A WHIFF OF NOSTALGIA.

As Proust realized, nostalgia is a weird animal; it muddles feelings while stirring up all manner of conflicting thoughts. It can provoke a kind of emotional response that closely resembles a mental reaction by simply rejecting the present as merely a pale reminder of what first prompted that original nostalgic memory. It can then--thus delivering a potent one-two punch--instantly confuse this impression with a second, now perhaps more visceral reaction, almost a feeling in the gut prompted by that fond, Proust-like, recognition of times past.

I always enjoy seeing Anna-Marie Holmes's Boston Ballet--together with Ben Stevenson's Houston Ballet and Helgi Tomasson's San Francisco Ballet, the Boston troupe nowadays joins American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet as our top classical quintet of an international standard--and a program I caught the other month offered a clear window on the current state of the Boston company. In addition to Christopher Wheeldon's new and fascinating Corybantic Ecstasies, it also included the world premiere of Daniel Pelzig's craftsmanlike, company-useful, and vividly, vibrantly danced Bachianas, set to Villa-Lobos, and the company premiere of Jean Cocteau and Roland Petit's 1946 existential shocker, Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. And it was Le Jeune Homme that set off my nostalgia depth charge.

In Boston, Viktor Plotnikov gave a passionate but controlled performance as the Young Man lured to suicide, and it was good to see Georges Wakhevitch's setting of a Parisian attic and city skyline restored to its previous glory. But watching this fifty-three-year-old work reminded me of a conversation I had with British ballet historian Cyril Beaumont just a little after Le Jeune Homme was brand-new and I was then tentatively starting out as a critic. We were discussing Fokine's Le Spectre de la Rose and Beaumont, who at that time seemed enormously old to me, informed me, just a little snootily, that people who had not seen Nijinsky and Karsavina in the Fokine had no real idea of its quality. He maintained that those who had seen that hallowed original cast, rather than, say, Alexis Rassine and Margot Fonteyn, or Etik Bruhn and Svetlana Beriosova, felt quite different from those who hadn't. Game, set, and match to Beaumont!

Now here I was finding myself feeling rather Beaumont-like about the original dancers in Le Jeune Homme--Jean Babilee and Nathalie Philippart. Perhaps it's a privilege of old age, and comes with the territory like discounted rail fares. Over the years I have seen quite a few Jeune Hommes--including Baryshnikov, Bocca, Dupond, and, on film, Nureyev--yet I have always felt that Babilee, with his paint-spattered overalls, dirty blond hair, and feral look of hunted, haunted despair--not to mention his tight, viciously controlled spins and his slow, muscular contortions--was really irreplaceable. And, as La Mort, no one else has ever blown smoke tings with quite the sensual contempt conveyed by the Lulu-like (think Louise Brooks on a bad hair day) "Pixie" Philippart.

But time moves on. I was startled to learn recently that next season Britain's Royal Ballet is proposing to revive Frederick Ashton's 1963 Marguerite and Armand, which has never been danced by anyone other than its creators, Fonteyn and Nureyev, in accordance, I had always understood, with the wishes of Ashton himself. Yet I think that, carefully cast and meticulously mounted, it could stand up today. It was surely a much more solid work than the mere star vehicle that a few people called it at the time.

Funnily enough, when its world premiere was sidelined because of an injury to Nureyev, I actually suggested to Ashton that he persuade Irina Baronova out of retirement--she was exactly the same age as Dame Margot and, as I had noted from watching her give class at the Royal Academy of Dancing, in something at least fairly close to performing pitch--and match her for the premiere with the fast-rising Christopher Gable. Ashton smiled thoughtfully and said he thought not.

I still believe it was a good idea; it would surely have gotten attention. And when the yet-to-be-announced Royal Ballet newcomers actually dance, I could have doubtless said something like, "Ah, but you should have seen Baronova and Gable in the ballet, or even Fonteyn and Nureyev. And, you know, no one will ever replace Michael Somes as the elder Germont" (although Leslie Edwards occasionally did so).

It is curious that as we get older we seem to acquire squatters' rights on our memories. How easy it is for senior citizens in the audience to murmur in their beards as they muster up musty memories, almost to relive the past, recalling not only their actual memories but also evoking--and this is surely an important component of the process--themselves at the very age when those memories were fashioned. When I myself look back on Le Jeune Homme et la Mort and recall my first sight of it in 1947 at London's Winter Garden Theatre (long destroyed, rebuilt, and now a seemingly permanent Cats home), I myself am--for a fugitive moment or so--just twenty years old and wishing I had seen Karsavina and Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose. Which was, by chance, a ballet Babilee and Philippart themselves danced in a mildly corrupt version, and not particularly well--as even I, in my green and salad days, noticed.

When I was young, older folks would say that the Sadler's Wells Ballet, which I had first encountered during World War II, was, once it was enshrined at the Royal Opera House after 1946, nowhere near as fresh and vital as it had been before the war. It is rather the way some people decried the move of New York City Ballet from City Center to the New York State Theater. Or perhaps even the way so many of us, myself included, think back to the City Ballet of Balanchine, the Royal Ballet of Ashton, the Ballet Theatre of Tudor. Those were the days!

But it was ever thus, not only in dance but in all the performing arts. When I first went to hear Wagner, the reigning soprano was Kirsten Flagstad. "Ah, but you should have heard Frida Leider!" I was told. But I bided my time, and quite soon, as the seasons evolved, I was able to say to the brash admirers of Birgit Nilsson, "Ah, but you should have heard Kirsten Flagstad!" To each his memories and, I suppose, to each his standards.

Senior editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.