Darling Lily: with elegance and elan, Carolina Ballet's Lilyan Vigo triumphs in classical and Balanchine roles.

Don't hate her.

She's got sleek line, charisma, and an innate sense of artistry. Five pirouettes on pointe are routine for her. She dances with a true Balanchinean sense of musicality. She radiates Audrey Hepburn glamour. She's articulately bilingual. She's won two Princess Grace Awards. With her creamy complexion and dark eyes, she could easily grace the cover of Elle magazine. And she's nice ... really, really nice.

Her name? Lilyan Vigo--Carolina Ballet's very own homegrown ballerina. The ultimate example of the sophisticated style of dancing artistic director Robert Weiss has shaped and fostered, Vigo joined the company, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, at its inception in 1997. Given her talent, she could have experienced success in any number of major ballet companies, but she chose to dance for Weiss, a former New York City Ballet principal dancer who worked closely with Balanchine and Robbins and has infused the company style with his knowledge. As a headliner of a ballerina, Vigo embodies Weiss' ideals about dancing. In a short period, Weiss has molded Carolina Ballet into a midsized classical troupe capable of outshining bigger-budget companies and of producing first-rate productions of repertoire and streamlined full-length ballets with superior dancers.

At an April rehearsal for Weiss' new production of Cinderella, Vigo and Weiss demonstrate their sympatico working style. He maps out the steps for her melancholic first act solo as she watches intently, her mind's wheels turning. Then she fleshes it out with full musical phrasing, sustained attitude turns, fluid port de bras, and the well-realized characterization of a girl who continually chooses hope over despair. They haggle about a transition, solve it, and move on to the next section. In less than three weeks, the two-act Cinderella with an original score by Karl Moraski is stageworthy. With a company of 31 dancer and a $4.3 million annual budget, resourcefulness is non-negotiable.

"I could have danced in another company for 20 years and never have done the ballets I've done here," says Vigo. Weiss has tailored productions of Firebird and Swan Lake specifically for Vigo--John Rockwell of The New York Times called her Odette "lovely" and her temptress-like Odile "scary"--and cast her in the temperamentally polar opposites of Carmen and Juliet (her favorite role). Vigo sparked the stage as Swanhilda in Coppelia and radiated feminine lyricism and passion as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the Balanchine repertoire she has mastered the allegro zip for the principal roles in Square Dance, Tarantella, "Rubies," Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, and Allegro Brillante (her favorite neoclassical part), while taking command of the flowing adagio of Concerto Barocco, Apollo, and Agon. Handpicked by guest choreographers like Christopher Wheeldon and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, she's also premiered many of the 18 ballets Weiss has choreographed during his tenure. Vigo may be a red state ballerina, but she sports a rainbow palette of dynamic technique and artistry.

Born in Miami to a Venezuelan mother (who speaks only Spanish) and a Cuban father who fled to Spain before Castro's revolution (Vigo has never met her paternal grandmother in Cuba), she wanted to realize her mother's unfulfilled dream of becoming a dancer. "As long as I can remember I wanted to dance," says Vigo. Her mother enrolled Lilyan and her sister in classes with Liana Navarro, a Miami-based ballet teacher who only worked with gifted students like the late Edward Stierle of the Joffrey Ballet and Patricia and Jeanette Delgado of the Miami City Ballet ("On the Rise," Oct. 2005.)

Navarro recalls vividly the day Vigo walked into her studio holding her mom's hand. "She was maybe 2. She looked like a little Russian girl--a miniature ballerina with beautiful, long, light brown pigtails to her waist and those little eyes staring at me," says Navarro. "At that moment I just knew this kid was going to be something." Even at the age of 4, Vigo was dead serious about her work, often asking the kind of technical questions you'd expect from adults. "Sometimes I'd have to turn away and cover my mouth to laugh," says Navarro, who was floored by her precocity. "Lily was always artistic from day one. Her heart, soul, and spirit were into this."

Navarro became a second mother to Vigo and usually covered all the dance-related expenses that her family's modest budget wouldn't allow. At the age of 7, Vigo went to Hollywood and appeared on Star Search, dancing a miniature Romeo and Juliet pas de deux with a young male student. When she won the first round, Ed McMahon interviewed her on camera, but Vigo, who didn't speak a word of English then, flubbed her memorized answer and sputtered, "Mama ... dance ... uh." Still, she remembers, "That was the first time I remember telling myself that this is amazing."

Throughout her youth, Vigo's role model was Gelsey Kirkland, even though she never saw her dance live. Navarro tracked down videotapes of Kirkland, many of them pirated. "She had that beautiful technique, but there was something about her aura and presence. She was magic to me," says Vigo. After winning a local ballet competition at the age of 10, Vigo took the prize money to train privately with Kirkland in New York for a week.

In her junior high school years, Vigo attended the Harid Conservatory in Boca Raton (she acted as an impromptu interpreter for future ABT star Marcelo Gomes, translating his Portuguese into Spanish into English) and finished high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where she was often cast in the same roles as Gillian Murphy, now a ballerina with ABT. But despite the fact that her favorite food is a New York-style thin crust pizza, Vigo rejected the idea of a career in the Big Apple.

"At NCSA there are so many people who can make a phone call to New York," says Vigo. "At that point I wasn't an SAB dancer and would have stayed in the corps trying to look like one of their dancers. The companies in New York are so big and I knew I wasn't good enough to go there and start as a soloist or principal dancer. I was looking for something a little smaller that I could love and enjoy and where I could find my own path."

Vigo made a conscious choice to stay below the Mason-Dixon line to be closer to her family. After a season with Southern Ballet Theatre (now Orlando Ballet), Vigo showed up at an audition in Miami for a new company called Carolina Ballet. Weiss couldn't believe his luck. "You'd have to be blind not to see she's gorgeous," says Weiss in a cigarette-weary voice. "Lily was just 18 and had all the potential in the world--beautiful legs and feet. She could do any turn you wanted."

In her first year with Carolina Ballet, Vigo danced the role of Juliet. Weiss made it his mission to refine her movement and bring her up to Balanchine speed. Debra Austin, a former New York City Ballet dancer who now serves as ballet master for Carolina Ballet, says, "We had to work on Lily's port de bras," and laughs as she mimics a stiff-armed third arabesque position that looks like a semaphore flag signal. "But she absorbs everything you say to her. She makes everything look so simple. Because she has such strong technique, she can just dance, and she's mesmerizing. She's got the g whole package.

An indispensable factor in Vigo's maturation has been the coaching of Weiss' wife, Melissa Podcasy, a former Pennsylvania Ballet principal who dances with Carolina Ballet. "She really shook my core," says Vigo. "She taught me that every step, every motion matters." When Vigo took on the role of the Firebird, she says, "Melissa kicked my ass."

In 2002, Vigo married Jarrod Ellis, a former dancer who now owns a heating and air conditioning company. (The company ad in the ballet program book features a picture of Vigo with the caption, "How does a Firebird keep her cool?") They share their house on an acre of greenery 15 minutes south of Raleigh with three dogs, a cat, and a cockatiel.

The Raleigh premiere of Cinderella scored a sold-out success with one reviewer calling Vigo "the perfect Cinderella." In many ways, Vigo's life and career parallel the Cinderella story. Coming from humble roots, she was helped by a fairy godmother of a teacher, found her path, got the guy she wanted, and can happily dance her way through the rest of her narrative. (And like Cinderella, sire has retained her refreshingly sweet humility.)

As a Carolina Ballet dancer who came in on the ground floor, her career are also matches that of a young company to be reckoned with. Vigo, now 27, doesn't waste much time on any "coulda-woulda-shoulda" career alternatives, although Weiss still feels that, "If you don't do it in New York, you don't get the same recognition."

"Once I'm onstage here, it's my paradise," says Vigo. "I don't want to be anywhere else."

Joseph Carman is a Contributing Editor to Dance Magazine and author of Round About the Ballet.