Houston ballet: dance in the heart of Texas.

On humid spring mornings ballerina Lauren Anderson usually opens all the windows of her sports car, slips in her Bonnie Raitt tape, turns up the volume, and sings all the way to her favorite place for breakfast. Her voice is almost as good as her dancing. The big, homey cafeteria across from Houston Ballet's headquarters serves some of the best grits in town. At the entrance, the waitress, familiar with the vibrant dancer, greets her with a big smile. Eagerly ordering the eggs, grapefruit, and grits that will get her through morning class and three afternoon rehearsals, Anderson says, "I started violin and ballet at the same time and loved them both. After a while my mother realized if I wanted to make a career in dance, I'd have to give up the violin but I never thought I'd make principal."

Her father, who was principal of the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts in Houston, is now a supervisor in the city's schools, and her mother is a musician and piano teacher. Anderson is one of the handful of African-American dancers who star in American ballet companies--one of many indications that the artistic director of Houston Ballet, Englishman Ben Stevenson, and the company that he has supervised for eighteen years, are trailblazers. Houstonians and those fortunate enough to have seen the fifty-five-member company on tour know that Houston Ballet has some of the best dancers performing some of the most interesting choreography in the country. The combination of Texas-style exuberance and British classicism is dynamite.

"The great thing about dancing here is that Ben allows us great freedom and nourishes it," continues Anderson. "We get such a wide variety of choreography to dance--Swan Lake, Giselle, and then also works by James Kudelka, Paul Taylor, and Toni Lander. Because Ben has such good contacts, he also brings in amazing people to coach us. We had Dame Margot Fonteyn for Swan Lake, Paul Taylor for Company B, Sir Kenneth MacMillan for Song of the Earth. Imagine getting the chance to work with people like that."

Breakfast finished, Anderson drives to the studios. They are in a large modern building in Montrose, a Houston neighborhood distinguished by its art galleries, funky restaurants, and clubs. She races across the parking lot, exchanges hellos with the staff, and heads for the classroom where Stevenson teaches almost every morning. Houston's facilities are superb--large classrooms, springy practice floors, extensive locker and wardrobe space, rehabilitation rooms with Pilates equipment, and spacious corridors and offices. The company's operating budget has grown from less than $1 million in 1975 to $11 million today, and the endowment now stands at $18.6 million, one of the largest of any dance company in the world. Big money means unusual security for the dancers: they have a forty-four-week guaranteed contract, the longest offered by any American ballet company.

Amember of Royal Ballet under the direction of Dame Ninette de Valois, and London Festival Ballet, director Ben Stevenson rounded out his classical career with appearances in London's West End in The Music Man, Half a Sixpence, and The Boys from Syracuse, and television performances with Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, and Shirley Bassey. Since taking over the direction of Houston Ballet, he has choreographed numerous full-length works, including Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

A large man with white hair and a perpetual look of bemusement, Stevenson personifies worldliness and grace. Today he is dressed in a black-and-white striped shirt and white pants. In contrast, his dancers wear every color in the rainbow. Principal Li Cunxin (pronounced something like Lee Swenson), a recruit from the Beijing Dance Academy and the first dancer from China to study in the United States, has on a sea-blue T-shirt and deep green sweatpants. Anderson has a shirt emblazoned "Roma," the hometown of a close male friend, while several other young women wear pastel leotards and tiny, diaphanous skirts. Houston Ballet members are a handsome group, many of them from the South and West. However, their training is decidedly English-accented, with emphasis on placement and detail.

Stevenson begins strolling among the barres, pushing a leg higher, gripping dancers firmly around the waist to get them to pull up, smiling and joking as he makes his rounds. Although everyone works hard, no one shows signs of tension. "I've known most of them a long time," he explains. "Eighty-five percent came through our school So I'm familiar with their bodies and what they can do. I deal with them individually, try to find their strengths, and let them work on those. My purpose is to make artists."

The men are powerful. They come across the floor in grands jetes that appear effortless. These are jumpers. Li is also a natural turner. As he spins into multiple pirouettes, the whole class stands at attention and then breaks into applause. Stevenson discovered him on one of the annual visits he has taken since 1978 to teach at the Beijing Dance Academy. Over the years he has been introducing Chinese students to Western dance forms, including jazz and modern dance.

"I came here on a guest scholarship," says Li Cunxin. "My training in China had been very Russian, a complete copy of Kirov, so getting the opportunity to learn a much wider variety of ballets was wonderful. I was like a hungry dog; I wanted to grab and eat everything." He has had plenty of opportunities to do just that; he dances Swan Lake and Glen Tetley's Rite of Spring; Stevenson has created new works for him, and he has danced in galas around the world. A few years ago he married former Houston Ballet principal Mary McKendry, and they now have a son and a daughter.

When class is over, the dancers head for the lounge, which is furnished with big, comfortable couches and food machines and has plenty of space for relaxing. A devoted fan who owns a bakery often provides boxfuls of cookies, cakes, and breads for them to munch on before afternoon rehearsals. Dawn Scannell, dark-haired and intense, pulls her legs up on a chair and sips on a soda. Laughing, she shows her peculiar tan. She danced in the premiere of Trey McIntyre's Touched. A company member, McIntyre doesn't want his dancers to wear tights, and hating the pale, bare-legged look, Scannell has been going to a tanning salon to get just her legs tan. "The reason I'm here is Ben," Scannell says and, echoing Anderson and every other Houston dancer, she adds, "Nowhere else could I get the variety of pieces. I started out with the Giselles, then found I could do neoclassics. I could see my whole sense of movement broaden by doing Paul Taylor's Company B and Christopher Bruce's Cruel Garden. Christopher Bruce has one of the wildest imaginations in ballet. When we first did Cruel Garden he fed it to us verbally, in little tidbits. In the process I learned how to put death, life, and love in the movement."

McIntyre may be only twenty-four, but his choreographic skills are as great as those of many choreographers twice his age. A Kansas native, he studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts for two years before coming to the Houston Ballet Academy in 1987. Stevenson saw his early dances and encouraged him to proceed. McIntyre's first work, Skeleton Clock, premiered in 1990. Pacific Northwest Ballet now has it in its repertoire. His second, Curupira, is in Houston's.

He was also the youngest choreographer selected by Peter Martins to participate in last May's Diamond Project II at New York City Ballet. Houston Ballet presents two series annually: one comprised of classics, such as Stevenson's Cinderella and MacMillan's Manon, and the other, the Cullen Contemporary Series, which last spring included McIntyre's Touched, Taylor's Company B, and Kudelka's Musings. Few regional companies have the luxury of a state-of-the-art theater in which to perform, but since 1987 Houston Ballet has had the luxury of two, the handsome Brown Theatre, with 2,250 seats, and the Cullen, with 1,000.

Anyone who thought Houstonians probably wouldn't approve of innovation should have heard the applause for the spring program, especially for McIntyre's Touched, done to Dave Brubeck's music. In it the dancers slowly entered a darkened stage holding candles, as if in a religious procession. They looked like fireflies caught in one huge jar. Over a period of about twenty minutes they created a series of patterns that were a counterpoint to the jaunty jazz score--some funny, some sweet, all beautiful. The audience's pleasure was palpable. As they were leaving the theater an older couple said, "I just wonder how he created it--in the studio? In the dark?" They had come only to see Company B but now planned to return to see other McIntyre works.

Everything would not work so well in Houston were it not for the Houston Ballet Academy, where most of the dancers first learned their art. Its high standards and warm teaching staff ensure an atmosphere that is conducive to hard work and creativity. Established in 1955 by members of the Houston Ballet Foundation, the academy now has six hundred students. Stevenson is its director and Clara Cravey its principal. A former dancer with Harkness Ballet and Ballet Internacional de Caracas, Cravey arrived in Houston two years after Stevenson. "We're trying to develop artistry," she explains. "That's what the classes in ballet, modern, jazz, pointe, pas de deux, and character dance are all about. And we stress modern because of our unusual repertoire. We also teach injury prevention and nutrition--to keep out eating disorders."

This attention to everything from how to express love and death with a tilt of the head to what kind of food provides the best nourishment characterizes the Academy and ballet company. "What we're doing is different," explains Stevenson. "It's based on the old school. In Europe companies incorporate many different styles. My dancers have to know themselves. They have to understand the quality of the music they dance to and they have to know how to use their eyes. I want them to learn the drama of dance at the same time they are learning technique. If there isn't anything going on in the mind, there won't be anything going on in the dance.

"It takes a long time to get something going, but the board had patience with us, and we grew up, many of us together. When you know dancers as I've known Lauren and Janie Parker, since they were seven years old, all the work you do becomes easier because we're friends, family to one another, and we are devoted to the same art."