Danilova at ninety.

The really has only herself to blame. Last November Alexandra Danilova became ninety years old, and we missed the opportunity to wish her "Happy birthday" on what is, after all, a fairly significant milestone. But, as I said, she only has herself to blame. After all, she doesn't look ninety, and indeed had I not been alerted to the occasion by an old mutual friend, Duncan Noble, I would have passed it by.

Noble, recently retired from teaching at the North Carolina School of the Arts, actually had the privilege of dancing with her in the old Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo days. In a warmly gossipy letter he recalls: "When she asked me to perform Hilarion to her Giselle she gave me a lesson in Acting 101. At the end of that rehearsal I knew what he was, what his clothes were made from (probably animal skins not properly tanned), how he lived, how he smelled, what he ate, why he was originally portrayed with red hair and a beard. and what his skin was like because he spent most of his time outdoors. Most important to me, she explained that he was not a villain but was trying to protect Giselle."

Somehow, talk of Danilova's Giselle brought back a flood of memories of the dancer, herself--how she danced, how she was, and, I suppose, what she was and what she stood for. The part she played was that of a bridge leading from the late Maryinsky to the late Diaghilev, then on to the early De Basil and, further still, to the early stirrings of indigenous American classic ballet. It all came back.

Early last spring, at a reception for the Dance Library of Israel, I found myself sitting at dinner at Tavern on the Green between Danilova and Markova, with Freddie Franklin nearby. Ah, if only as a teenage fan I could have foreseen that moment, my teenage fan's heart would have burst with pleasure. As it was, it was pretty heady stuff. For these two women from vastly different backgrounds--though with careers that for a time ran strikingly parallel--are virtually the last of the great ballet legends.

Markova was very special--a great ballerina. I would say that she was one of the three great Giselles of the century, the other two being Galina Ulanova and Yvette Chauvire (I never saw Tamara Karsavina). Danilova was also very special, but in a different, less-conventionally-the-ballerina, way. But great. Her Giselle was not, indeed, her best role. I first saw it in 1949 and admired it enormously. But, as you can tell from reading her own fascinating book of memoirs, Choura, published in 1986, Giselle was never one of her favorite parts. She always preferred Myrtha, and there she was peerless.

Danilova as a dancer, whatever role she performed, was quite miraculous: a stylist who imposed her individuality upon everything. Of course, I was only lucky enough to see her in the Indian summer of her career, when something of the grandeur, the sparkle, the diamond-like glitter, had perhaps dimmed. I wouldn't know--some people said so, but some people always will--yet it seemed grand, sparkling, and glittering enough for me.

Personally, I thought her Giselle much better than she apparently thought it herself; it was intensely dramatic, yet also imbued with a romantic ambiance you could cut with a feather. And her Odette in Swan Lake, Act II. was also a model, cold and imperious, of classic style. I am pretty sure she never danced the full-evening ballet, and, by the time I saw it, her Black Swan Pas de Deux lacked eclat, not to mention fouettes.

But perhaps the two roles on which she left her firmest mark--and the first one she didn't even create--were as the Cancan Dancer in Leonide Massine's La Boutique Fantasque and the Street Dancer in his Le Beau Danube. This was the soubrette, demi-caractere Danilova in excelsis. In most of the performances I saw her give in Boutique, she was partnered by Franklin, but once I saw her, in an animated bustle of heartless froufrou, partnered by the india-rubber Massine himself. It was a pairing that took one back to Diaghilev.

Although I saw her with Massine (the always-perfect Hussar) in Danube a number of times, mostly in an arena setting, the Hussar I most closely recall with her was a very young John Gilpin, twenty-seven years her junior! He looked like a Saint-Cyr cadet, and she looked like something wonderful out of Colette. It was a strange partnership, yet Choura (if I may be so bold after so many years of respectful worship) could make the best use of that strangeness. She was splendidly authentic in Massine and, for that matter, Fokine, as demonstrated by her tearfully grave Prelude in Les Sylphides or her heartlessly cold Ballerina in Petrouchka with, as I recall it, Massine in the title role and either David Lichine or Anton Dolin as the Blackamoor.

Toward the end of her dancing career she did quite a lot for Dolin and what is now English National Ballet, including a number of all-star performances in Dolin's Pas de Quatre and a final piece of froth, Zachary Solov's Mlle Fifi, dancing with Michael Maule and Dolin, himself. Yes, the lady could turn froth into magic; she must have been around the night they invented champagne.

Danilova is a treasurable repository of old choreography. Frederick Ashton, among others, was always asking, "Choura, show me some of the old variations"; and she helped Balanchine with both Raymonda and Coppelia. And through all this, first as a dancer and later as a teacher, a coach (playing this role even in the movie The Turning Point), and a repetiteur, she ran through our ballet century like a steel-tough thread of gold.

How could we have missed her ninetieth birthday?