Dame Alicia Markova.

BOSTON--"It's not just about me, but all the things I've been involved in," says Dame Alicia Markova, talking about the contents of her papers, which she plans to deposit in the Special Collections department of Boston University's library. "There are so many things--it's been such a long time."

"All the things" to which Markova refers include many of the milestones of twentieth-century ballet, beginning in 1925, when fourteen-year-old Lillian Alicia Marks was plucked from the classes of her teacher, Serafina Astafieva, by Serge Diaghilev. Invited to join the impresario's famed Ballets Russes, the teenager traveled to Monte Carlo accompanied by her governess.

Markova paid a visit to Boston in early May to see the Special Collections department. She has given Boston University some recent clippings and program books, and she plans to consolidate the belongings from the various stops of her career itinerary in England and the United States.

Now eighty-four years old and a storyteller who has not forgotten a moment of her glorious past, Markova, as she has been known since her Diaghilev years, spoke at a gathering of friends of the Boston University Library and then in private over tea at the Ritz Hotel. Her posture is the drawn-up position of a ballerina, ready to meet her public in a soft white dress, high-heeled shoes, and hair perfectly arranged in her signature pompadour.

"I started out as a Balanchine dancer and the first baby ballerina," she says. Balanchine was twenty-one when they met, a recent emigre from Russia. He cast the tiny dancer as the Nightingale in his version of the twenty-minute ballet from Stravinsky's Le Chant du Rossignol, the first ballet he choreographed in the West. "At that time," Markova recalls, "Balanchine didn't speak English. I only spoke English. We communicated through the music."

This past February, Markova re-created the "entrance in the little gold cage" and her first variation from Le Chant du Rossignol for a Balanchine Foundation video project directed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. Markova set her steps on Iohna Loots, a nineteen-year-old dancer whom she had taught at the Royal Ballet School. In the video, Markova speaks about creating the ballet. She recalls her first meeting with Stravinsky, who was brought in to teach her how to hear the music; Balanchine humming marches under his breath when they rehearsed without an accompanist; and the demonic rehearsal schedule that sometimes continued until three in the morning--"before there were unions," she says.

After Diaghilev's death in 1929, Markova returned to England, where she originated many roles during the decade that marked the birth of British ballet. She danced in works by Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Ninette de Valois as well as in the first British productions of Giselle and Swan Lake. She and her frequent partner Anton Dolin later formed their own troupe, then spent gypsy years dancing with the Rene Blum-Leonide Massine Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ballet Theatre (not yet called American Ballet Theatre), and many other companies. Markova co-founded London Festival Ballet, now English National Ballet, which gave its first performances in 1950. The company's studio is named Markova House. She retired from performing in 1963 but she has never stopped working to this day.

In 1982, Markova gave her costumes, wigs, and traveling trunks to the Theatre Museum in London, "as a gift to the nation," she says. This past year, she added the 1990 museum display of her dressing room. "In my dancing days, I was in my dressing room from ten in the morning to late at night," she recalls.

Among the possessions she cherishes is Anna Pavlova's dressing table, "which was willed to me with some of her furniture," Markova says. After Pavlova's death, the Russian ballerina's husband gave Markova a necklace of amber which Pavlova had loved. Markova has kept only two small chairs from the Pavlova bequest. The rest she has placed, on loan, at the Junior School of Royal Ballet.

Next month the English publishers Hodder and Stoughton will bring out a new biography, Markova, the Legend, written by Maurice Leonard.

Markova's intended gift to Boston University, together with the holdings of the Harvard Theater Collection, make Boston an important center for ballet scholars. The Harvard collection includes the volumes of notations from the Imperial Ballet that were brought out of Russia by Nicholas Sergeyev; Lady Ripon's scrapbooks of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes; the Collection on the Russian Ballets of Serge Pavlovitch Diaghilev formed by H. D. Rothschild; Parmenia Migel Ekstrom's Stravinsky-Diaghilev Foundation materials, and the George Balanchine Archives. The Boston University Special Collections is also the repository for the papers of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.