American Ballet Theatre: a living museum of dance.

When Dance Magazine started in 1927, no permanent ballet company existed in the United States. A little more than a decade later, in 1940, Ballet Theatre (now called American Ballet Theatre) came into existence as America's "museum of the dance," as founder Richard Pleasant designated it. But "museum" never referred only to preexisting works. Ballet Theatre's repertory, ranging from classics to new one-act ballets -- over 150 of them -- has been analogous not only to the Metropolitan Museum of Art but -- along with the New York City Ballet -- to the Museum of Modem Art, as well. This November, ABT under artistic director Kevin McKenzie plans to hold a season at Manhattan's City Center consisting solely of ballets to which it has given birth over the years.

Looking over the company's history, one can see some broad forces at work. The major ballets of its early years, as we know, continue to exert a particular fascination; these dramatic works, made on stellar actor-dancers such as Nora Kaye, Hugh Laing, and Sallie Wilson, are often cited as giving the company its unique profile. But not just any kind of dramatic works; in these, the drama emerges through step and gesture, carriage and dynamics, not through emoting.

Although it may sometimes seem that ballet exists purely in its own world, Ballet Theatre's repertory has felt the influence of political and artistic currents. To begin with, the original plan for an "American wing," a "British wing," and a "Russian wing" mirrored not only ballet history but the reality of the Allies in World War II, even before the United States officially entered the war in late 1941. Plans for the company were developing as the conflict started and numbers of British and Russians suddenly became available to work here. (The French did not influence Ballet Theatre until the fifties, after wartime travel restrictions eased.) American audiences were undoubtedly predisposed toward the Allies. In 1942, the tense wartime atmosphere was reflected in such premieres as Pillar of Fire by English choreographer Antony Tudor and Russian Soldier by Michel Fokine; other distinguished Russians who contributed to Ballet Theatre repertory included Leonide Massine, whose Russian Gypsy Aleko also premiered that year; David Lichine; and Bronislava Nijinska.

As to the American "front," the earlier vein of Americana ballets was no doubt reinforced by patriotic feeling during the war. The company's opening program on January 11, 1940, included Eugene Loring's The Great American Goof about a quintessentially American image, the little-guy hero. Similarly, the protagonist of Michael Kidd's On Stage! (1945) was a stagehand. Agnes de Mille's first creation for Ballet Theatre was Black Ritual (Obeah, also 1940), an ill-fated start on what was intended to be a "Negro unit" within the company; during the war she also made a tongue-in-cheek portrait of eighteenth-century European aristocrats at play, Tally Ho, or The Frail Quarry (1944). (Popular Americana such as de Mille's Rodeo and Loring's Billy the Kid had been commissioned by other companies.)

But the prime exhibit of wartime ballets in this gallery of Ballet Theatre's commissions was young corps dancer Jerome Robbins who made a lasting piece of Americana with his first major choreography, Fancy Free (1944), set to the rhythmically vital Leonard Bernstein score, which soon entered the orchestral repertory. Fancy Free is one of those artworks that endure because it captures something basic to its specific time that also continues to speak to us -- an innocence, idealism, and optimism that we've never completely lost. Its witty movement portraits of three very different wartime sailors on leave, united in their high spirits, is tempered with a wistfulness in the bluesy pas de deux alluding to the precariousness of wartime relationships.

The ballet's structure -- its repeats-with-elaborations of incidents and movement motifs, and its memorable formal elements of trio, duet, solo -- is so firm that one never tires of it. The cubano-based solo and Latin street smarts of the Third Sailor, Robbins's own role, epitomize American dance's democratic melting pot of vernacular styles and ballet.

Another influence of the time was clear in Tudor's work. Sigmund Freud's psychological probings had evoked the image of the repressed individual at war with society's constraints and falsities. This theme gave drama to Tudor's protagonists, as in his 1936 Jardin aux Lilas (which BT first performed in 1940), Pillar of Fire, and The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (1943), as well as his 1945 psychological case study of a murderer, Undertow.

De Mille's 1948 Fall River Legend, another strongly Freudian BT commission, analyzed the anguished Lizzie Borden and made a plea for understanding the murders of her repressive father and her stepmother.

The burgeoning art of film was also making its impact on dance at Ballet Theatre. The sudden, sometimes surrealistic, jumps in time and place achieved through film cutting found their equivalents in fluid set arrangements, such as the indoor-outdoor designs of BT codirector Oliver Smith for Fancy Free and Fall River Legend. Quick-change lighting and scrims could be used, as in Tudor's 1943 Dim Lustre, where they facilitate filmlike flashbacks for a man and woman whose memories overwhelm their efforts at a new relationship.

But, of course, Tudor's genius cannot be explained away by particular world trends. His personal inflections of the classical movement vocabulary directly expressed the new sense of precarious psychological balance through subtle physical precariousness and tension. His telling movement and gesture, sophisticated musicality, and compassion for human suffering embodied the complexities and vulnerabilities of very individual characters.

On another front, abstraction, which has so greatly affected the arts of this century in general and American Ballet Theatre's later repertory in particular, made a major appearance in 1947 with George Balanchine's magisterial Theme and Variations. (His first commission from BT was Waltz Academy in 1944). It was one of indefatigable longtime director Lucia Chase's many commissions up to her retirement in 1980; she requested the ballet for the great partnership of Cuban Alicia Alonso and Russian-American Igor Youskevitch. Theme turned out to be one of Balanchine's most cogent tributes to his Russian heritage, a gloss that is streamlined and speeded up in the best Balanchinean-American manner, and it enhanced the reputation of the choreographer, who was without a permanent company at the time. It stands alone in Ballet Theatre's repertoire as a successful brand-new classical ballet led by a single pair of principals; the international stars of the sixties, for example, were to get no such vehicles of their own that lasted. But Theme has been a showcase of generations of dancers both at Ballet Theatre and at Balanchine's New York City Ballet for its grandeur, its musicality, and its technical and artistic challenges.

Because of constant touring, the fifties produced more borrowed ballets than new ones for American Ballet Theatre, as the company was renamed in 1957. Nijinska's short-lived abstract showpiece Schumann Concerto (1951) was a notable exception to the rule. The success of Jerome Robbins's largescale, athletic, and energetic Les Noces (1965), set to Stravinsky's stark score or chorus, percussion, and four grand pianos, gave the company a new level of confidence.

Soon after, ABT could boast of another major new talent from its ranks, with the first two ballets of corps dancer Eliot Feld. Harbinger (1967), to Prokofiev's Piano Concerto in G, Op. 55, showed modern relationships through a fresh, playful, jazzy classicism. The poetic At Midnight (also 1967), to Mahler's Riickert songs, revealed the tortured inner worlds of lonely figures who never manage to connect, and contrasted them with happy young couples. Feld left to form a gifted company that folded all too soon. He returned to ABT in 1971 with some of his fine dancers to create A Soldier's Tale, a bitterly stylized Vietnam-era antiwar statement set to Stravinsky's 1923 concert suite. Although Feld's later work would become mannered to the point of discomfort, his early ballets -- such as Harbinger and At Midnight -- were classical and restrained, a felicitous combination of abstract form and emotional coloration with a touching freedom and an inevitable flow of movement.

Modern dance influence -- visible in Feld's work, and recurrent at the company at least since the fifties with commissions from Birgit Cullberg, Glen Tetley, Herbert Ross, and others -- resulted in The River (1970), commissioned from Alvin Ailey and Duke Ellington. Its river-of-life images embody, with vitality and a poignant clarity, the uniting of black and white influences. Later would come commissions from such modern dance choreographers as Lar Lubovitch, David Gordon, Karole Armitage, David Parsons, and Ulysses Dove, along with borrowings from the repertories of Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, and Merce Cunningham, among others.

Tudor returned, after a hiatus from the company, with a ballet that reflected changes in its roster: The Leaves Are Fading (1975) did not require the acting ability that his earlier works needed but used the company's depth of fresh young puredance talent. A lasting statement of mellow reminiscence, of passion recollected in tranquillity, set to his beloved Dvorik, it showed a succession of romantic couples, led originally by Gelsey Kirkland, whom Tudor greatly admired. (The tender central pas de deux was danced at a memorial for Tudor in 1987, as a most fitting tribute to the master.)

In Push Comes to Shove (1976), Twyla Tharp made another kind of portrait-commentary on the company, in a witty American bundle of classical and vernacular dance and music, with principals and corps -- and applause -- all as major ingredients, topped off by the suave antics of crowned classical-dancer-cum-clown, Mikhail Baryshnikov. The Royal Ballet revived Push this winter, but it would be nice to see ABT do it again. It would hold up better than some of the pugnacious works by Tharp -- a child of the sixties counterculture -- or her portentous and rambling How Near Heaven (1995).

In fact, many large-cast, abstract, pieces in recent years have been sprawling affairs, full of entrances, exits, and busyness, sometimes with the hectic pace and slambang movement of MTV segments or movie trailers, and often unintelligible. Such programming may be influenced by having to perform in large theaters, such as the Metropolitan Opera House, and perhaps by a democratic faith in multiple soloists or a fear that few dancers today can carry a full ballet. Among the best of ABT'S multisoloist works has been Mark Morris's witty, snappy Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes (1988), which offers meaty individual roles for its twelve dancers.

Principal Clark Tippet perhaps tried a bit too hard with his ambitious Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987); while congesting the stage with dancers, he did mirror with promising success the lushness of its romantic score. His two-person Some Assembly Required (1989) satisfyingly depicts one couple working out the glitches in a contemporary relationship. Tippet was carried off at an early age by a primary force of our time, AIDS. If the disease has not been reflected much in the company's repertory (a possible exception is Lynne Taylor-Corbett's elegiac 1983 Estuary, along with the duet from Lubovitch's Concerto Six Twenty-Two), it has certainly made a tragic impact on the dance world.

The season of company commissions at City Center will be welcome. On an intimate stage, New York audiences will get a fresh look at American Ballet Theatre's living museum.