A kiss for the camera.

It is a rainy afternoon in late April and the artistic director of San Francisco Ballet, Helgi Tomasson, 61, is standing in the center of the largest studio in the SFB building, quietly reliving in his body the male solo from George Balanchine's Divertimento From "Le Baiser de la fee" (The Fairy's Kiss). A few feet away, 23-year-old Gonzalo Garcia, an ebullient new company principal, studies Tomasson's actions intently. He echoes, just behind Tomasson, the shuffling turns on quarter point and the off-balance jumps and landings that are trademarks of this moody and mysterious variation. Tomasson and Garcia are performing this public act of remembering for the video camera and staff who sit at the far end of the room.

They are representatives of The George Balanchine Foundation, and, according to ballet scholar Nancy Reynolds, the foundation's director of research, they have been waiting years for this moment. The foundation was created five months after Balanchine's death in 1983, with the express mission of rescuing "endangered" (i.e. nearly lost) Balanchine choreography. "Balanchine created this solo on Helgi for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival," Reynolds said quietly during a pause in the filming, explaining that Tomasson's understanding of the dance sets the standard for its interpretation.

"Balanchine made this entire solo on me in an hour and twenty minutes," Tomasson tells Garcia. "Then he didn't rehearse me again in it until two days before the premiere. All he said was, 'Good, that's good. Next!' "Tomasson laughingly recalled. For nearly three hours the slender and wide-eyed Garcia is indefatigable, repeating the choreography, which encapsulates the perfume of the plot of Le Baiser de la fee, about a young man repossessed by a fairy on his wedding day.

Tomasson, who had been in New York City Ballet for barely two years when Balanchine made this solo for him, has white hair now, but as he marks through the steps for Garcia and the camera, his actions still have the crisp precision and the neat clarity for which he was known. He cautions Garcia that the dreamy look of ease in the movement is dangerously deceptive. "It gradually gets harder and harder," he says. "By the end you are so tired you just want to get it over with, but you have to draw it out instead." By mid-afternoon, Garcia is drenched with sweat, and he understands intimately the grueling challenge of this pensive soliloquy. "The body is doing something and the head is doing something else," Tomasson says, explaining the strangely beautiful motion of a series of signature racing leaps in which Garcia snaps his head back toward where he came from just as his body surges forward.

By the day's end, the video documentation is in the can, but the living future of the Baiser excerpt is now in Tomasson's hands and Garcia's body. The afternoon of labor translating the thirty-year-old memory of one man into the soaring body of another means a crucial piece of Balanchine's work can now be preserved as both the process and a souvenir of extraordinary dancing memory.