Lucia Lacarra: Spain's Gift to San Francisco.

Spain's Gift to San Francisco Lucia Lacarra has become an instant favorite at San Francisco Ballet.

Lucia Lacarra has, quite unintentionally, become something of a tease at San Francisco Ballet. The Spanish ballerina arrived in 1997 as the company's newest star, fresh from triumphs in her home company, Roland Petit's National Ballet of Marseilles. Cast for virtually every first night of SFB's repertory programs and scheduled for several important premieres, Lacarra was a quick, tantalizing vision that left everyone wanting more. She danced, conquered--and then suffered a stress fracture.

By being sidelined for most of the spring 1998 season, she whetted local appetites and created more than a little anticipation for her return. Will she be Helgi Tomasson's first choice for the company's first-ever Giselle? Will she be given the role of Desdemona in Lar Lubovitch's Othello, opposite the already celebrated Moor of her husband, Cyril Pierre? And what about the affinity for Balanchine and Robbins that this youngster from the Basque country seems to possess as her birthright? Although Lacarra has fully recovered and has been dancing in Europe since midsummer, she did not dance again in San Francisco until after the company's visit to Manhattan's City Center last October. "It never really hurt that much," she says, stretching the offending foot. "It was just so frustrating to have to stop after having such a happy beginning."

It was, in fact, one of the happiest first seasons imaginable, while it lasted. Lacarra charmed critics and audiences of all persuasions, earning standing ovations, inspiring Byzantine discussions in Internet chat rooms, and creating a loyal following among the standees at San Francisco's venerable War Memorial Opera House. At the 1998 San Francisco Ballet Gala, the same night that witnessed Tomasson's emotional return to the stage in Robbins's Circus Polka, Lacarra brought down the house in Victor Gsovsky's Grand Pas Classique, partnered by Roman Rykin. The couple's no holds-barred, extroverted classicism made for a terrific crowd pleaser--and the crowd did not have long to wait for more.

Again at the Opera House, Lacarra in Agon was at the heart of a San Francisco Ballet all-Balanchine program. With much of the company still feeling its way stylistically--and creating, in the process, fascinating new accents within the fast-growing Balanchine diaspora--the Spanish ballerina was a revelation. With a purity of line and the spark of life that signals a born Balanchine dancer and promises more, Lacarra molded her figure to Stravinsky's music with easy abandon. She was a subtle dominatrix to Stephen Legate's willing slave in the pas de deux, where the intentionally fragmented images of the choreography were made one by the couple's sensual intensity.

"The rehearsals were so easy," recalls Legate, a Bay Area favorite who is more often seen partnering his wife, Evelyn Cisneros. "Even though Lucia's English is not that great, she communicates; she is so incredibly gifted physically and she has such innate musicality. Evelyn and I have had a chance to go out with her and Cyril, and the great thing is to find that Lucia is really an incredible person to begin with, very warm. That puts her over some dancer with mere technical proficiency. Of course, she possesses that, too."

Still, the buzz around town after Agon was about the ensemble rather than any one dancer. SFB, much like other major companies from Miami to Pads, has been developing its own distinctive accents in the Balanchine style--as much a result of the company's eclectic repertory as of the troupe's international backgrounds. It was later in the 1997-98 season that Lacarra gave indisputable notice that a new star had arrived. The occasion was the company's tribute to Jerome Robbins, when Tomasson cast her as the Novice in the company premiere of The Cage. In this lurid, horrifying masterpiece in which some very angry women take the ultimate revenge on men, Lacarra's innately sweet presence made the killings that much more shocking. Imagine Audrey Hepburn as a gun moll. Lacarra's final bursts of violence were also unsettling, dazzling, and gorgeously danced.

"If you must go," laughs her partner-victim David Palmer, "there are worse ways than being strangled by Lucia's thighs." The two also rehearsed Robbins's In the Night together, although Lacarra's injury kept her from dancing it last spring. "Lucia is concentrated, on target every day," says Palmer. "I think she has everything it takes to have a wonderful, long career. And she's been learning on the run. I mean, she learns very, very fast."

Difficult as it is to believe, The Cage was her first Robbins ballet, yet she seemed born to style. One's long acquaintance with the work in no way diminished the surprise of her presence, of her luminescent body in motion that gave off a kind of aurora corporealis. This alumna of Petit's star factory displayed all one could want--insolent extension and superhuman suppleness, eloquent pointe work, an ideally proportioned body, and a gift for emotional truth with every gesture.

"I have to say that I learned that from Roland and Zizi [Jeanmaire]," says Lacarra, who spent much of this past summer back in France with her former company dancing Petit's Carmen. She does not mince words in private about the backstage tensions and financial intrigues that led not only to Petit's sudden retirement from the company he founded but also to Lacarra and Pierre's frustration and eventual departure from Marseilles; and she does an affectionate, decidedly wicked imitation of the legendary Zizi at Carmen rehearsals. But Lacarra is profoundly grateful for what she considers Petit's invaluable lessons.

"The best thing he gave me was strength," she says, "inner strength. When I arrived in France from Spain, I was eighteen and I had never done any dramatic ballets--just short classical dances and Balanchine." In fact, at fifteen she was dancing principal roles with Victor Ullate's Spanish National Ballet (now Madrid's Ballet Ullate) and was chosen by Derek Deane to be the Sugar Plum Fairy in his new Nutcracker. By nineteen she was a principal in Marseilles--petite and sexy like Zizi, with a shameless technical abandon that has evoked comparisons to Sylvie Guillem, and an enigmatic vulnerability not unlike that of her idol, Dominique Khalfouni.

Balanchine's Allegro Brillante, which Lacarra recalls as a pleasant exercise, was actually her first ballet while still a student at Ullate's school in Madrid. Her partner then was fellow classmate, Angel Corella, now a popular principal at American Ballet Theatre. "Angel and I were both very little then," she recalls. "With Roland I learned to interpret, to build a character through movement. Many times in his choreography there is actually very little to do technically, so what you do has to be perfect. Sometimes that means making the most not only of steps, but of a small gesture, of a glance, of stillness onstage, of the moments between steps."

Her sensual, raspy voice and staccato Spanish cadences grow intense when she discusses the ballets that shaped her aesthetic, the ballets she left behind in coming to the United States--Notre-Dame de Paris, Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, Le Rendezvous, Ma Pavlova. Petit set Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut on Lacarra, and it was in the murderous embraces of his Carmen that she and Pierre fell in love. "You come to know yourself in Roland's ballets," she says. "Things I thought I could never do--would never dare to do--I do now, thanks to him. In Marseilles I learned to believe in my possibilities."

Have those possibilities changed in San Francisco? She and Pierre, who have a way of finishing each other's sentences, reveal in unison that they "miss all the drama in Roland's company," meaning onstage, not off. "But Cyril was right when he told me to come, when he said how pleased he was with the company," says Lacarra, who followed her then-fiance to San Francisco after Tomasson hired him as a principal in 1996. Having spent much of their young professional lives dedicated to a single choreographer--she is twenty-three, he twenty-seven--Lacarra and Pierre are having a ball within the eclecticism of Tomasson's troupe--Balanchine, Robbins, Tomasson, Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, William Forsythe, Val Caniparoli, Ben Stevenson, James Kudelka.

"Going from choreographer to choreographer is new for us," says Pierre, whose success as Lubovitch's Othello last season was staggering. "It is very rich work for dancers with our experience," says Lacarra, "and a very different way of working: less theatrical, more technical, very fast. You might learn a ballet in two weeks, then be left on your own to really work on interpretation. It is not always easy, but when it goes the right way it can be wonderful."

Tomasson's Silver Ladders looms large in the future, particularly since that injury had kept her out of its world premiere. Balanchine? Lacarra and Pierre look at each other and announce "Je l'aime bien" together, with a shrug. "It is all here and here, fast and big," adds Lacarra in Spanish with a huge sawing gesture. "Balanchine has been good for us to gain speed, assurance, because you can't afford to make any step halfway, you cannot even try to control yourself. I find that very interesting."

But it is The Cage that has given Lacarra the most joy in the United States. "That girl is such an animal," she says, "an innocent who has no idea who she is or what she wants until blood is right in front of her, and then she has to have it, like baby's milk. I thought of her as a newborn--finding her way, discovering her world, becoming a killer. And every moment in Robbins's choreography, the hands, the head, not just the steps, means something.

"It's funny," she continues, "no one told me anything about my interpretation. I just learned the steps and took it from there. I think Helgi was pleased."

He was. Not coincidentally, Tomasson chose both Agon and The Cage for the company's New York City visit this fall, in addition to his own Silver Ladders. This setting of Joan Tower's rhythmically intricate score, by the way, may well be Tomasson's most satisfying choreography to date, and it bears witness to the possibilities of his new muse. "Lucia should be seen," says Tomasson, "especially in The Cage. She is such a very beautiful dancer."

In the meantime, San Francisco balletgoers had to wait until The Nutcracker to see Lacarra. She has yet to dance the two roles she looked forward to the most: Odette-Odile in Tomasson's Swan Lake and Desdemona in Othello. She was all set for one and campaigning hard for the other, and both would have paired her with the love of her life. As it happened, Pierre danced both without her.

Still, the memory of her star turn in The Cage lingered long after the curtain. La Lacarra for her part is still pouting about the enforced interruption, still hoping to dance again with her husband. Of course, as she puts it, "We are now both praying for Giselle."

Octavia Roca is the dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle.