Julie Kent: ballerina for the 21st century.

From the wings, she heard a horrified gasp from company director Mikhail Baryshnikov and her friends Leslie Browne and Alessandra Ferri, who were watching. But instead of getting flustered, the seventeen-year-old ballerina relaxed. "I thought, Well, I've already made a mistake, it can't get much worse from here," she recalls. "I almost wanted to giggle." She finished the solo confidently-and flawlessly.

In her eight years with ABT, Julie Kent has earned a reputation as a dancer known for her clarity, serenity, and unshakable poise. Her dancing is quietly fearless, with an intriguing mix of contradictions that makes her fascinating to watch. Vibrant and ethereal, delicate and strong, Kent blends a regal, almost old-fashioned presence with cutting-edge technique. Her vocabulary is by-the-book classical; yet with a body made to order for dance in the nineties - strong jaw, fine bones, and luxuriantly long limbs that amplify everything she does - Kent presents a glimpse of ballet as it could look a decade or two from now. Original is often the first adjective that comes to mind when seeing her dance.

An embodiment of the classic ABT ballerina, Kent is as comfortable attacking a blistering variation from Harald Lander's Etudes as she is essaying the mad scene in Giselle. It hasn't all come effortlessly, of course. Kent's most persistent challenge has been learning to project her emotions, a prerequisite for the story ballets she loves performing. Her efforts came together seamlessly last spring during ABT'S season at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. She brought a sweet dignity to the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, and in Symphonic Variations she performed Frederick Ashton's nonstop movements with style and ease. She topped it all off with an authoritative debut as Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. Her luminous Odette, danced with purity and intensity, was a tragic princess with a strange, avian beauty. "Definitely a young woman most likely to succeed" was the verdict in the New York Times.

In fact, by any account, 1993 was a terrific year for Kent. In March she won the Erik Bruhn Competition, dancing a scintillating balcony pas de deux from Romeo and Juliet with ABT'S Peter Morrison. And in June, a month shy of her twenty-fourth birthday, she was promoted to principal dancer at ABT. She even took a confident step outside the strict confines of the ballet world, posing on pointe for the cover of W, the fashion newspaper, in a Ralph Lauren flannel shirt.

For now, however, ballet offers the richest rewards, and Kent seems to revel in every part of the process, even rehearsals. "It's really rewarding to go from not knowing the steps - and, in the case of something really difficult, like Ballet Imperial, not knowing if you even can learn them - to seeing your progress six or seven weeks later," she explains. And performing? "If you're dancing something you really love, you can kind of lose yourself in it," she says. "It's like giving a gift to somebody at Christmas. I love that sense of sharing something of myself with the audience. It's just the best feeling."

During a post-rehearsal chat in an austere ABT office, it becomes clear that Kent's poise is not confined to the stage. She speaks deliberately and thoughtfully, with the tiniest whisper of a southern accent - she grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. Kevin McKenzie, ABT'S artistic director, has praised her uncanny maturity" onstage, and offstage as well she seems remarkably mature. It comes as no surprise to learn she was an honors student and finished high school before joining ABT.

On this day she's accompanied by her dog, Frosty, a fluffy white American Eskimo. "A lot of people in this company have dogs," she explains. Dressed in her version of the standard rehearsal uniform - pink leotard, pink leg warmers, and a bulky pink sweater - she's friendly but reserved as she sips a Gatorade, picks at a ham sandwich, and talks about her career. Her face lights up, though, when her boyfriend, ABT principal dancer Victor Barbee, stops by to pick up a sandwich.

If she hadn't become a ballerina, she might have become a writer. She comes from a mathematical family: Her sister is a software engineer for IBM and her father is a nuclear physicist. "But I've always wanted to do something where I could express myself," she says. From the time she reached her midteens, it was pretty obvious that she wouldn't be enrolling in creative writing classes anytime soon.

Her first brush with ballet was watching her mom, who had studied dance in her native New Zealand, take adult classes. Before long Kent was training with Hortensia Fonseca at the Academy of the Maryland Youth Ballet, alma mater of Susan Jaffe, Cheryl Yeager, and the late Peter Fonseca. When she was nine, New York City Ballet came to town and auditioned young girls for parts in Harlequinade. "I didn't make it because I was too little, but I got bitten by the bug," she says. During subsequent NYCB visits she was selected for several baby-ballerina roles. "I got to hold Suzanne Farrell's hand in Mozartiana, " she recalls. "It was a real thrill."

She did summer study in New York first with the now-defunct ABT II, then at the School of American Ballet, where she was encouraged to become a full-time student. But her parents were cool to the idea of her moving to New York City on her own. Things got a bit tense when she was told at SAB that she might make it only into regional companies if she didn't enroll. "My mom got really concerned and would bring me in for weekend classes at SAB to make sure I could keep up," Kent recalls. After an audition for ABT in October 1985, she was invited by Baryshnikov to become an apprentice, which she did. Several months later he asked her to join the company. Kent was sixteen.

Her first year at ABT was both hectic and charmed. "I danced three out of three ballets almost every night," she says. "Misha did it to make me strong. And there was no real pressure, because they never gave me any parts I couldn't handle." She got a forced vacation after developing a stress fracture but bounced back to become the only American to walk off with a medal at the Prix de Lausanne International Ballet Competition in 1986. Shortly thereafter she was cast opposite Baryshnikov as a young ballerina in the Herbert Ross film Dancers.

Kent says she has no regrets about signing on with ABT instead of the other team uptown. "I'd have loved to be in either New York City Ballet or ABT," she says. "But I love the story ballets the best. I love the whole theatrical side of ballet, the drama of the full-length ballet. I like to just dance, too, but I think if I had a repertory of only that I might not be as fulfilled."

Like other ABT dancers, she admits that the last couple of years have been tough, with artistic directors coming and going and the company teetering toward bankruptcy. "It's sad, but there's nothing we can do," she says, her shoulders drooping a bit. "The company was mismanaged for a long time, and it's not something you can turn around in just one season." The worst part is not getting to dance as often as she'd like. "It's hard mentally," she says. "You can't maintain the same kind of physical condition when the company is off. But you just have to keep a good attitude and know you'll get back in shape."

For now, Kent, like many of her ABT colleagues, fills in her downtime as a guest artist with small touring companies, like the one put together by Columbia Artists Management that visited several cities last summer. And she waits patiently to learn new roles at ABT. She danced her latest, the Sugar Plum Fairy in McKenzie's new production of The Nutcracker, during ABT'S Orange County, California, appearances in December. "I'm burning to do all of them - Sleeping Beauty, Manon, Don Q - but just as they come along, so I know I'll be ready," she says. Indeed, she waited an entire season before dancing the lead in Romeo and uliet because eight ballerinas were ahead of her.

On a bright autumn day, Kent and ABT principal dancer Robert Hill are rehearsing the Grand Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker. The mood is relaxed and informal, and Kent, who wears a practice tutu over her leotard, grins broadly after she misses a move in a string of turns. But when she and Hill start the passage again, you see the characteristic blend of energy and calm she projects onstage.

It wasn't always that way. "I've really worked at translating how I feel into how it looks," Kent says. "Even though the instinct and the intent are right, it doesn't work unless you can see it. For a while I had the idea that everything I did was all even - very pretty and nice, but all on the same level. I'm long, and unless I use all the angles, my dancing tends to get a little flat."

Working closely with ballet mistress Georgina Parkinson - "She's very theatrical," Kent explains - she discovered how to make her dancing more physical and channel her movements into every part of her body. "It's much more fun when you're dancing with everything from your toes to your hair to your eyelashes," Kent says. "It makes everything less tiring. You use your arm muscles, whic'h helps your back, which helps your legs. It has a propulsion, and the blood is pumping through every part of your body. I know the difference when I'm using all my body compared to when I'm holding in and sort of flattening out."

Because working herself up to that level isn't always possible when she's tired, Kent likes to take the weekends off - read a novel or work in her garden, perhaps - and come back refreshed. "If I dance too much, it becomes a chore," she says.

She also doesn't like to map out all the details in a ballet in advance; instead, she lets things happen according to the way she feels onstage and how she hears the music. "There's something about the theatrical element that you can't re-create in a studio," she says. "You respond to different energies. Sometimes I find myself doing stuff onstage and I can't remember where it comes from. So after a performance, I rewind the tape in my brain and think, I'll keep that for next time.

"I think the music carries you away when you're onstage," she adds, warming to a subject she clearly loves. "I'm not thinking anything technical when I'm out there. I'm just thinking the music, especially in something like the second-act pas de deux in Swan Lake. I think it's pretty rare that you can lose yourself in a role onstage. But if you can take yourself to that level where you become a character, I think that's what people are really touched by - that kind of energy connection with the audience when they can believe a story because they know you believe it."