Julio Bocca: from national hero to international superstar.

He came to New York City nearly eleven years ago, journeying halfway across the world with his mother, grandmother, and stepfather. He was eighteen years old, an Argentinean who spoke no English, and whose dark, revealing eyes betrayed hope, apprehension, and unquenchable desire.

Even then, he was an engaging, contradictory figure--solemn yet ready to laugh, shy yet brash and impulsive, and given to a halting, reticent manner that would always be at odds with his onstage ebullience. He had known only hard work and remote venues. But now he was responding to an invitation from Mikhail Baryshnikov to dance at the Metropolitan Opera House as a principal with American Ballet Theatre. If he was unsophisticated, he could intuit nonetheless that the most formidable things you can be given are the things you want the most.

In the years that followed, Julio Bocca became one of that handful of artists who can fill the Met, as he should do again when the ABT season opens this month. An artist who can generate the excitement that prompts an audience to gasp, laugh in sheer amazement, and explode in an ovation, he takes his bows while being pelted with peonies and roses. Thrilled by the ecstatic response, he acknowledges it gratefully, joyously, hands clasped together, pressed to his heart.

You cannot understand the dancer simply by looking at the dance. To understand Bocca and what he has become, one must understand Argentina, the country that spawned him, the place he lives in and loves, and from which he derives the temperament that colors the prodigious gifts that prompted Rudolf Nureyev to describe him as a "child of nature."

The town of Munro, where Bocca was born on March 6, 1967, is just across the Del Tejar Bridge from Buenos Aires, a twenty-minute drive past Plaza Dorrego, where his mother took him when he was a child to ride the merry-go-round. He would grab the brass ring and get a free ride. In a life where work would be constant and stakes invariably high, those were, in a manner of speaking, the only free rides he would ever get.

He was the progeny of what he calls "a quick love." His father was a customs official who died when Bocca was in his teens. From the start, he refused to acknowledge his son, and the wound inflicted by that rebuff would never fully heal. Julio Bocca was given the surname of his late maternal grandfather, Nando, a lusty, handsome laborer whose passions were opera and dance, and who vowed on the morning that his grandson was born that the boy with the big, luminous eyes would dance someday at the Teatro Colon. The Bocca family was so poor they diluted Coca-Cola with seltzer to make it last, yet Nando Bocca, convinced that the arts supply life's deepest satisfaction, worked extra hours to buy his family a piano.

Bocca's mother, Nancy, a dance instructor with an abiding passion for all forms of the art, introduced him to dance, bringing him in his crib to the classes she held in the tiny studio at the rear of their house. Even as an infant he was profoundly stirred and roused by music. He first appeared onstage at ten months, having wandered out from the wings during a dance recital, in short pants, a pacifier in his mouth.

At four, he began to dance. After that, he knew precisely what he wanted to do. That he was emotionally suited for this profession was not in doubt, for he had a sense of daring and a hunger to triumph. His family recalls that whenever they played cards together, he played ferociously, always hating to lose. Above all, he was blessed with grace, speed, and the ability to respond to the dictates of music with his body and his heart. When his mother and his grandmother, whom little Julio called La Nonna, are asked just when they knew that he would make a life in dance, they answer, in unison, "Always."

Today his grandmother lives alone in the family's humble Munro house, which she has filled with mementos of the boy who became the light and center of her life. There is his first costume, a tiny gaucho vest decorated with red and white sequins, and pantaloons trimmed in white lace which La Nonna fashioned from an old dress. There are lists he made in the years when he was teaching himself to be a professional: lists of costumes he required and the order of the program, lists of times to leave and arrive. There are letters he sent home in his early teens, when he danced his first major roles in Rio and Caracas, letters signed, "I want to kiss you all with love," and written on Snoopy stationery.

Because his mother was often away, teaching and studying every form of dance from classic to folk, Bocca spent his days in his grandmother's radiant presence. She was intrigued and delighted by the child who was as sturdy as he was graceful. When he was taken into the company of the Teatro Colon at age sixteen, he always brought his costumes home to La Nonna so that she might sew a few stitches in them for luck. In later years, she attended his performances clutching a bit of tissue in one hand, and when he danced she would wipe tears of joy from her eyes. She encouraged him, believed in him, and gave him her energy and time. "Everything I have done was love," she says. From his grandmother's love of him, and his mother's love of dance, he learned what it means to have in your life something for which you would sacrifice everything.

When he was eight years old, Julio Bocca was accepted at the school of the Teatro Colon. The first year, La Nonna accompanied him on the hour-long journey to Buenos Aires. After that, he insisted on going alone, sitting in the back of the train, a nine-year-old cradling an outsize practice bag on his lap while staring out the window.

Ballerina Eleonora Cassano, whom he would later partner, remembers him from the school as a little "monster" in a culture where that word denotes individuals of exceptional talent. He could do things that other little boys could not--double sauts de basque and perfect tours a la seconde interspersed with fouettes.

At age fourteen Bocca left home to dance in Caracas, living alone in an apartment and cooking his own meals. From then on, he lived on his own. The difficulties inherent in this situation were absorbed by the opportunity to dance. At sixteen, he went to Rio, dancing the principal role in La Fille Mal Gardee with dynamism and a joyous, instinctive showmanship that never veered off into vanity. Even then, he wanted what he would always want from dancing: for himself to dance in a manner that was "clean," and for audiences "to come away with something."

The Bolshoi came to the Teatro Colon the year he was sixteen. Bocca was selected to dance the Peasant Pas de Deux in its Giselle. He had seen the Bolshoi Ballet on tour, led by Vladimir Vasiliev who embodied the potent yet poetic style and artistry that he admired most. "He is the first for me," he would always say of Vasiliev. Bocca was thirteen when he wrote in the diary he had just begun to keep that he wanted to dance at the Bolshoi. Ballerina Lyudmila Semenyaka, who was dancing Giselle, was impressed by his precocious style and polish. Soon the ballet world, where rumors travel fast, began hearing of an astonishing new Argentinean boy.

In the next two years, Bocca and his family saved enough money to send him to Moscow for the 1985 Fifth International Ballet Competition. La Nonna finished his costumes the day before he departed. He never thought he would win. He went in the hope of being seen by someone. Five people saw him off at the tiny airport. One week later, his return was met by a milling, impassioned gathering of five thousand Argentineans. For he had won the gold medal, dancing the Grand Pas de Deux from Don Quixote. When the door of the plane opened and Bocca stepped onto the tarmac, he was mobbed by his countrymen who sprayed him with champagne and chanted his name.

From that day on Bocca was a national hero, and this status affirmed that more than brilliant dancing is needed to become known outside the dance would's narrow confines. Pavlova or Nijinsky achieved world renown, but today dancers acquire major reputations only when they also embody a social or political dimension. The international fame of the Soviet defectors Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Godunov, and Makarova was due to more than their artistry: their defections had also made them Cold War symbols of the need for the artistic freedom permited only in a democracy.

In the Argentina of 1985, Bocca too became a symbol. After years of oppressive militarism that Argentineans called the Dirty War, the country had just embarked on an initial, tentative foray into democratic rule; and Bocca's gold medal had transformed him into a democracy's most valued figure: the dirt-poor boy who achieves recognition through the combination of opportunity and his own abilities. As such, he was living proof that Argentina's nascent democracy was viable. And Argentineans adored him, because he was specially blessed and because he had demonstrated that being one of the gente bien, as upperclass families are called, was not essential for success.

Bocca proved an ideal national hero, for he loved Argentina as much as he loved dancing. Until his emergence, ballet there had been exclusively for those with the money and pedigree to frequent polo matches and the Teatro Colon. And just as Guillermo Vilas had made tennis a sport for everyone, Bocca was determined to popularize ballet, to make it available to ordinary citizens, the gente de pueblo who were too intimidated by the gold and velvet grandeur of the Colon to go there. So he gave two outdoor concerts, dancing in the city's streets, first on the world's widest street, Avenida 9 de Julio, and then on Avenida Libertador--events attracting audiences of a million people, and telecast live to millions of others.

As time went by, Bocca came to embody the sort of myth that had assured Elvis Presley's place in the hearts of poor Southerners. For, having succeeded, he could have left behind the ordinary people with whom he was raised, but he refused to do so, was incapable of doing so, partly by temperament and partly by decision. As any indigent Argentine will tell you, Bocca became a working-class hero, someone who, despite his talent and opportunities, insisted on remaining "one of us."

It was a heartening legend, even if it was not entirely valid. Like Elvis, Bocca chose to make his home in a middle-class neighborhood, but was so surrounded by admirers when he ventured from his house that he rarely attempted to go to a movie, and could eat in restaurants only if he did not object to being gawked at and being asked for countless autographs, which, in fact, he did object to.

Initially, this celebrity affected him. In class he never greeted other dancers, waited instead for them to greet him. His attitude became "I'm the best," and he made no secret of it. His saving grace is that quality known as character: eventually, the way he was treating others began troubling him. To get hold of himself, he entered therapy, which is not unusual in Buenos Aires, where there are more therapists per capita than in any other city in the world. For this nation of Italians, Germans, French, and Spaniards was such a confused culture that the Teatro Colon was built in the styles of French baroque and the Italian and German renaisances, and among the mongrel citizenry, crises of identity were unavoidable.

"I am from where?" was the dominant query of the portenos, as the people of Buenos Aires call themselves. And for Bocca, who never knew his father, and whose talent was a gift too great to be fully comprehended or charted, this question of identity was destined to resonate even more than it did for most.

Like most quiet people, Bocca is often underestimated by those who fail to recognize that he sees far more than he appears to see, and that his inborn energy and sweetness are destined to vie with strains of sorrow and temperament. Like anyone, he enjoys being in control of situations, and seeks to invest his private life with the order and balance he insists on in his work, and with a sense of absolute freedom which that rigorously disciplined work never supplied. He will, for example, sign autographs when he wants to and refuse to sign when he does not. "That is how I am," he will say, ending any discussion.

Desire to retain control prompts him to initially say no to ideas of other people, though later he may do as they suggest. One afternoon in New York, he got his hair cut in the presence of Dolores Gallicchio, an attractive Argentinean who is chief among the group of women who function as mother figures for a young man who maintains close ties with his family but is often separated from them. Mme Gallicchio has been close to Bocca for ten years, and in that time has learned that he can be both rebellious and contrary. Once a hair stylist had given Bocca a new, longer look that suited him well. "It looks great," the stylist said to her. "Don't tell him too much," said Mme Gallicchio, "because then he will be wanting a very short haircut."

Always shy, Bocca even now tends to be withdrawn in the presence of strangers; yet, while he feels compelled to put space between himself and others, he often suffers from loneliness. This unresolvable conflict can make it easiest for him to express himself in situations that offer a built-in distance: thus, he is apt to be less open in a face-to-face conversation than when talking on the phone, less open on the phone than when leaving a message on an answering machine. And always, he is most open onstage, where everything seems real but isn't. In this sense, as in many others, dance came to him more readily than anything else.

Bocca arrived in the dance world long after the ballet boom, offering nourishment to an audience starved for stars. Drawn to the romance of classic ballet, he worked hard to improve within that exacting art form, never wanting to be seen at anything but his best. As he improved, he kept raising the stakes. "I can do more," he would say after people complimented him on a performance.

"American dancers always hold back," says Bocca's teacher, Wilhelm Burmann. "To Julio, the question is, hold back for when?" Burmann recalls that Bocca brought him to Buenos Aires six years ago to help him prepare for two guest performances at the Royal Ballet with Natalia Makarova. For six weeks Bocca took two private classes with him each day. "He's that dedicated?" someone recently asked Burmann. "And that proud," Burmann said.

"When I think about great dancers," says Georgina Parkinson, Bocca's ABT coach, "it becomes clear to me that what the audience responds to is energy, passion, movement, and Julio has an abundance of all those things."

Says Kevin McKenzie, ABT's artistic director, "Julio has a magnetism. His energy is like a spontaneous combustion. There's danger involved. He's this combination of totally controlled and on the edge."

"I was very lucky all the time," Bocca says of his career, and this is true, though luck was the least of it.

For Bocca was a natural dancer. Dance is in his fingertips and in his feet; this is his great blessing, and, on occasion, a responsibility so profound and unending that it feels like a curse. And though he worked hard and found many things difficult, for the most part dance came to him so readily that he could rehearse once for Act II of the McKenzie and Susan Jones Don Quixote, go out of town, and at his next rehearsal, two weeks later, have no need to review the choreography.

"A good dancer learns to be a dancer," says Lidia Segni, a former Colon principal who is the director of Bocca's company, Ballet Argentino. "But Julio Bocca was born to dance."

Always he has been determined to do what he knows he can do, particularly when his capacity was doubted by others. It was his insistence that led to his successful partnering of Cynthia Gregory, who was considered too tall for him. And when the five-foot-five-inch Susan Jaffe declined to dance a Don Quixote with him on the grounds that she was too large for him to lift, he marched into a class, found her at the barre, raised her high into the air with one hand, and held her there. "Who says I can't lift you?" he asked.

Always, he relishes his professional status, and while too much praise or special treatment may embarrass him, he enjoys the loans of limousines and secretaries that are a star's prerogative, and can be quick to anger if treated less well then he feels he should be treated. Yet that capacity for empathy and for focusing on others that contributes toward his brilliant partnering also allows him, in a more general way, to consider other people.

On ABT's opening night at the Met last season, when he and his principal partner, Alessandra Ferri, led the company in Giselle, he sat in the wings to watch Parrish Maynard and Ashley Tuttle dance the Peasant Pas de Deux, applauding them enthusiastically from his place offstage. Once during a performance of La Bayadere attended by Dolores Gallicchio, he slipped onstage and nearly fell. "Poor Dolores," he thought. "She will worry."

Each time he dances, he will glance out at the audience when the ballet is nearly over and if the house is full--which it invariably is--he allows himself a little smile. But though he remains aware of his appeal, he also jokes about himself. "I have to look taller again," he says as he goes to rehearse with regal ballerinas.

Similarly, he likes to mock the star's ego. "Who's dancing the lead gypsy?" he asks Kevin McKenzie during a rehearsal of Don Quixote in which Bocca will dance Basilio, the lead male part. "Corella," says McKenzie, referring to Angel Corella, the rising star of the company.

And Bocca grins. "Not in my performance," he says, laughing.

As time proceeded, he danced all over the world, in every great venue from Covent Garden to La Scala, partnering every ballerina with whom he yearned to dance, from Ferri to Makarova and Gregory. And for a season he fulfilled his desire to dance at the Bolshoi.

The more he danced, the better he got and the more he grappled with the dancer's lurking apprehension for, like every great artist, he was consigned to spend the first part of his career proving he was as good as anyone else, and then was condemned to spend the remainder of his career trying to equal himself.

"People wait for you to do what they saw you do before. There's a lot of pressure with that," he says, "and you have to be mentally prepared for it."

Yet he could not deal with disappointing an audience. "If he doesn't give a good performance," says Lidia Segni, "he doesn't feel well."

Bocca came back to Buenos Aires during the middle of the 1995 ABT season to give six shows that commemorated his winning the Moscow gold medal. In nearly every street of Buenos Aires, there were huge posters of him. Some advertised his shows. Others advertised his presence on the cover of Gente, which is Spanish for People.

His commemorative performances, in the amphitheater Luna Park, were sold-out events playing to five thousand people a night, and danced by Bocca, his company Ballet Argentino, and the four native ballerinas with whom he has been most associated.

Prior to the first night, he was restless and edgy, worried about being underrehearsed and finding an outlet for his nerves in every aspect of the performance. "He's looking for trouble," said one of his ballerinas, "where there is no trouble." He fretted about the conductor, though the tempi were fine. He angrily dressed down the lighting staff when the follow light was blue instead of white.

In fact, he had real cause for nerves. To give his audience as much as possible, he planned to dance, at each performance, the Grand Pas de Deux from Le Corsaire, the Grand Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker, the Grand Pas from Don Quixote, Acts II and III of Swan Lake, several tangos, the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, a forty-minute ballet newly created for him, a lengthy waltz with four different partners, and a ten-minute finale.

"No one but him thinks he can do it," the dancers in the company were saying to one another. "No human being can do this," one of his ballerinas told him. "I can," he said.

And so he went on and he did it, and the first night, after acknowledging a wildly appreciative ovation, he nearly collapsed backstage; the strain forced him to delete the grand pas from Don Quixote and Le Corsaire from the lineup but that left him with a three-hour program in which he was onstage and moving much of the time. By the end of the six scheduled performances, he had been seen by thirty thousand people; Luna Park had sold thousands of Julio Bocca programs, T-shirts, sweatshirts, knitted caps, and facsimiles of his gold medal; and Bocca had lost twelve pounds.

Bocca's dancing had brimmed with intensity and consummate grace. When the final performance ended, applause built to a frenzy. The audience did not want to let him go. Even after he thought the ovation had ended, they called him back again, and finally, completely unprepared for yet another call, he appeared onstage, exhausted and grateful, wearing his white terrycloth robe.

He bowed and extended his arms to them, thanking them just as they were thanking him. And their appreciation was not simply for this performance, but for the fact that he had chosen a life in dance, a choice that enabled him to defy the harsh conditions of his birth, just as he would later defy the limitations of gravity.

Bocca returned to New York City after his triumph at Luna Park to dance three performances of the Kevin McKenzie--Susan Jones Don Quixote during the final week of ABT's Met season. As things turned out, these last performances were to be far more fulfilling for him than had been the season's opening night when he had danced Giselle with Alessandra Ferri. She had danced exquisitely, but he, thrown off by tempi that were excessively slow, performed at far less than his best. He concluded the evening feeling embarrassed and downhearted.

"The conductor will get the tempi right next time," a friend suggested at dinner that night.

"Next time is too late," Bocca answered.

It was an unfortunate event to occur in what he had looked forward to as a special season, the second since he had passed through a dark time when his interest in dancing seemed to wane irretrievably. "It's very weird," he said then, "because already all my dreams have come true. Well, what is next? What now?"

At the time a critic had written that he had seemed bored onstage. "I agree with that," he said when it was mentioned to him, "because I feel that way. But I was really stupid to do it that way in performance."

He went back to therapy, emerging from it reconciled and prepared to recapture that delight in work that had made him a dancer to begin with. "For many years you had to prove yourself," he thought at the time. "Now you are one of the best. You are one of the expensive ones. So enjoy what you work for. Take your time."

But it was ironic that, just when his dancing no longer caused him psychic distress, he began to notice that it had become more difficult to get back in shape after a break and that his body had begun to change. In the past, he had never understood how Nureyev could have a massage before a performance. He himself could never do that because it made his muscles too soft. But now, he often had a massage before he went on, and this was an early sign that, after twenty-four years of life as a dancer, he was entering a new phase.

"I'm an old man," he took distinct pleasure in saying. And though at twenty-eight he was far from old, even for a dancer, it was apparent that he was entering his prime. Certainly the time he had left was lessening, and that seemed to spur him to rededicate himself. He spoke offstage of being tired, but onstage he boiled with energy.

"I found my way to enjoy myself," Bocca commented one day, in a characteristically casual manner. "You know, get old, get smart." By this stage, he had perfected his technique so much that he was convinced he could get no better. "This is as much as my body will do," he had begun saying.

"He can't get better, but he can get different," said Burmann. And as the ABT season went on that difference began to show in his expanding artistry; even his technique seemed to expand with each performance, startling the audience and even himself as he imparted new meanings and deeper shadings to ballets he had danced since his early twenties.

It was, he would say later, "the first season I really feel Albrecht." And it was the first season that he worried about how to play Romeo. "I am not so young anymore," he told friends. "I have to find a way to be like a young boy." But with his artistry developing at singular speed, he was able to give his Romeo a youthful impetuosity and verve it never had before.

To see a great dancer hit his stride is like watching a natural phenomenon, like watching a horse run, or waves breaking, for it is a phenomenon that appears to be fueled, as those things are, by unique energy and logic. "I don't have to think about it, I just go," Bocca sometimes says of his dancing.

The first two ABT performances of Don Quixote were danced to cheers and ovations, both for Bocca and Paloma Herrera, the young Argentine-born ballerina dancing her first Kitri for ABT. Before the final Don Q, the last performance of the season, dancers came to Bocca and asked him to do certain turns and leaps, and he added these to what was already an astonishing performance. At the very end of the Act III coda, after Herrera had thrilled and excited the gathering with thirty-two perfect fouettes, Bocca began a series of whiplash-fast turns, and as he spun like a top, the audience first began to laugh in delighted amazement, and then jumped to its feet, delivering an ovation in the middle of the coda. And after the performance ended, Bocca stepped back and bowed to the entire company, a gesture filled with respect and appreciation for what he always calls "the greatest com-pany in the world."

"Well, of course I did that," he said later, when asked about it. "They are so good, they work so hard."

That night, visitors shepherded into his dressing room by Dolores Gallicchio found an ecstatic Bocca, joking and gulping Gatorade from a quart bottle. Leaving the theater, wearing his wire-rimmed glasses and usual T-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap, he wished the guard a good summer and signed autographs before going to a nearby restaurant for a dinner given by his close friends, the arts patron Howard Gilman, director of the Howard Gilman Foundation, and his associate, Natalie Moody.

During the meal, several young women from the ABT corps passed by on the street, noticed Bocca through the picture window, and knocked on the glass. He turned toward them. They salaamed repeatedly, saying, "Maestro! Maestro!" and Bocca laughed, both pleased and embarrassed.

Ebullient and light-hearted, he smiled at a woman who approached his table, her face a study in that look of eagerness and shyness that tends to overtake people in the presence of great performers.

"She doesn't know how to say thank you," said her husband, "for the best performance she's ever seen."

Bocca grinned. "Well," he said, "she could pay for the dinner."

When it was time to go, he bid his companions good night, then hurried into the street, a black canvas practice bag over his shoulder. He hailed a cab. Once inside, he placed the bag on his lap and gazed out the window as the vehicle moved forward, just as he had in the days when he was a little boy journeying from Munro to Buenos Aires, to learn how to be a dancer.

So ended his ninth season with American Ballet Theatre. Now his tenth begins, a season in which he will have much more to show us and which will be a significant marker in the brief span that is the dancer's life.