Born to be bad: why dancers can't resist their dark side.

PERHAPS GEORGE BALANCHINE was correct; perhaps, there are no mothers-in-law in ballet, but there certainly are plenty of wicked stepsisters, repressive fathers, muddled mothers, noxious necromancers, and kinky kinsmen. And there sure area lot of mad magicians, crafty crones, felonious fairies, ferocious fakirs, and even a vampire or two. Everybody loves watching villains, and as the reader who turns the page will discover, almost everybody loves dancing them, too.

Of course, contemporary psychiatry informs us that nobody is really bad. Scratch a troubled troll and you'll find a lonely, pathetic, misunderstood, rejected creature who might be helped out of his anguish by a good talk, a bit of free association, a plate of cookies, and a mug of hot cocoa. That brings us to motivations. Most of the scoundrels you'll meet on a dance stage have a reason, even an insignificant one, for their nefarious deeds. Carabosse, in The Sleeping Beauty, never received that invitation to the party of the year, Princess Aurora's christening, so her nose is a bit out of joint (thanks to the makeup department), and the urge to slip the little darling a micky is understandable. She has plummeted from A List to Z List. Can you really blame her?

For a resentful hag with a memory like an elephant (or a regisseur), I refer you to La Sylphide's Madge and her fatal scarf. James, the protagonist, pays for his lack of charity or even common courtesy in dealing with her. And then, there's Myrta, the queen of the Wilis. Sure, she serves up a watery death for that poor schmo, Hilarion. But, hey, consider all those jilted, brokenhearted maidens for whom she represents an avenging spirit. Evil? Nah. She's a feminist, right down to her artful arabesque sautee. So, too, is any Medea you can cite, from Martha Graham's to Yuri Possokhov's. Hell hath no fury like a mother abandoned. In La Bayadere, poor little rich Gamzatti finds that a lowly temple maiden has stolen her prince's heart: time for a little snake oil, with snake attached. Who can blame Gamzatti? She and Solor already had their china pattern picked out before this mere dancer came along.

SO, WHO'S GENUINELY EVIL? I cannot find any concealed nobility in von Rothbart. Sheer malice impels this sorcerer to transform all those women into swans, yet it's Prince Siegfried who seals his own doom by succumbing to temptation. Still, for unmitigated black-hearted villainy, forget Swan Lake and consider the contemporary dance repertoire. Is there anybody more despicable than the husband in Kenneth MacMillan's The Invitation, a chap who seduces young women and ruins their lives for the mere sport? For homicidal maniacs of the serial variety, I refer you to the perfectionist dance teacher in Flemming Flindt's The Lesson, a guy who strangles every budding ballerina venturing into his studio.

In the second half of the twentieth century, evil on the dance stage underwent a striking change. Earlier villains were prone to casting spells on their victims, whether supernatural (von Rothbart) or metaphorical (the siren in Balanchine's Prodigal Son). Since then, evil has metamorphosed from magical incantations and fatal potions to projections of our innermost fears, anxieties, and character flaws. Graham can take credit for enveloping the dance stage in symbolic values. In her wake, the novice in Jerome Robbins' The Cage, for example, represents everything that, in the choreographer's view, is destructive about woman.

Over there in the Soviet Union, evil assumed political importance and became inextricably twined with the corrupt Western system; all manner of aristocrats and capitalists menaced dashing heroes and whimpering heroines in ballets like Spartacus and The Stone Flower. You knew Leonid Lavrovsky's Tybalt was rotten to the core when he proved rotten to the corps, kicking every peasant who crossed his path.

Nevertheless, audiences often find the transgressive nature of evil physically alluring. That may explain the wealth of Dracula ballets that have roosted in American regional companies of late--those swirling tapes, that pomaded hair, those sexy overbites! Why, they could even be rock idols. Who can resist?

Many of our best performers can't. The finest character dancers acquire their stature and enhance their artistry by basing their portrayals on universal human qualities. They dare to probe the psychology of villainy. They root their interpretations of evil in the internal lives and vulnerabilities of their characters, and they do it with complete mastery of their craft, and, maybe a touch of irony, too. These performers know that a funny wig, an outr, costume, an unnatural extension, and a campy sneer projected at the balcony just won't cut it any longer. Now they have to make us love these evil wretches--if only so that we can hate them even more.