Addicted to Dance.

DANCER-CHOREOGRAPHER ROBERT LA FOSSE'S CAREER HAS RANGED FROM BALLET TO BROADWAY, UPTOWN TO DOWNTOWN.

Twenty-two years ago, Robert La Fosse, an eager teenaged ballet student, bursting with "gotta dance" enthusiasm, moved to New York City from Beaumont, Texas, to begin an adventurous career that few dancers can match. His repertory has ranged from Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story to postmodernism. His sunny, all-American appeal and innate dramatic sense made him an audience favorite at American Ballet Theatre, then with New York City Ballet; his versatility inspired Jerome Robbins and John Kelly, Bob Fosse and Margie Gillis, Twyla Tharp and Karole Armitage. Partners have included Suzanne Farrell, Cynthia Gregory, Natalia Makarova, Patricia McBride, Susan Jaffe, Darci Kistler, and Ann Reinking. He even joined Mikhail Baryshnikov, his ABT boss at the time, in Follow the Feet, a playfully competitive romp that John McFall choreographed especially for them in 1983.

La Fosse has also been choreographing since 1985, bringing his craft and sophistication to increasingly complex projects. His latest piece, premiered June 3 as part of NYCB's American Music Festival, was set to four early Duke Ellington compositions and incorporated the dance and tap styles of the swing era. (Saratoga sees it on the 17th of this month at the company's traditional summer gala.) In addition to contributing substantial, challenging works to the repertory of NYCB, his home base since 1986, he has choreographed works for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Alberta Ballet, and other troupes. He has made pieces d'occasion for galas as well as dance sequences for opera and musical theater. In 1997 he created his own Nutcracker for Russian Ballet Theatre of Delaware, in Wilmington. Along the way he evolved from the Cecchetti-oriented purist who had found Balanchine's ballerinas "vulgar" to the dancer who could exult in Farrell's daring when he partnered her ("I'11 never forget the amount of weight she gave me; a ballerina has never thrown herself into my arms like that!").

"I'm addicted to this thing called dance," he says. "It's the reason I still wake up in the morning and go to class and love what I do. At many points in my life, I've thought this may not be what I want to do for the rest of my life. I've stopped doing that. I think I know now that I'm always going to be a part of the dance world."

His first encounter with that world came very early: "I knew when I was five or six that I was going to be in the theater. I'd always had the itch or desire to perform for people. Seeing my older brother Edmund taking dance lessons inspired me to want to do the same. I can remember that from the day I started, I knew I wasn't going to give this up. I started with acrobatics, then tap, then jazz, and worked my way up to ballet. I had a wonderful ballet teacher, Marsha Woody, who was very encouraging when we got to a certain level. I didn't really know what I was going to do with it, but I knew all along in my heart that I was a performer ... When Edmund left Beaumont after high school and joined the National Ballet in Washington, D.C., I knew that it was possible to make a living as a dancer."

Arriving in New York City at seventeen, he moved in with Edmund, who by then was gaining prominence as a leading member of Eliot Feld's company. While taking classes at School of American Ballet, La Fosse learned that ABT had a male corps opening. "I showed up and took company class, and that very day I was offered an apprenticeship by Lucia Chase," he says. He soon found himself soaking up the rich atmosphere of the company in the late 1970s. "I was really excited to be where I was. I was around all these great artists: Baryshnikov, Kirkland, Gregory, Bujones. Just to walk into a room and watch these people at work--it was amazing.

"Then Misha left to dance with NYCB. I was concerned because I didn't know what it meant for ABT. When he came back, that's when everything started to happen. I think he noticed my dramatic ability, that at a young age I was able to take a character and develop it. I think he knew that I was ambitious and a hard worker, and that I was always watching. He gave me a role in Nutcracker. I did a sailor in Fancy Free, then the lead of Prodigal Son--quite a turning point in my career, and it happened by default, because Misha was supposed do the first ABT performance, but he was injured. He and John Taras had worked closely with me on the role, but I went out onstage and realized that I was all alone out there."

Baryshnikov encouraged and challenged La Fosse, giving him increasingly prominent roles and promoting him to principal in 1983. In 1985, when Kenneth MacMillan staged his Romeo and Juliet for ABT, he chose Leslie Browne and La Fosse as his first cast. For the young principal, that was a "thrilling experience, one of the hardest pieces I've ever danced." The opportunity came during a heady period in his life. "That was the year I fell in love; there were some wonderful things going on; it was pre-AIDS, so life was really going full force. I wasn't thinking about the future; all I could think about was what was happening."

Before the year was out, his life and career had undergone serious reassessment, a period that inspired his 1987 autobiography, Nothing to Hide (Donald I. Fine): "My personal life started to change, and I got really burned out touring so much and not being in New York. I started choreographing and really loved that. There was an element of wanting to do other things besides the ballet. I knew that there would be change, and I was scared of change."

The touring company of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Song & Dance was being assembled at the time, and Peter Martins, who had choreographed the show on Broadway, invited La Fosse to perform the central dancing role on the road. "He said, `After you finish this tour, you'll come dance with us.' I said, `We'll see,'" La Fosse recalls.

While considering his options, he received a lunch invitation from Jerome Robbins, who made an ultimately convincing case for joining NYCB immediately. "Robbins had a big influence on me," he says. "At that point I had worked with him a lot, doing his ballets at ABT and being in a touring group that he took to Spoleto in 1982, when I performed Afternoon of a Faun, N.Y., Export: Opus Jazz, and Other Dances.

"Jerry's ballets are about people; they're about places in time, or references to relationships. I was always interested in portraying characters. I think Jerry picked up on that in dancers. In a Robbins ballet, you're forced all the time to remember who you are, what you are, and where you came from, and to relate to the dancer you're dancing with."

Soon after La Fosse joined NYCB in spring 1986, Robbins made Quiet City, an elegiac work featuring him and two soloists as angelic figures who appear before a crowd of onlookers dressed in dark street clothes. Although Robbins made a point of not giving any specific explanation or reference for the work, La Fosse had his own, very immediate interpretation. "At that time, my ex-boyfriend had killed himself and my friend Peter Fonseca had died of AIDS, so in my heart it was for the people who were dying." (La Fosse has been quite active on- and offstage in AIDS fundraising and in 1993 was artistic director of "A Demand Performance," an evening of collaborations between choreographers and fashion designers that raised $1.8 million for organizations that serve people affected by HIV and AIDS.)

Further opportunity to experience Robbins's genius came when he was featured in the original cast of Jerome Robbins' Broadway, the sensational 1989 compilation of highlights from the many musicals Robbins had choreographed and directed from 1944 to 1964. La Fosse was in the show for three months, performing Tony in West Side Story and Gabey in On the Town, dancing an extended pas de trois to Irving Berlin's "Mr. Monotony," and earning a Tony Award nomination for best leading actor in a musical. "That was truly an educational bonus," he says. "It was extraordinary to see all those dance numbers assembled, to watch how they came together, how they related to each other. Everybody came in and took part; it was the most amazing thing I experienced as far as history goes."

La Fosse's first season with NYCB was a whirlwind of learning roles; he performed in eleven ballets. In addition to the lure of working closely with Robbins, joining NYCB gave him increased opportunities to create his own choreography. "I impressed upon both Peter and Jerry how much I wanted to choreograph," he says, "and they said that they'd make every effort to include me in the choreographic process. There were a lot of opportunities, such as company workshops, that I didn't know about at the time. I already knew that choreographing would be my future, and that's what I really wanted to investigate. I was very fortunate." Martins invited him to make a ballet, Woodland Sketches, for the 1988 American Music Festival. At Lincoln Kirstein's invitation, he created a forty-five-minute story ballet, Puss in Boots, for the SAB 1990 Annual Workshop Performance, which was was well received. He also contributed works to all three Diamond Projects, the intensive spring offerings of new ballets presented in 1992, 1994, and 1997.

Each of La Fosse's pieces for NYCB has displayed a deep respect for the classical idiom and its possibilities. His 1994 Danses de Cour (to Richard Strauss) and 1997 Concerto in Five Movements (Prokofiev), while extremely different stylistically, are complex, musically deft compositions that show his capacity to marshal large ensembles and to make principals and soloists dance with new fervor. Concerto was, La Fosse feels, "the most sophisticated work I'd done up till then. It's intricate structurally. I wanted to do a piece that was not a story ballet, but in which each movement evoked something for me. Because the music was composed in the 1930s, there are a lot of references to Busby Berkeley; based on my research, that's where a lot of the patterns come from." His imposing corps of sixteen women in sleekly designed, blazing-red leotards set the dynamic tone: "The score has a kind of Olympiad feeling ... There's something very sportsmanlike about it."

La Fosse's charming Nutcracker, which the Wilmington-based troupe plans to perform annually, sets the action in Russia--the dancing dolls in the party scene enact the Petrouchka story--and makes use of actors as the party scene parents, local students in an abundance of children's roles (including delightful "rosebuds" who join in the Waltz of the Flowers), and company members for the gracious series of second-act divertissements. "I tried to find a way of telling the story that is as clear as possible" La Fosse comments. "Some people try to go in too deep with Nutcracker; they go back to the Hoffmann tale and try to bring out Clara's sexual identity. That really destroys the charm and what's in the music and Petipa's libretto. To me, it's more about magic, and I tried to create that as much as possible. The ballet was created at a time when everybody was fascinated by magic."

In recent years he has danced on stages away from Lincoln Center. He enjoys collaborating with artists whose sensibilities are very different from those of classical ballet. In 1993 he appeared as an ethereal embodiment of inspiration in John Kelly's Light Shall Lift Them at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and lately he has joined Margie Gillis and other dancers in a touring program of solos, duets, and chamber works. "It's an ongoing collaboration," he says of his work with Gillis, with whom he created a haunting, poignant duet called Fallen Angels. "I'm madly and deeply devoted to her as an artist. She's a star, she's special. There's something that happens in the studio with us that allows me to learn a lot about improvisation."

Opera is another, quite different milieu in which La Fosse feels comfortable. He has choreographed productions at both the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera; last season he contributed new choreography to the Met's lavish Die Fledermaus, and this December he will choreograph the Met's world premiere of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby. "I find working in opera a wonderful experience. It educates you--watching the director work, exposing yourself to the music."

At thirty-nine, La Fosse has already accomplished much in many different arenas, but he is eagerly looking forward to and envisioning what opportunities lie ahead. (He'd choreograph a musical if the right one came along.) Meanwhile, he's still a strong presence at NYCB, bringing his distinctive flair and personality to Union Jack, The Concert, and West Side Story Suite while relishing the challenges of such caractere roles as Dr. Coppelius, Drosselmeier, and Rotbart in Peter Martins's new Swan Lake.

"There will come a time when I'll stop dancing," he says. "It may be in two years; it may be in five. I'll know. It's a very difficult thing to give up dancing. It's like a little death. It's always hard for me to go see someone's final performance, because it tears my guts apart. As dancers, we put ourselves out there, physically and emotionally. Yes, it's a job, but it can change people's lives."

Susan Reiter is a contributing editor of Dance Magazine.