Ballets Russes Reunion: One Last Grand Adventure.

THE STANDING OVATION erupted before the show even began at this spring's Ballets Russes Gala Performance, held at New Orleans's Orpheum Theater as part of the four-day Ballets Russes Celebration. When the curtain rose on a half-moon of nearly seventy-five original company members--all formally dressed, most white-haired--the anticipatory buzz that had begun in the lobby built into thunderous applause, shouts of "Bravo!" and tears visible on both sides of the proscenium.

During the subsequent greatest hits program from the Russes repertoire, including Gaits Parisienne, Graduation Ball, and Les Biches, Bolshoi dancer Dimitri Gudanov's sweeping, weightless jumps in Le Spectre de la Rose drew an approving roar. At intermission, viewers oohed and aahed over an exhibit of original Ballets Russes drop curtains painted by Salvador Dali (who envisioned a woozy surrealist wasteland for Bacchanale) and Alexander Benois (who set Petroushka against a St. Petersburg skyline, with fanged cats riding broomsticks over the sleeping city's domed silhouettes). The curtain call echoed the glamour of the original company, as guest artists from the San Francisco Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet and beyond fanned out across the stage, gold braid gleaming and tiaras winking in the floodlights. But nothing matched the visceral power of that first tableau and its emotional response, a testament to the company's widespread and enduring influence.

Through its multiple world tours and incarnations--from its 1909 Parisian birth as Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to Col. W. de Basil's Ballets Russes (1932-52) and the overlapping Serge Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (1938-62)--the Ballets Russes was instrumental in shaping ballet and developing its audience in the twentieth century: "It seemed all the conference-goers, who traveled from far-flung parts Of the globe had some connection to the company, as dancer or fan or both. Christmas, Easter and the Ballets Russes: those were the days we looked forward to in Seattle," declared moderator Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, whose Conseil International de la Danse/UNESCO helped organize the event with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the New Orleans International Ballet Conference, presided over by Olga Gardia de Smoak.

The company, which disbanded briefly after Diaghilev's 1929 death in Venice and produced intramural rivalry and a number of short-lived offshoots until the Denham company's final performance in Brooklyn in 1962, collaborated with artists ranging from Henri Matisse to Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau to Igor Stravinsky. It yielded renowned choreographers Vaslav Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava Nijinska, George Balanchine, Michel Fokine and Leonide Massine, whose ballets figure significantly in the modern repertoire, and whose students have gone on to dance in, and direct, companies worldwide. An illustrated family tree branching out into those companies, part of a Ballets Russes memorabilia exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art, underscored the company's vast international reach. So, too, did vintage photos of company members hamming it up on ship decks and waving from train windows. If one shot truly captured the relentless traveling, it was of Tatiana Stepanova, wearing a tutu and a tiara, and gamely adjusting her pointe shoes from her perch on a battered steamer trunk.

But the exhibit, fascinating though it was, couldn't compete with living history, and starstruck balletomanes spent most of their time at the Sheraton Hotel adjacent to the city's French Quarter, hanging on tales of hardship and adventure told by the company's surviving dancers. At panel discussions, they spoke movingly and often hilariously of the multinational company they called family. Though there was frequent mention of the grueling itineraries and the lousy pay, many also called it the best job they'd ever had. "You cannot buy with all the money in the world the fabulous tours," said Miguel Terekhov, a Uruguayan whose Russian father had been a dancer, and who joined the company as an impressionable youth with visions of long-legged ladies dancing in his head. "For a 14-year-old kid, it was adventure. It was what I wanted. Sometimes people complained and said it was hard, but I don't know--I treasure those years."

Not only did the company build ballet audiences wherever it went, it picked up company members along the way, like a gypsy caravan. In the 1930s, when the de Basil company first began touring the States, it brought ballet to thousands of Americans with frequent whistle-stops--one-night stands in small towns, where they would dance what they called their "ham-and-eggs" programs (with staples like Les Sylphides), then race back to the train to eat a late dinner and rinse out their tights in the tiny washbasins. To maximize the company's Russian mystique, non-Russians danced under Russianized stage names. "If you were Smith, you became Smithoff" said Seattle native Marc Platt, who became Marc Platoff. Thanks to their worldly reputation, dancers were invited to the homes of wealthy benefactors and well-heeled fans, though as Platt recalled, the dancers typically exited the theaters in the one suit or black dress they owned even if they weren't going anywhere, just to maintain the company's aura of glamour. Australia, famously dazzled by the Ballets Russes, clamored for the dancers to star in advertisements promoting cosmetics and other luxury items. At a conference screening of An Avalanche of Dancing, a documentary on the company's Australian travels, 81-year-old Irina Baronova shook her head ruefully as her youthful endorsement for cigarettes flickered across the screen.

The Ballets Russes became a surrogate home for many dancers who left their own homes as teenagers, or in the case of dancers like Warsaw's Nina Novak, had their families and friends torn from them by World War II. Refuge and adventure weren't the only draw, of course: For Liverpool's Frederic Franklin, the Ballets Russes promised a way out of his small English town and into a professional career. Now 86 and still dancing character roles with American Ballet Theatre, Franklin began taking ballet lessons as a youngster, after an aunt told the local teacher her nephew ought to "have a go," because he liked to wiggle around to the Victrola. Eventually, however, Franklin had to expand his horizons, and he auditioned for the Ballets Russes at age 17, after spotting an ad in Variety that read "Wanted: A Boy."

The Depression, World War II, a series of South American revolutions and the exigencies of running a touring ballet company meant that money was always scarce, and the panelist dancers swung from admiration to cheerful disgust in describing de Basil and Denham both as strict taskmasters and creative accountants. Baronova, one of three "baby ballerinas," who toured with her mother in tow, jokingly recalled that her mother used to hide money in her knickers, and when de Basil needed some, "they would go out in the alley and she would lift her skirt and oblige him. I mean, she would give him the money," Baronova added, as audience members giggled. Native American ballerina Moscelyne Larkin (who toured as Moussia Larkina) remembered a South America tour when payday was mysteriously postponed to a new day in each country they entered.

Salaries weren't all they had to improvise: During that same trip, they traveled on a train powered by wood and coffee beans. "It smelled good but it ran very slowly," Larkin said. De Basil also insisted that the dancers take daily class, even, literally, when they were on the road. "We wrapped towels around barbed wire fences in the farm land and did barre," said Baronova. "Gradually, the cows would come over and get interested. And the traffic! I'll just leave that to your imagination."

There was wonder--at Cuban dancer Alberto Alonso's first glimpse of snow--and havoc, in trying to move seventeen different nationalities across borders. Some of their adventures were nothing short of harrowing: Fifteen-year Russian veteran Nathalie Krassovska recalled the tumultuous day in 1939 that World War II was declared; the company was in Paris, and the news sent people running panicked through the streets. As soon as they could, the dancers set sail for New York. "Quickly, quickly, take your places," Massine ordered the first night they arrived at the New York theater, the same night they had disembarked from the ship.

Despite competition for roles and the stresses of working and living together so closely, the dancers came to rely on one another, and the camaraderie that developed was evident at the reunion, along with genuine gratitude at seeing each other once more. "It is so good for the morale to meet again," said Baronova tremulously at the discussion "European Beginnings of the Ballets Russes," as her fellow pan elists gathered to embrace her. There was fond mention of dancers who had passed on, particularly the company's longtime Russian principal Alexandra Danilova, but along with the hugging and weeping and mutual admiration, there was also plenty of laughter. "The first time I saw George, I thought he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen," said Chicago dancer Alan Howard of fellow panelist George Zoritch. "You wouldn't believe it now," Zoritch replied wryly. "I look like the remnants of Louis XIV ... I bend down and I see breasts."

Close quarters produced intra-company intrigue, including marriages between Polish dancer Roman Jasinski and Larkin, who went on to found the Tulsa Civic Ballet together, and fellow Native American ballerina Yvonne Chouteau and Terekhov, who eventually followed Larkin and Jasinski to Oklahoma. Chouteau was six months pregnant on one Latin American tour, Terekhov said, prompting a pre-performance telegram from Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso that read, "Good luck to the three of you."

Individually, the dancers faced their own challenges, from learning roles at the last minute to planning their lives long-term. The men often faced questions about their masculinity, said Alberto Alonso, who had begun taking ballet to strengthen his legs for football. "I had lots of fights with boys. They all said it was sissy," he recalled on the all-men's symposium "At Home in the World: Men and Ballet." For the women, the question was how to strike out on one's own. At "Women as Dancers and Pioneers," a panel moderated by Francine Segal of Loyola University and Lynn Garafola, the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and a Dance Magazine contributing editor, Yugoslavian dancer Mia Slavenska remembered being ridiculed by her director for wanting to choreograph a piece about an upstart Yugoslavian peasant who was tortured to death in the town square. "You must be crazy," he admonished her. "You want to portray a tragedy with pretty girls on tippy-toes?" But Slavenska defied traditionalists with a later solo work questioning the logic of steps: "I have always disliked the thirty-two fouettes in Swan Lake," she said. "If you don't want to do it, you are accused that you can't do it. I made a dance that was all fouettes: thirty-two to the right, forty-two to the left. The curtain came down as I was spinning."

Teaching and coaching the Russes repertoire afforded many a post-career alternative to choreographing, although Baronova, who took up the challenge, hasn't always found it satisfying. "I'm asking them to do what the choreographer asked me to do; it's like preserving a photo," she said, but what results isn't always recognizable. "The young people say, `It's boring,' and it hurts, because it was not boring."

If those young people don't yet understand the Russes legacy, the conferencegoers knew too well what a rare occasion the reunion was. They offered impromptu, heartfelt testimonials to the company's impact on their lives, like the woman who became a dancer after seeing Baronova, and tucked photos of Baronova dancing Sleeping Beauty into her makeup mirror before performances. At the newly opened New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, younger dancers took master classes with repertoire guardians like Krassovska and Nikita Dogulshin, dean of the choreographic institute at St. Petersourg's Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, while their older counterparts viewed rare footage of the company and reconstructions of original works.

Dancers well into their 70s and 80s even demonstrated variations from the Russe repertoire, giving the younger generation a fleeting glimpse of the performances they had missed. At a June 3 formal dinner, in a glass-walled hotel ballroom with a view of the Mississippi River, the Vaslav Nijinsky Medal was awarded, posthumously, to de Basil, Massine and Denham, as well as to Novak, Franklin, Howard, Platt, Slavenska, Irina Borowska, and writer and New York Times critic Jack Anderson for their work in advancing Nijinsky's artistic ideals. The dancers know that theirs was an extraordinary era, unprecedented and unmatched, but beyond the obvious artistic trailblazing it did, the company most likely enjoyed such widespread popularity because, as Franklin said simply, "We were good and people liked us."

Heather Wisner is an associate editor at Dance Magazine. Her childhood teacher, former Ballets Russes dancer Robert Irwin, used to enliven her ballet school's cast parties with his touring tales and memorabilia, although if what Marc Platt says is true, he left out the good stuff.