was a warning signal that the stress of her new life in the company was too much for her to handle. "They throw you in, and it's sink or swim," she explains. "You learn the ropes totally on your own. They have to see if you're going to survive. It's a process. There is no possible way they can take the time to personally oversee your comfort. You just learn. That's what being an apprentice is."

But Weese also has vivid memories of the joys of that time in her life. "You have those moments when you realize, `I made it. This is something I dreamed about my whole childhood, and I'm here.'" And despite her injury, she still knew that her driving desire was to dance. That meant, once back on her feet, pushing to the front again, making herself seen. Weese considered this her way of letting those in charge know that she was ready for the next step. They must have noticed, because in 1993 she signed

As relieved as she was at finally getting into the company, Weese knew that she wanted more. "My highest goal was to be a principal," she says. "And I knew that I wouldn't stop until I got there. I just really wanted it." The first step was achieving the status of soloist. Weese believes that she attained that rank as a result of a significant shift in her attitude. Instead of looking to Martins and other company higher-ups for confirmation of her talent, she decided to take things into her own hands: "For a long time I had it in my mind that they were in complete control of my career, and their opinion shaped everything that I am or have." But everything changed when Weese gave herself "permission to be in control." And when she really looked at herself, she was somewhat disturbed by what she saw. "I was very confined to technique. I knew I had more than that. I wanted more than that."

Weese went to work. "I wasn't feeling something, and I wasn't being fulfilled. I knew if I wasn't fulfilled, there was no way other people could be fulfilled watching my dancing. It's hard when you're thinking about other people's judgments. I finally decided that it's not about that. What am I thinking? What am I feeling?" She watched other dancers from the front of the house to see what made her feel something from their dancing. She asked herself what she wanted to create with her own dancing. And she realized that while technique is an important foundation, it's only a place to start. Dancing is also about "using every part of your body to express--your mind, your soul, your spirit, your muscles, your physicality, your sensuality, everything about you as a human. It's granting yourself permission to be who you are." She sums up her personal evolution: "I just started dancing for me."

After that, there was no stopping her. Martins promoted her to soloist in 1994 after a rehearsal of Nutcracker in which she danced the Sugar Plum Fairy. (Weese still has the wand.) In almost no time she was appearing in principal roles. In 1996 her strong performance as the female lead in Martins's Jeu de Cartes earned her that long-sought goal: promotion to the rank of principal.

Weese speaks frankly about what it means to be a post-Balanchine ballerina, and she bristles at the bad press the company has received recently. "Balanchine was a pioneer," she declares. "He gave us a passage into a difference, a revolutionary change for dance. But he passed on. We have to move on." Weese points out that change is inevitable. "The Balanchine ballets may be different from how they used to be done, but we're different dancers. We're a different generation. The world is in a different state. There's no possible way it could have stayed the same."

Not everything is easy about being a dancer in this day and age: "It's an era of being in charge of yourself. Sometimes I'm my own coach, my own eyes. I'll go in and look at my tapes and pretend I'm coaching someone else. That's the way I choose. I want something more, and in order for that to happen, I have to do it myself." Although she makes sure to point out the advantages of personal responsibility, Weese laments the fast pace of life in today's world, which often precludes the cultivation of artistry. "We take less care and less time in what we're creating," she notes. "So it's the quality that's really lost. And because everything's so fast, even if you want to take more time and care, it takes a lot more energy."

Weese certainly has that energy. The hunger that has driven her to attain her goals continues to spur her on: "I want to find out what I can accomplish as an artist, how far I can go with that. You can always do more. I'm excited, and I'm curious to know where I can take it, what I can do with it. It's just the beginning."