Edward Villella: Miami City Ballet gathers speed; the former New York City Ballet fireball from Queens is becoming king of Florida dance with his Miami company.

A pony-tailed messenger asks, "What's up?" as he parks his bike against the huge plate-glass window. A short elderly woman, after eyeing his tight black pants and chartreuse undershirt, replies, "Mr. Villella always starts class at ten o'clock." Behind them on a bench, sitting squarely in the hot sun, are the regulars: a Cuban man and woman who hold hands as if attending a matinee in old Havana, a pensive young girl in halter and shorts, and a gray-bearded mumbler whom no one dares question about his balletomania. Others who are strolling along gentrified Lincoln Road Mall take in the sight behind the glass. A bronzed tourist exclaims, "There's ballet down here!"

In Miami City Ballet's classroom, young men in tights and women in leotards, some with colorful scarves as headbands, stand ready with chests held high and hands on the barre. Edward Villella greets them with "Good morning, guys." Unceremonious, for someone who had been one of the world's greatest dancers. Small and lithe, with shaggy black hair and New York accent, in his standard ensemble of khakis, T-shirt, and beat-up running shoes, he resembles Al Pacino more than a ballet master. Only his wire-rim glasses give him a professorial touch.

"It's hard to believe almost nine years have passed since I left New York to get this going," he says to a visitor, casually taking stock of his surroundings. This refers to the first-rate, world-acclaimed classical ballet company he established, in record time, in quintessentially philistine Miami.

"Before we danced one step," he says, "I made a point of educating the people here in ballet, through lectures and demonstrations. I wasn't going to do any fluff. Mainly Balanchine, what I call |American classicism.' Fortunately, they got it."

Villella turns his attention to his proteges. Their general color tends to beige rather than white--the result of race and nationality (Asian, Hispanic, African-Caribbean), not the beach. There's not an anorexic in the room. Villella's rules are quite simple: "I don't hire prima donnas. And if I do, by mistake, I ask them to leave. This place has to work like a family to survive."

Two years ago he replaced all administrators who he felt weren't pulling their weight--most of them--and while he was at it, he removed any trustee who even mentioned slowing the company's expansion. "One of them talked to me as if I were her naughty little son," he says, incredulously.

For the moment the pianist's playing of a lilting Chopin waltz brings calm. "There isn't any mystery to all this," he said. "People have purposely made teaching ballet mysterious so they can hold something over someone else."

The thirty-seven dancers are sparkling this morning. They respond to the urgings of Villella and former New York City Ballet dancer Elyse Borne, whom he brought down to be the company's ballet mistress.

"Faster, faster," he demands, standing up to count out loud. Balanchine's ballets, the core of the repertoire, are built on speed.

Villella gives a particularly graceful young man an approving nod. Marin Boiero, from distant Romania, literally glows. "Since I was little boy, I hear of Edward," he says excitedly. "So many roles were created for him by Balanchine. He gives them to us direct. This is privilege."

As the barres are cleared away, the messenger and his elderly friend remain at the window, protecting their positions from the encroachments of new arrivals. A mother and two young children have now joined them. They all watch as Villella steps forward to demonstrate a dance sequence.

"You'll have to excuse me for not getting up in the air for this." he says. "Just imagine me there." Actually, it's easy to do if you ever saw the high-flying Villella---the macho dancer from Bayside, Queens--who danced his heart out with New York City Ballet for eighteen years.

A young man trying to imitate him shows evident frustration. "Look, guys,." says Villella, pointedly, "I know many of you like to stand in front of the mirror after you've finished a combination and savor the mistakes you've made, but please get out of the way so we don't have any accidents."

Guilty laughs.

In closing, they come jumping across the floor, one by one, propelling themselves into the air with all the energy they've got. Exuberant Iliana Lopez, smile bright, long legs extended, almost leaps into the wall. "Damn," she says, getting up from her crash landing, "I was having such a good time."

"That'll teach you," responds Villella.

For a few minutes before class ends, he dives into a short routine, crouching, spinning, and finishing with his leg raised and half bent behind him in attitude. The gestures and steps flow together, and then on from phrase to phrase until the dance seems to have a life of its own.

"I'd love to choreograph to some jazz," he says, snapping his finger to a silent beat, "but, ah. where's the time?"

Upstairs his strikingly plain office has been brightened by fifty-seventh-birthday bouquets of orchids, irises, and lilies. Silver balloons hover near the ceiling. His wife, Linda, a small, pretty woman in a flowery, ankle-length dress, arrives with two large ice-cream cakes. The salutation on one reads, "For Edward, Calm, Cool, and Collected The other says, "Not." She places them before her husband. With Linda and twelve-year-old daughter, Crista, he had started the birthday celebration at breakfast, quietly, in their palm-shaded mansion. They had had no unannounced visitors in the guest wing or anyone sleeping by the pool or on the terrace this morning.

Villella says, "Sometimes when my dancers party very late near my neighborhood, they crash in my yard rather than go home. They sleep out on the grass. Linda usually gets them breakfast. She's good about things like that, a real mother."

It should be a relaxing moment. Good friends surround him. But there is always something to do. He turns to Pam Miller, company manager: "When are we going to be able to file those papers against those guys?"

"Soon," she promises.

Last season's orchestra, dismissed because of incompetence, has been picketing all of this season's Miami City Ballet performances.

"This union fellow from Vegas comes up to me and says, |Villella, I've heard of you. You're a genius. We should talk. But let me warn you, my father died on a picket line, and I would do the same.' Can you believe that? They want to scare away my musicians."

To Barbara Singer, administrative director, "Get tapes of tonight's music so the kids can have a runthrough this afternoon at the theater, in case the orchestra doesn't dare show up."

His public relations director, Leslie Sternlieb, tells him a Miami Herald columnist, refusing to retract a slur, said, "Doesn't the Miami City Ballet get enough good publicity?"

Villella pauses, then says, "I brought flowers to the desert, but sometimes I think they'd like to have their desert back." Linda passes him a plate. He takes it, adding, "We knew how to deal with situations like this in my old neighborhood."

The smile returns.

He says, "Hey, Jimmy!"--Gamonet De Los Heros, resident choreographer and ballet master--"Get your Peruvian paws off my cake."

Villella learned how to run a ballet company at age thirty-nine after his life fell apart. In 1975 doctors told him he could no longer dance because of the severity of his injuries, incurred by years of lifting ballerinas and performing on too many concrete stages. By that time, his marriage to dancer Janet Greschsler--never a happy one--was already in its death throes. With no job but with financial responsibilities to her and his son, Roddy, he had to find something to do. He recalls, "I didn't realize it then, but I think I was depressed for a solid five years."

Falling in love with Linda Carbonetto, former Olympic skater and Ice Capades star, helped a lot. "I couldn't understand the big deal about his having to stop dancing," she says. "I'd had to stop ice skating at twenty-one. But he was so sad, and such a sweet guy. It got better, though. We know how to make each other laugh."

Having attracted a wide audience from White House performances, television appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and comic cameos on Carol Burnett and The Odd Couple, Villella managed to put together a reasonable living giving lectures, master classes, and when possible, directing PBS dance specials, but he soon found the life too hectic and unstable; it never left him time to be at home with Linda and Lauren (her daughter by her first marriage). In 1980, Villella became artistic director of the floundering Eglevsky Ballet, then moved on to the same position with Ballet Oklahoma from 1983 to 1986. "I learned that my basic talents were organizing and directing," he says, adding, "I can lead." In 1985 influential and farsighted residents of Miami decided that it needed a ballet company and him as director.

"We're doing okay. We have flourishing homes in three cities--Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and Naples--besides Miami. We've gone from 5,000 to 15,000 subscribers, expanded our repertoire and tour schedule. We're even overcoming the effects of the recession and the hurricane.

"But, in the long run, who knows how long classical ballet will be around--now that it's considered |elitist.'

No subject angers Villella more.

"Tell me, is the music of Bach and Beethoven elitist? Is beauty elitist?

"I used to be taken seriously at the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts]. Now I'm persona non grata. If you don't get support there, it's hard to expand your repertoire, and that's how audiences and dancers grow.

"What's |in' is disposable art, stuff you can see on MTV. New Wave. Next Wave. Everybody is so busy being politically, ethnically, and socially correct, they've forgotten about art that's sublime. Ballet is an art form that lifts you out of the pedestrian. That's important. We need elegance, Fred Astaire, refinement."

Villella was to the manner bred, not born. His blue-collar Italian parents wanted him to have a chance to "enjoy the better things in life. My dad made me help him load his trucks in the garment district just so I'd see how awful physical labor could be." Ballet classes, started with his older sister, Carol, were only meant to give him polish, but once he got the feel of ballet in his bones ("a whole new dimension to physicality") and a taste of the artistic life at the School of American Ballet ("I remember the first time I heard people talking about painting and music and books; it seemed like such a beautiful world"), there was no turning back. Anyone who made fun of his new-found passion got a punch in the nose. To please his parents, Villella graduated from the New York Maritime Academy. But after that, ballet was it. At twenty-one, he became a member of George Balanchine's New York City Ballet.

"I stood up to Balanchine. He didn't like me taking classes other than his; he didn't like me dating girls in the company. I had to fight to get some of the more classical roles. Maybe he never thought I was refined enough. But I'm probably one of his most dedicated disciples."

The rehearsal of Bukagu begins late. Undaunted by the heat, a new audience has taken its place at the window. Yanis Pikieris, Maribel Modrono, and Sally Ann Isaacks are already warming up when Villella arrives. He often danced this ballet, one of Balanchine's most erotic, with Allegra Kent. Last year he had Kent come down to show them how it should be done. Villella remains close to many of his New York City Ballet colleagues, but not to company chief Peter Martins. The cool Dane and the fiery Italian-American are just too different.

Pikieris and Modrono start. Isaacks, who is in the second cast, follows them.

"Look, you're going to have to get your hand on her waist before that count," instructs Villella, "or else you're going to be behind the music for the rest of the ballet." Marking the score, the conductor, Akira Endo, promises, "I'll wait if I have to." The dancers slither down each other's bodies like snakes.

An hour passes. The leads of Raymonda Variations replace those of Bugaku.

"Remember who you are. You are members of the court. You are at an elegant party."

Villella hasn't yet taken a break.

"Next best thing to performing is seeing someone you've coached do a great job creating a role. But nothing, nothing ever beats being onstage.

"When Jerry Robbins asked me to do Watermill again five years ago, I couldn't resist, even though I wasn't sure how in hell I was going to get my fifty-three-year-old body back in shape. But, you know, I'd always been sad that I didn't have a chance to say good-bye to my audience onstage. This gave me that chance. The role didn't require much dancing, but it did mean wearing nothing but a dance belt.

"Before the performance, in the ladies' room at Lincoln Center, Linda and Crista heard a woman say, |I understand a seventy-three-year-old man is going to take off all his clothes onstage tonight.' My poor daughter.

"At the end of the ballet I stood there, taking my bows"--Villella acts this out--"saying my own private farewell, and then I see Linda and Crista, sitting in the fourth row, smiling up at me. I blew them kisses. Someone nearby asked Crista, |Do you know that man?' and she proudly answered, |Yes, that's my father.' I was touched.

"My son Roddy's big question was, |How did you hold in your gut for so long?' That was not quite as touching."

The Nueva Tasca is a favorite Villella restaurant, partly because of its hearty Cuban cuisine and partly because it is close to the Dade County Auditorium, where the Miami City Ballet performs. Crista and Linda arrive at 6:00 P.M., Villella twenty minutes later. The other diners turn to get a good look at him as he walks back to his family's table.

"Senor Villella, do you want your beer right away?" asks the waiter, practically bowing.

"Yeah, sure." And then, "Sorry, Linda, about being late. I'm trying to get the musician problem worked out.

"Hey, sweetheart, I like your dress."

Crista beams.

Villella digs into his rice. "I haven't had anything since tea this morning."

"We're getting more applications for the school than we can accept," mentions Linda, who runs the one-year-old company-affiliated Dance Center.

"That's not going to make the local schools very happy. But they just don't give the training we need. We have no choice. Anyway, they already think we're interlopers."

"Did you know, Daddy, that wearing Miami City Ballet T-shirts is forbidden at all the other dance schools?"

"No, I didn't, sweetheart." Nor does it look as if he very much cares, as he finishes his beer and starts on his chicken.

The crowds are already arriving at the theater when the Villellas get to the stage door. While Villella rushes to change his clothes before the curtain, Crista finds a friend and Linda makes her way into the lobby.

"We sort of have to act as host and hostess at performances," she explains, as Miami's cultural mavens engulf her.

Isaacks dances Bugaku with overwhelming sensuality, her long, loose body momentarily freezing the stylized Japanese movements so that everyone can feel the full impact of the ritual marriage coupling. It doesn't get the ovation of Raymonda Variations, but Villella is ecstatic.

"Did you see Sally?" he asks everyone backstage afterward. "I didn't even plan to have her dance this, but she insisted. She said she had a feeling for it."

Villella waits at Isaacks's dressing room to tell her how well she danced. When the dancer opens the door, she's too flattered to say anything but, "Thanks. And thanks for letting me do it."

On the ride home, in the balmy night, Crista curls up in the back seat, too sleepy to talk. Villella, however, is still wired.

"I've never been able to go right to bed after a performance. I like to sit a while, have a beer or glass of wine, and reflect. I love this living room. Sometimes I even light candles. Everything in here--the rugs, the desk, the prints, the chairs--was made by hand. I'm uncomfortable when I live with machine-made things. There's something very warm and soothing about living with objects guided by human hands. I need this because, in fact, I go a little crazy every day."

Then he laughs, "I guess to make a perfect picture I should be wearing a smoking jacket. But that's not quite me, do you think?"

Leaning forward in a favorite brocaded eighteenth-century armchair, he looks askance at his feet.

"Certainly not with running shoes."

Valerie Gladstone, coauther of Balanchine's Mozartiana, frequently reports on the performing arts for television and magazines.