In Blanchine's Company: A Dancer's Memoir.

In Blanchine's Company: A Dancer's Memoir By Barbara Milberg Fisher Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006. 236 pp. Illustrated. Paper, $24.95.

It was a happy time when New York City Ballet flowered from Ballet Society in 1948. Artistic director George Balanchine's creative resources were at their most profuse. Concerto Barocco, Symphony in C, The Four Temperaments, Orpheus, and Nutcracker were a few of the gems that flowed from his imagining, and Barbara Milberg Fisher (then Barbara Milberg) was one of the lucky young soloists to participate in all of them.

She danced with the company from 1946 to 1958, then departed, eventually to join Jerome Robbins' Ballets: USA. Later, upon leaving dance, she negotiated the whole academic route through to Ph.D. and became a full professor of English at City College of New York. She was as uniquely suited to her second profession as to dance.

Here's her impression of Balanchine at work: "Balanchine possessed a kind of multidimensional alertness that included the immediate phrase of music and the spatial design of the sequence he was envisioning, but also an uncanny awareness of the physical idiom of the dancer ... the way that person naturally moved."

Of Firebird she writes, "This is no ballerina but an enchanted bird, glowing and sparkling and fluttering in a blinding rose-amber spotlight. A magical being ... in some way forcing you to feel the depth of its solitude, file piercing singularity of its existence."

Despite the charm of its prose, In Balanchine's Company is no mere literary exercise. At times it's funny, as when, in a game of charades, he was asked for a three-syllable name of a composer, Balanchine insisted on "Mo-tz-art." Sometimes it's downright exciting, as when Milberg describes the backstage pandemonium caused by a missing tutu. And often it's affectionate as when she depicts Tanaquil Le Clercq, in her wheelchair, acknowledging an ovation during the company's 50th-anniversary celebration.--Doris Hering