Balanchine finds home in Diaghilev country.

PERM, Russia--This sprawling oldnew city of log houses and cement blocks on the edge of Siberia has been a double bright spot on the world ballet map. First, Sergei Diaghilev grew up here. Second, it was to Perm that the Kirov Ballet and its Vaganova Academy came during World War II, to escape the Germans. Perm's school and company have flourished ever since, and have sent a steady stream of world-class dancers--including Lyuba Kunakova and Nadezhda Pavlova--into the wider world.

Now there's a third distinction putting Perm on the map: it's become the first provincial Russian city to have a Balanchine ballet of its own. The responsible party is David Eden, a Diaghilev for our time, whose selfappointed job is bringing American culture to Russia and vice versa. For a long time, Eden had wanted to "do something in the Russian regions." A year ago, he sent the leaders of the Perm company a letter. "Do you want some Balanchine?" he asked. "Yes," came the answer.

Perm's theater is graced with an efficient bear of a director. Mikhail Arnopolsky. With Eden's help, Arnopolsky obtained the Balanchine Trust's permission to mount Concerto Barocco. Trust executor Barbara Horgan sent Adam Luders to Perm to stage the work, which had its euphoric premiere in March. On May 12, Eden flew to Perm a small clump of American Balanchineans, including Arlene Croce, David Vaughan, former New York City Ballet dancers Bart Cook and Maria Calegari, and this reporter.

We had come for a roundtable with Russian colleagues, portentously called "Theater of George Balanchine: Legacy, Epoch, Contemporaries." Swirling around us coincidentally was Perm's Fourth Annual International Ballet Competition, a decidedly unBalanchinean event. Our party retired from the fray to a quiet chalet on the city's outskirts to address the perennial wishbone question: Is Balanchine ours or theirs?

A decade or so after perestroika, both sides are ready to share. What ensued was not a tug-of-war but a pooling of information, in which one began to understand how Balanchine's Russian youth had affected him in his maturity. Some bold, heaven-seeking impulses of the great avant-gardists such as Meyerhold and Foregger found their way into Balanchine ballets, according to Sergei Korobkov. Through his paper and the others, it emerged that a few Russian critics had bravely conceived the idea, even before the Cold War's end, of Balanchine finishing the constructivist visions that Stalin had killed at home; of an avant-garde Russian idea of art's celestial geometry blooming in America.

How much those critics risked for this belief, in the bad old days when Balanchine was forbidden to audiences, we can't know. Later in the roundtable, Vadim Gaevsky, a senior critic with a great hangdog face, looked up intensely from his prepared text at Calegari. For years, he said, he had kept a photograph on his desk of "a Balanchine arabesque." Here was that arabesque in the flesh.

Vadim Kiselyov threw away his prepared text to reminisce about his youth, and the great, bright visit of New York City Ballet to Russia in 1961. We could almost see the cabal of committed souls, waiting all night for a glimpse of their exiled god, carrying a barrel of the rare Antonov apples Balanchine loved.

From the American side came a reiteration of the idea of Russian constructivist visions coming to fruition in Balanchine ballets. Croce evoked invisible wheels and spheres under the surface of Concerto Barocco, and echoes of Lopokov. Calegari and Cook described glimpses of high spirituality that sometimes came through in Balanchine's most offhand remarks.

Then we adjourned to a neo-classical gem of a theater built by Diaghilev's grandfather, where the Perm company danced Concerto Barocco. The usual Russian smudgings were in evidence: slow first movement; muddled steps in the partnering; more than a little stately puzzlement as the corps swung into the jazzy steps. On the other hand, the Russians, led by the grand and Iyrical Elena Kulagina and the liquid, daring Yulia Mashkina, gave the ballet that high seriousness, that yearning sense of reaching to heaven that Russians can bring to their chosen art. Among the breathless remarks overheard backstage after the performance: "We were so nervous," "We will grow into the steps," and "We want more."