Heather Watts: final bow at New York City Ballet.

In her striped T-shirt, baggy trousers, and high-top sneakers, New York City Ballet principal Heather Watts blends easily with the other dancers and Juilliard students thronging Lincoln Center as she heads for the Rose Building, home of the School of American Ballet. From under a House of Blues baseball cap, her dark, coppery brown hair hangs down her back in a long braid. A red sweatshirt is knotted around her waist and delicate, Edwardian-style earrings, a gift from Peter Martins, dangle unobtrusively. The style is classic Watts, a look that now seems almost standard-issue-with-a-twist for nineties dancers but was oddly daring, almost revolutionary earlier in her career. Once seated at a handsome wood table in a conference room in the Rose Building, Watts acts less like a rebel than someone clearly eager to be someplace--any place--else. A principal with City Ballet since 1979 and one of the company's most prolific performers--she has danced in all but five ballets in the current repertoire--Watts hasn't given many interviews in recent years. "It's hard to talk about yourself," she says, pouring each of us a glass of water.

Much has been written about this unconventional ballerina whose career has spanned almost two and a half decades. With her edgy, individualistic dancing style and a long, angular body that seemed utterly contemporary, almost futuristic, when she first leaped onto the New York State Theater stage, Watts has long been a lightning rod for critics, some admiring, others less so. Over the last few years in particular, the criticism has been harsh, both of her dancing and of what some claim has been her influence on the company through her relationship with Martins. Yet for much of that time, Watts has not responded, in print at least: "I don't believe in complaining or explaining."

After twenty-four years with NYCB, however, Heather Watts will retire from the company on January 15, with farewell performances in two favorite ballets, Martins's Valse Triste and Balanchine's Bugaku. Now she's reminiscing, thoughtfully if a bit reluctantly. "You kind of have to say something," she says. "You can't just sneak out the back."

Indeed, during the course of two long chats, Watts has much to say about a complex career that has had more than the requisite peaks and valleys. She was one of the last ballerinas cultivated by Balanchine, who seemed fascinated by her innate modernity, both in attitude and appearance. He cast her in everything from Symphony in C and Theme and Variations to Dewdrop in Nutcracker, a signature part for Watts. A super-peak came when he created a role for her in Robert Schumann's "Davidsbundlertanze" in 1980, in which one critic deemed her dancing "breathtakingly fragile and beautiful." "I couldn't believe he put me in it," Watts recalls. "To think he was presenting me, that I was one of his ballerinas. He was making quite a statement."

With her unusually wide-ranging repertory, which encompassed new and old ballets by Jerome Robbins and Richard Tanner, she danced with NYCB's best men--Martins, Bart Cook, Helgi Tomasson, Adam Luders, Ib Andersen, Daniel Duell, and Damian Woetzel, among others. Mikhail Baryshnikov partnered her in a performance of "Rubies" telecast from the White House. And in a company not known for forging partnerships, she has danced for the past fourteen years almost exclusively with Jock Soto.

Watts was also a favorite muse of Martins, who set sixteen ballets on her, including his first, Calcium Light Night, the idiosyncratically quirky 1978 pas de deux with Duell. With her singular blend of tension, lyricism, and legginess, Watts seemed perfectly tailored for his hardedged, abstract ballets, like Ecstatic Orange (1987). But the lines between her professional and personal life blurred when Martins, her longtime boyfriend, took over the company following Balanchine's death in 1983. "There was no way, given my life, that I could think of Peter as my boss," says Watts, whose twenty-year, on-again-off-again relationship with Martins finally ended in 1990. (A year later he married NYCB ballerina Darci Kistler.) "Nor do I think he was ever able to think of me as an employee."

Their long history and obvious closeness led to speculations about Watts's role in the backstage machinations of the company. She dismisses the idea. "When Peter and I talk, it's very simple," she says. "We grew up together. We think alike. We don't have very much to say because nothing really has to be said. Does he ask my advice on how to run his company? No. Does it come up in conversation sometimes? Yes. Do I run the New York City Ballet? No! Would I do a couple of things differently? Yeah, I would.

"I used to be much more of a sounding board," she continues. "Now when we talk, it's 'How's your house? How's your day? What are you thinking?' Peter has a lot of problems that come across his desk, and when I spent my time with him, I heard about them. Now he prefaces everything with, 'This is where I'm at.' There's a lot of love between us, and everybody can probably tell that. But he's married now and has a wife, and we have separate lives in a way we never had before."

What Watts seems to want most now is to bow out of the company and the ballet world. "The people around me know how desperately I want to get out," she says. Though she has shown a flair for costume design and displayed sharp management skills--she organized Principal Dancers of the New York City Ballet, a group that has visited ninety cities--Watts insists she will quit the dance world cold turkey.

"I feel like I want to have a real job," she says. "Besides, I didn't save any money. Do you have any jobs in your bag?" Watts has, in fact, been doing more than think about the future. She says she's had talks with cable television people, and with her clear voice, sassy style, keen intelligence, and, when she wants, personable manner, it's not hard to picture her as a TV personality, an idea that appeals to her. Her first post-NYCB project is a book on entertaining, to be published by Putnam, that she is coauthoring with Soto; its assorted recipes, entertainment ideas, and gardening tips are designed to be simple and quick. "It's a young, hip version of Martha Stewart," Watts says.

Much of the book's research was accomplished at the rambling old farmhouse, set on twenty acres near Washington, Connecticut, that Watts bought last year with Soto and Woetzel, two close friends from the company. There, while Soto marinates steaks and stirs homemade carrot-ginger soup [see box on the opposite page], Watts putters in her garden, accompanied by her golden retriever, Q, named for the cable network, QVC.

"It's wonderful there," she says. "Right now, I just want to be happy, and to get on with whatevers comes next."

Memory, freshened by some old clippings from the library, tells just how unusual, in both appearance and dancing style, Watts was when her career accelerated in the late 1970s. Her hyperextended angularity may have appalled proponents of Romantic ballet, but when coupled with what John Gruen in Dance Magazine called "a clarity made evident by subtle but provocative exaggeration," she displayed the right equipment for Balanchine's leotard ballets, works Watts considers among her finest roles. "I tried to do those ballets for the steps," she says, "but I think maybe something else came out."

Looking back at forty-one, Watts credits her status as a baby boomer with shaping the style of her dancing. "I think it was generational," she says. "Gelsey [Kirkland] was of my generation, but she chose to pursue the old world, the Giselles and the Don Qs. I came from California, from a politically free time and from parents who let me and my brothers and sister go our diverse ways. I didn't want to be standing there onstage, taking a rose out of my bouquet. If I had gone to the Royal Ballet or ABT, I probably would not have danced because it wouldn't have suited me. There's a lot of 'not dancing' in those old ballets."

Balanchine, in turn, encouraged Watts to pursue her own style of dancing. "He was fascinated by my California background and couldn't believe my father was an aerospace engineer," she recalls, savoring the memory. "He used to say in class, 'Your dad lands machines on the moon and you can't land three grands jetes nicely?'"

But learning to focus on her dancing proved suprisingly hard for Watts, who remembers herself as a confused young dancer. She started dance late, at age ten, and decided she wanted to be a ballerina after appearing, at eleven, as a bug in a performance of Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream that NYCB gave in Los Angeles.

But her ascent was rocky. A Ford Foundation scholarship student at the School of American Ballet, she was nearly kicked out for skipping classes and flouting traditions. And when she managed to get into the company, it was two years before Balanchine let her perform. Once she got serious, good roles were showered upon her. "It became so easy for me," she says.

While many of her early roles seemed deliberate choices, like the lead in "Rubies," others came her way "because I was the body that could kind of do it," Watts says. "At the time that I was young there were not the numbers of dancers who could do what dancers can do now." And Watts often wound up in ballets she feels didn't suit her physically or mentally. "When Merrill Ashley was out, I did Ballo [della Regina] and Square Dance," she says. "Balanchine wasn't making a statement, 'This is my favorite choice for Ballo.' It's just that I could kind of do it. And in that sense I gobbled up most of the repertoire because I could kind of do everything in those days."

But after Balanchine's death, Watts was emotionally drained. She performed regularly but eventually she felt that her work went on automatic pilot. "The dancing came so easily; I'd have a fight with my boyfriend, then do a matinee," she says. After a while, even automatic pilot didn't work. "I could do Agon and Bugaku, but I couldn't really do the ballet stuff," she said a while back. Martins suggested she take a leave of absence, but Watts persisted, afraid that if she quit, she'd never return. Eventually, her desire did come back and she resumed classes with her longtime teacher, Stanley Williams. "But I was never really big on taking class," she admits. "And now," she sighs, "I just want it all to end."

In conversation, Watts is direct, playful and, at times, almost painfully honest. She is also moody. "I'm tired of talking about myself," she says during a call from Connecticut and hands the phone over to Soto, who talks good-naturedly about his long partnership and friendship with Watts. "I've never seen anyone like her who can dance without having her feet make any noise," he says. "You see someone like Heather dance, and you just hear the music."

Looking back, Watts now believes she probably danced too much. "There were some years where I danced three ballets every night, year after year," she says. "It did not feel like too much at the time. But what's happened with me, I think, is I never had an injury where I was forced off the stage and had to fight my way back. If I had, I might have come to appreciate for a longer period of time the ability one has to dance. And I might have been a little more disciplined about keeping to the actual rigors of the training.

"I think, quite frankly, this has been reflected in some of my performances in the last few years. I just couldn't get into class every day and pump it out. And I know I've not always been in the best shape I can be.

"I didn't push myself," she says slowly. "I didn't push to keep my jump. Like with Dewdrop. More than five years ago, I felt, you know what? I don't want the kids to look at this and think this is my Dewdrop. Could I have pushed and really worked on it? I could, but emotionally I couldn't because I had done it so much."

Despite all that, the decision to quit was not easy. "Peter wanted me to stay for the Balanchine Celebration [in 1993] and Jock needed time to get used to dancing with other partners," she says. "I kept saying, 'I'm doing this for Jock or the Balanchine Celebration.' But what I recently realized was that I needed a couple years to say good-bye for myself."

These days find Watts, the onetime rebel, in the position of being bemused, and amused, by a new generation. She chuckles over City Ballet soloist Ethan Stiefel, who rides a motorcycle. "Mr. B wouldn't let us ride bicycles," she says. "It's a different enough point of view that I don't quite get it. They know a great deal more about educating themselves for the future, about pensions and college. I don't want to discourage education or seem judgmental, but I think if you're going to be a dancer, you should be taking ballet classes instead of college courses."

But when the conversation switches to the younger generation's abilities and to critics who claim that NYCB has lost the essence of Balanchine dancing, Watts bristles: "I read this piece about the Diamond Project in The New Yorker, and it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to write a letter. It said under Peter now, when dancers come out of school, they're ready, but after a few years in the company they're weak. Do you know how hard the work is in the corps? These writers don't know what they're talking about. If I could still do the corps of Fourth Movement Bizet or the corps of Stars and Stripes, I'd dance another twenty years. When I was young, Balanchine used to say to me, 'Go back and do Concerto Barocco,' He wasn't talking about the lead, which was what he was going to put me in, but the corps. You don't get weak from doing that."

She also is hurt, saddened, and angered by the barbs leveled at the company and at her, in particular, in recent years. Much of the criticism has been strong, notably a New York Review of Books piece that criticized Martins's frequent casting of Watts. "The really big things about me I've been steered away from," she says. "It's caused me a great deal of mental anguish. I don't know what they expected to achieve. Did I cry? Did I feel publicly humiliated? Yes. Did I feel this was terribly unfair for people like my parents to read, who couldn't possibly understand what this venom was about? Yeah.

"And I always felt it was very unfair of them to take out the loss of Balanchine in their lives on us who really did lose him. I really don't think for a writer at Seven Minutes, or whatever those magazines are called, the loss was as important as for people like Peter and Suzanne and Kyra and myself. Or for the next generation or the generation that never saw him. I guess they felt the company should simply cease and desist after Balanchine. I don't see any reason for that to have happened, although there are days, I'm sure, when Peter's like, 'Please, cease and desist.'"

Looking back over her favorite roles, and her list is long, Watts recalls a performance of Calcium Light Night she did a couple of years ago. "As I did it, I wondered, What happened to that angry girl who used to dance this?" Watts found she had to act to achieve the emotional state that had once come naturally.

What did happen to that angry young girl? As Watts tells it, she learned to look beyond her own life. Over the last decade, she became an active volunteer, mostly for AIDS organizations, but also for a slew of local causes, like the East Side Homeless Shelter and the Dream Team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital. Now her main project is God's Love We Deliver, which brings hot meals to people with AIDS who are too ill to cook. With Soto, she helped cook and deliver meals for years, though now most of her energy goes into fund-raising.

"A certain amount of anger comes with being self-involved," she says. "And I became less self-involved." Seated in the Rose Building conference room, Heather Watts smiles. Then she gets up, ready to move on to the next phase of her life.

HEATHER & JOCK'S SPICY CARROT-GINGER SOUP

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

8 large carrots, peeled and cut into pieces

2 large potatoes, peeled or unpeeled and cut into pieces

2 large onions, peeled and diced

5 garlic cloves

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

As much ginger as you can handle, cut into pieces

Cumin to taste

Juice of 1 lemon

4 cups of low-sodium chicken broth (unless you have time to make the real stuff)

Water (if it's too thick)

Put onions and garlic in a large skillet with butter and cook about 5 minutes on medium heat, until onions are somewhat cooked. Add potatoes, carrots, ginger, and broth, and cook for 25 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Add thyme, cumin, salt, and pepper, and cook for 10 more minutes. Transfer batches of soup to blender and puree. Then pour into another pan set on low heat. Stir in lemon juice and heat through. Add salt and pepper to taste.