A bow to Bolender: Todd Bolender, who grew up with city ballet and has directed companies worldwide, is a living example of dance, American style.

It is an unusually hot day in Seattle, turning the main studio in Pacific Northwest Ballet's Phelps Center into a steam bath. On a tatty velvet circular banquette, three dancers in rehearsal clothes and pointe shoes have just demurely seated themselves--but not demurely enough. They are in the early stages of rehearsing Todd Bolender's Souvenirs, which the company will perform this month on the same weekend that Kansas City Ballet revives Bolender's The Still Point.

A slender man, eves alight and alert, gets to his feet, gently moves the dancers aside, and demonstrates, his straightened back hitting the target like an arrow, no reaching with the bottom for the seat. "This is the way young ladies should sit properly," he tells them, neatly crossing his ankles.

Bolender, at 89, is neither young nor a lady, but he knows how ladies sit and a lot more besides. He is, as PNB Artistic Director Francia Russell puts it, "an icon of dance history," specifically American dance history. Not only was he present at the creation of ballet as an American art form, but as dancer and choreographer he was a key participant in its development in New York, in Seattle where he was one of PNB's founders, and in Kansas City, whose ballet company he led from 1981 to 1995, when he became artistic director emeritus. Six years of directing companies in Germany and three in Instanbul, just before he took the reins in Kansas City, have made him instrumental in putting America's stylistic imprint on opera-house ballets abroad.

As a dancer with every permutation of New York City Ballet, beginning with Ballet Caravan in 1936, Bolender created roles in the work of choreographers seeking to tell American stories in dance, among them the State Trooper in Lew Christensen's Filling Station and the strange figure of the Alias in Eugene Loring's Billy the Kid. His exceptional musicality, flexibility, and powerful legs made him an ideal instrument for George Balanchine, who made the male solo in the Phlegmatic section of The Four Temperaments on him, as well as the Sarabande solo in Agon. Of his performance in Agon, Robert Garis wrote in the International Encyclopedia of Dance, "[his] easy wit and charm in the first pas de trois ... seem unrecapturable."

For Jerome Robbins, Bolender, a man who loves to laugh, exercised his broader comic talents as the cigar-smoking husband in The Concert, and, he said in interviews, he was invariably paired with Janet Reed in "Jerry's jazzy things."

While the bulk of Bolender's dancing career was spent with Ballet Caravan, Ballet Society, and NYCB, he danced briefly with Littlefield Ballet, appearing in the first American Sleeping Beauty and Catherine Littlefield's Barn Dance; he was even more briefly with Ballet Theatre--an injury sidelined him after four months in 1944; and he was a guest artist with the Ballet Russe in 1945.

Clearly, Bolender, who has the frank, informal manner that is more characteristic of Midwesterners than of historical icons, was a versatile dancer, but in American ballet's early days, unless your teachers were Russian, training came in many forms. Bolender's began in Canton, Ohio, where he was born in 1914 (not 1919 as the encyclopedias say) and he was pegged early on as the dancer in his arts-loving family. In Canton he studied acrobatic tap, and in 1931, at the height of the Depression, he went to New York, which with all its possibilities he says, "sounded like a kind of heaven." The first two years he returned to Ohio in the summer to earn money, but at age 20 he moved permanently to the city that even seventy years ago was a mecca for artists of every stripe.

It was a hard life: His father could give him only five dollars a week to live on, and when he was first studying with Hanya Holm, who had opened a school for Mary Wigman in 1931, he had a room on 71st Street with no heat, "one house off Fifth Avenue and across the street," he said wryly, "from one of the richest women in America." He wasn't in it much: From 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. he ran an elevator in an apartment house at Park and 53rd, then went home for a couple of hours of sleep before he took class. "I loved working with Hanya," he said. "She was an incredible teacher. And the class was half percussion. It was wonderful."

Dancers of every variety came to New York on tour in those days; Bolender attended the performances of, among others, Uday Shankar, who developed his own blend of Indian and Western dance and was briefly Anna Pavlova's partner, and the German modernists Harald Kreutzberg and Mary Wigman. "The two greatest influences on me were Wigman and Shankar, their combined technique," Bolender says.

Bolender, who proudly cast his first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, did not continue with Wigman technique for political reasons. "Wigman refused to get out of Germany after Kristallnacht [Crystal Night, or the Night of Broken Glass, which marked the beginning of Hitler's persecution of Jews in 1938]," he said. By that time he was taking classes at the School of American Ballet and dancing with Ballet Caravan.

In the course of his long career, Bolender has choreographed for opera and musical comedy, and his work is in the repertoires of many companies, including the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, San Francisco Ballet, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Kansas City Ballet has more than two dozen of his works, many of them created for that company, as well as earlier works such as The Still Point, which NYCB premiered in 1956. Set to Claude Debussy's only string quartet, with its yearning, lyrical movement it looks very modern indeed, although it is danced on pointe. The title is take from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," and while the ballet tells a story of loneliness redeemed by new, young love, the piece is just as much about dancing itself.

Souvenirs, made a year earlier, to a score for one piano, four hands, by Samuel Barber, is at the opposite end of the spectrum, a comic story ballet with six scenes and lots of highly detailed choreography. "How did you ever make this ballet anyway?" James Jordan, who was assisting Bolender at PNB, cried out in mock frustration at one rehearsal. Kansas City Ballet's ballet master has, of course, staged it many times.

This tribute to silent film stars takes place at a seaside hotel in the early part of the twentieth century. "It's about a point of view," the choreographer said during a rehearsal break. "I wanted to convey the wonderful simplicity of silent film acting, to get the point across with movement."

That's no easy task for today's dancers, who are too young to have seen such masters of the silent screen as Theda Bara, on whom the ballet's Vamp is based. Nevertheless, it was in part for the sake of the dancers that PNB's artistic directors wanted to do the ballet. "We love [it]," Russell said. "It's funny, clever, witty, and has wonderful roles for the dancers."

Twenty-one of them to be precise, including the three wall-flowers on the banquette being trained in deportment. And how to make a humorous point, on pointe.

DANCE MAGAZINE Advisor/Senior Editor Martha Ullman West, a former co-chair of the Dance Critics Association. writes' for the Eugene Weekly, Dance Chronicle, Ballet Review, and other publications.