Angel Corella: a career in high gear.

The young man seated in the makeup chair is nineteen years old and looks considerably more composed than he feels on this June night, one hour before his debut as the leading dancer in Theme and Variations with American Ballet Theatre. Though Angel Corella speaks no English, it has been evident to him in this, his first season with ABT, that his presence engenders excitement.

In class other dancers gather around him when he does twenty pirouettes from a single preparation. Rumors of his gifts were such that the New York Times assigned an article about him before he ever appeared onstage; dancing his first roles, the Peasant Pas de Deux in Giselle and the Bronze Idol in La Bayadere, he was greeted with cheers and showered with roses. And now, this performance of Theme and Variations, part of a mixed bill on a Monday night, has been sold out for weeks.

"I knew a lot of people were coming," said Amanda McKerrow, the experienced and gracious ballerina Corella will partner, "and I knew they were coming to see him."

By now Corella understands that the hype and anticipation surrounding him have been virtually unprecedented and so intense that with this performance he can either dash the enormous expectations placed upon him or justify them. He gazes into the middle distance as makeup is applied to his well-defined cheekbones and chin and to the dark, almond-shaped eyes that occasioned a stranger on a New York street to tell him, "You have a face that Picasso would have loved to paint." In repose that face is preternaturally dignified and elegant, yet remote, for even at this early stage Corella possesses the unmistakable otherness that marks a genuine artist.

This opportunity to prove himself at the Metropolitan Opera House with a great ballet company is what Corella yearned for since he began dancing at age seven. But early on, despite his gifts, he was mired in frustration, his future inexplicably stalled, his longings unobtainable. Even then, dancing at the Met remained his utmost desire. "But that," he used to tell himself, "will never happen to me."

The makeup man applies finishing touches. Corella closes his eyes.

"What are you thinking?" asks Ricardo Cue, his manager, and the engineer of Corella's recent journey from oblivion.

"I'm thinking of every day I had. to get up at seven in the morning and go two hours to class," Corella answers softly. "And I feel that in this moment I am receiving the reward."

Backstage, in the intermission before Theme and Variations begins, it strikes McKerrow that despite his outward calm Corella must be nervous, for while she warms up, she notices that he is practicing Theme's difficult and tiring "turning section" again and again, executing his whiplash-fast double pirouettes, followed by a single fouette. His ears are covered by a headset on which he plays music before a performance to rouse his energy. Often he plays alternative music groups like Rage Against the Machine. Tonight he plays Sam Cooke, losing himself, and his concerns, in the singer's mellow voice.

He removes the headset only when the Tchaikovsky music begins to filter across the stage from the orchestra pit. Moments later, the heavy gold brocade curtain rises. When Corella and McKerrow are seen onstage. the audience breaks into excited applause. As Corella dances, he hums the music to himself. The rich and precise melodies seem grafted onto his body like a second skin.

On both sides of the stage, the company fills the wings. Before the performance, for luck, they gave him a banana signed by many members of the corps de ballet. Now, watching him intently, each of these young dancers knows that Corella's time to prove himself has arrived.

Corella is ready to begin his variation. He takes a deep breath and faces the audience in fourth position.

"The silence all around the stage was so deafening," he would say later, "that I could feel everyone was with me."

Theme and Variations, created in 1947 for Alicia Alonso and Igor Youskevitch, is a rite of passage, a ballet requiring such supreme clarity, speed, and pristine precision that the extraordinary virtuoso Erik Bruhn considered it the most difficult male part in dance. "If you can do a good Theme and Variations," Baryshnikov once told another virtuoso, Julio Bocca, "you can do a good anything."

"Theme masters you," says McKerrow. "You don't master it. You just try to rise to the occasion." She herself had debuted in Theme ten years earlier, partnered by the late Patrick Bissell. Knowing that Theme is given only to dancers regarded as greatly accomplished, she had sensed how much was riding on it.

Thus, when Kevin McKenzie, ABT's artistic director, gave a Theme to Corella, it would be difficult not to read that gesture as both an accolade and a trial. To McKenzie, the assignment may have been as much a corroboration of his own judgment as of Corella's talents. For it was he who had hired Corella at the start of the season in March, taking the unusual step of bringing him into the company as a soloist, and risking the complications of creating openings for him in a schedule already cast.

"When you see that energy for the first time ...," he recalls, still smiling at the pleasure of it. "Around here, the going joke was, `Yeah, but can he sing?'"

"I can't wait for people to see him," McKenzie was saying early on. And indeed, the ABT audience was enthralled, first by Corella's exuberant Peasant Pas de Deux--executed with such undistilled ardor for dance that his partner, Shawn Black, would later say, "He made me remember why I became a dancer"--then by Corella's typically musical reading of the Bronze Idol, one of ballet's most stylized and virtuosic solos, that revealed his capacity to forge a connection with the audience even in a role so narrowly confined.

It was following his third performance of the Idol, at the matinee of May 10, that McKenzie, wanting to see Corella in "the context of a longer piece," sought out the young dancer in the soloist's dressing room to inform him that he had been scheduled for a Theme and Variations on June 5. At those tidings, Corella's face broke into his lustrous, contagious smile, and his dark eyes beamed. He had no fear of dancing Theme and Variations, which he had danced once in Spain when he was fifteen. He knew only that he wanted every opportunity, every possibility, every challenge. He had come a long way to get them.

Corella, the only son of a middle-class family, was born in Madrid on November 8, 1975. The brick house in which he and his two older sisters grew up rang with music, which his mother played all day, humming Bach and Vivaldi as she ironed and cleaned. His sisters studied ballet, while he was enrolled in a judo class at age seven. Soon he saw a man's nose broken. The sight of blood horrified him. As he recalls now, with a grin, he thought, "This is not for me," and began taking ballet class.

At fourteen he was accepted into a Spanish company, but there things went badly for reasons he has come to perceive as strictly personal. Told repeatedly that he had no talent, he found himself, at the end of four years, relegated to the back row of the corps and to sharing the dressing room farthest from the stage. He was disheartened and downcast. Convinced that he had no future, he was about to quit dancing when his mother spoke to a retired dancer about her son's dilemma. He put Corella in touch with Ricardo Cue, a passionate ballet aficionado and a student of the craft and history of dance, who had been a director of the Spanish National Ballet.

"What do you want to do?" Cue asked Corella.

Corella answered, "I want to get out of here."

The company Cue most admired was ABT, and he determined to bring Corella to it. But first he wanted to enter Corella in a major dance competition. "You are going to win the gold medal," he told Corella that first day. "We need it for the working papers." That was in November. The next important competition was held in June. "If I have to wait that long," said Corella, "I will quit dancing."

Cue flew to Paris, where he convinced officials of a December competitition, the Concours International de Danse de Paris, to allow Corella to be a late entry. With his first inkling of hope in years, Corella threw himself into practicing. "Taking Angel from his company," Cue would say later, "was like taking a tiger from a cage." He took first prize over ninety-four contestants. Contest judge Natalia Makarova later described Corella as exceptionally incredible ... He is an angel who has been sent to us." And so from being ill-treated and unknown, Corella went to being chauffeured by limousine to a dinner with Madame Georges Pompidou and Madame Jacques Chirac, wives of leading French political figures.

As Cue's enthusiasm burgeoned, Corella, remembering his prior frustration, became more skeptical. "That is ridiculous," Corella would reply after Cue spoke of the sensation Corella would soon make with this world-class company in New York. "That is crazy."

"And soon," Cue would tell him, "the whole world will be ridiculous and crazy."

After they came to New York and signed the contract with ABT, Corella was enraged. In Spain he had been trapped in a company that was like a sect. Now, his contract signed, his immediate future nonnegotiable, he felt trapped again. He hated New York at first. Then, gradually, as Cue's promises started to come true, Corella came to believe that his fortunes could change.

Corella's first rehearsal of Theme was held on May 20, only sixteen days before the performance. He worked with David Richardson, a former NYCB dancer who now coaches ABT's Balanchine repertoire and is known to ABT audiences for his beatific Friar Laurence in MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. Richardson looked forward to working with a dancer of such elegant epaulement, archingly graceful port de bras, effortless ballon, and soft landings. Together they focus on the minutiae that can make an adequate performance good and a good one great--a twist in the torso that should be in the hips, an extension slightly misplaced, an assemble that wrongly resembles a brise.

"Don't put your head to the side," Richardson cautioned at one point. "It makes you look sad."

Corella learned quickly, anxious to correct mistakes, to retry a combination. Working on placement, he studied his image dispassionately in the mirror. Moment by moment, his expression changed; now impish, now gleeful, now focused and intent, now otherworldly, transported by enveloping rapture. When something went wrong, he bit his lip and made a face and looked suddenly like the teenager he was.

There is nothing he would rather do than work on his dancing. Often, after rehearsal, he remained in the studio for hours. Apparently able to learn an entire ballet or ballet score by watching or hearing it once, he would view ballet videos in his small apartment, then dance the entire work, humming every bit of music, playing every part. Now, in the studio, he began a series of spins but kept losing his line. Corella's pirouettes are among his most thrilling technical feats, and he tossed a frustrated look at Cue, who was present at this rehearsal.

"There's something uncomfortable for him," said Cue, so he can't do the pirouettes."

"Does he know what it is?" asked Richardson, "or do I have to find it for him?" Cue repeated the question in Spanish to Corella, who explained the problem. "He doesn't need to go into fourth position to prepare each time," Cue told Richardson, "He just needs to mark the position."

One hour after it began, the rehearsal ended. "I'm very happy," Richardson said. "I hope that Angel is happy." His words were translated for Corella, who shook his head. "I think it all went wrong," he said. "It was very good," said Richardson, smiling his beatific Father Laurence smile. "Trust me."

Much of Theme and Variations's impact relies on what Richardson describes as "the romance and magic of the pas de deux," and at the next rehearsal, three days later, he tried to coax these elusive elements from Corella. At this rehearsal, Corella partnered ABT's youngest ballerina, Paloma Herrera (scheduled at that time to dance Theme with him, but later forced to withdraw due to an unusually taxing rehearsal schedule). They went over the pas de deux several times, but something was missing.

Patient, nurturing, Richardson gently coaxed both dancers into a state of confidence and relaxation. Then, as the pianist played the majestically swelling music, Corella elegantly extended his right hand to Herrera who accepted it with an elegance of her own. Corella's gestures, his gaze, the way he partnered Herrera had become more gracious, more adult. Richardson smiled as he noted the alteration. "That romance and magic are essential," Richardson said when rehearsal ended, "and today I saw a hint of that perfume, that cologne."

Three nights later, May 26, Corella made his debut in another role, leading the Mandolin Dance in Romeo and Juliet. Backstage, nervous about slipping on the stage, worried about giving a bad performance, he warmed up by dancing parts of William Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated and of Les Sylphides.

Shortly before the performance began, ABT's rehearsal administrator, Cristina Escoda, approached Corella and Cue. "Whenever the lead gypsy is listed for rehearsals in Don Quixote," she told Cue, "Angel should go to that rehearsal."

Corella is well aware that in McKenzie's upcoming version of Don Q, the lead gypsy will dance a small, virtuosic role created on him by McKenzie.

"The lead gypsy?" Corella asked hopefully in Spanish. Cue nodded, and Corella's eyes glowed like those of a child who had just opened a wonderful present.

Corella is a compelling young man, with an elusive nature readily obscured by that open, dazzling smile. It is difficult to know him well, and no one will know him long without understanding that dance matters more to him than anything else. Most of the time, he combines the good manners that come from being well brought up with an inborn kindliness: smiling and waving at infants in their carriages, asking his companion, as he hurries through city streets on a sweltering day, "Are you tired?"

Despite these courtly and gentle attributes, he often describes himself as a rock, and it is an apt description of a young man who tends to be stubborn and bent on getting what he needs and wants. When necessary, he can be cool, and he is usually unsentimental, never losing sight of what he can do, or of his determination to do it. Trafficking always in extremes, he either likes people enormously or dislikes them. He bestows trust on few individuals, but that handful who have his trust have it absolutely.

Lately he has been struggling to come to terms with the life that appears to be opening up before him, a life in which he finds himself for reasons and through means that mystify him.

"When I dance, I feel as if I am being moved by something outside myself," he says one night at dinner. "It is the feeling of being a puppet."

"That is because God gave this gift to you," Cue tells him. Corella's young face grows solemn as he thinks this over for a minute. "If that is true," he says finally, "then it is a tremendous responsibility."

In that "deafening silence" of the Met's stage, Corella takes the very first steps of his first variation in Theme. As he dances, he experiences what he can only describe as euphoria. "It is like being in love for the first time," he explains later, "and being loved back." The excitement in the audience is palpable, for in ballet, where a new generation is born every ten years or so, audiences literally witness the arrival of the next generation, a lineage proceeding, in recent decades, from Bruhn to Nureyev to Baryshnikov to Mukhamedov to Bocca. Now, watching Corella, the audience senses that here, on this spring evening at the Met, they are observing that charmed and consummate line extend to its next successor.

When Theme ends, there is thunderous applause, and the curtain descends. Before it is raised again, the corps of ABT turn to Corella and applaud. Then the curtain is raised, and McKerrow bows to Corella, falls to one knee, extracts a red rose from her bouquet, kisses it, and presents it to him.

The audience's applause builds as Corella takes his bow. As the sound washes over him, one Spanish word resounds in his mind again and again: Gracias.

There are two more weeks in the season. For Corella, dancing the lead gypsy in Don Q provides another success, and the onset of frustration. In most of his parts, he has had to come out onstage and prove himself in just a few minutes. "With a longer part," he tells Cue, "if you do a bad double turn, you still have ten more you can do right."

He worries that it may be a long while before such a part comes to him. Then this worry recedes as he focuses on ABT's final night of the season.

After closing night he is greeted at the stage door by fans who give him a huge bouquet of red and white carnations. He then goes to a small dinner attended by the principals in Don Q, Bocca and Herrera. Afterward, he and Cue walk up Columbus Avenue. It is a perfect spring night, a soft, eastward breeze wafting off the Hudson River. ABT dancers seem to be everywhere, walking in threes and fours, not ready to say farewell to this magical evening.

At West Sixty-seventh Street Corella sees an old lady begging for money, her head covered with a babushka. He goes to her and places his huge bouquet in her hands. She stares at him, astonished. "You are an angel," she says.

A few days later, the day before Corella leaves New York for ABT's summer tour, he rehearses with Herrera. They are vibrant, so young yet so accomplished, conveying real joy in the movement and in the building connection between them. Corella has never seemed as alive or as open. "He has shed a skin," says Cue.

They rehearse Theme, then move on to Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux. When they finish, Richardson beams. "Very, very good," he says. "Very special, very moving."

When rehearsal ends, Richardson tells Cue, "We're casting Angel as Benno in Swan Lake." This means that Corella will dance the celebrated Petipa Pas de Trois.

"This is wonderful," says Cue. "This is just what he wanted. To be onstage more than a few minutes."

Richardson watches Corella do a series of perfect double pirouettes. "I feel almost blessed," he says. "His dancing was beautiful in the beginning. It is even more so now."

"This season is ending in happiness," says Cue.

"When you want something very badly and you don't have it," Corella says, "you forget about it, and then it comes to you. That always happens to me."

On Corella's final evening in New York, he and Cue ride uptown in a cab, from which they emerge at Lincoln Center. Corella looks across the plaza to the Met. It has been just four months since he first came here and saw a video of ABT dancing Don Quixote.

"Will I get to touch that scenery?" he had asked Cue at the time.

Cue had answered, "You will dance in front of it."

And now he has. This vast, modem building is the home of Corella's recent past and of his promising future. For a long moment, Corella gazes at the Met and at the great plaza around it. "This is what I love," he says.

Elizabeth Kaye who writes about dance and the arts, is author of Mid-life: Notes from the Halfway Mark, published by Addison-Wesley.