Lynn Aaron: no dull tulle; when Feld Ballets/NY opens at New York City's Joyce Theater on February 15, Lynn Aaron is sure to play a leading role.

When she was growing up in Gainesville, Georgia, in the 1960s, Lynn Aaron wanted to be a ballerina. Like many young dancers raised on the televised images of Natalia Makarova and Suzanne Farrell, she envisioned herself swathed in puffs of pink tulle, accented with pink tights and pointe shoes.

Now fast-forward twenty-five years to 1993. Lynn Aaron, the thirty-one-year-old leading ballerina of Feld Ballets/NY, is hanging by one hand from a metal bar that stretches the width of the Joyce Theater in New York City, while downstage a man scales a forbidding sheath of mesh netting. Throughout the dance - Eliot Feld's MRI - Aaron furls and unfurls her body around the bars, her hands outfitted with black gloves, her body encased in a grimylooking unitard. She is ballet's answer to Catwoman.

It's a long way from Gainesville, Georgia, and that's okay with Aaron. She says she happily put aside her tutu dreams when she first saw Feld's brand of rigorous classicism. So sure was she that Feld's was the company for her that she returned to audition three times before finally being invited to join. Along the way, Aaron has grown into a dancer with a singular blend of musicality, grace, and athleticism.

As Feld Ballets/NY enters its twentieth-anniversary season, Aaron can count seventeen original roles crafted for her by Feld in her seven years with the troupe. Her dancing - which Feld approvingly describes as "unmannered" - runs the gamut from the fierce, otherworldly prowess of MRI and Savage Glance to the entwined lyricism of Embraced Waltzes and Endsong. She rarely wears tutus these days, and Aaron says she can imagine no other place she'd rather be and no other choreographer with whom she'd rather be working.

Lynn Aaron is the daughter of Jimmye and Tommy Aaron, the older of their two children. Her father is a professional golfer, her mother a housewife. She began studying ballet at age six with Diane Callahan, a teacher from Atlanta Ballet who used Aaron's aunt's garage as a studio. By the time she was thirteen, Aaron was spending her summers at ballet camp. It was there - at the Alabama School of the Arts camp - that she realized how deep a commitment it would take to become a professional dancer. One short year later she was pleading with her mother to let her leave home for dance school. But Jimmye Aaron felt that her daughter was too young to be on her own, facing the pressures of professional training in New York City. She said no.

Disappointed, Aaron soon took comfort in her mother's decision. "Not very long after she told me I couldn't go away, I was so glad I didn't go away," she recalls. "I decided then if I don't ever make it, if this holds me back some, I'll deal with it. Those were some of the best years of my life. I would not give up those years for anything."

And far from holding her back, that extra couple of years at home (she graduated from high school early and took up study at the School of American Ballet at the age of sixteen) seems to have enriched her. She says that not leaving her family early made her a stronger person - and in observing Aaron you can't help being impressed by her levelheadedness, generosity, and assurance. You might not expect such a balanced ego coming from such an acclaimed dancer.

Feld finds this aspect of Aaron's character remarkable. "Lynn has found some mechanism that seems to be uniquely available to her to take her narcissism and her desire for ecstasy and put them in a form that makes them all useful," he says. "I don't have any explanation for it. It's a quality I've never encountered in any other dancer in forty years."

Indeed, there is plenty about Aaron that is unique. Much has been made of her ability to work tirelessly, repeating new steps over and over again when Feld is creating a new work. "Lynn works at something with an energy and a concentration and endurance that are actually frightening," says Feld. Her long-limbed body is amazingly fit, even by the rigorous standards of dance, and she will train extra hard, if necessary, to prepare for a new piece. Aware that getting through MRI would require a lot of upper-body strength, for instance, Aaron did calisthenics and worked out with weights in addition to attending her regular ballet class and rehearsals while the dance was being made. All her dedication has paid off: In more than a decade of performing, Aaron has never had an injury.

But, as Feld points out, this physicality is only important "in the service of sensibility," when it becomes "an extraordinary asset." And Aaron has no lack of sensibility. A lean and precise mover, she is profoundly musical. Watch her in something like Ah, Scarlatti, or the incomparably luscious Endsong and she seems to be reaching beyond the bounds of her own body to the heart of the music.

It wasn't long after Aaron joined Feld Ballets/NY in 1987 that her qualities were recognized. Feld cast her as one of four women in the lyrical Chopin ballet Embraced Waltzes. The dance, which involves a great deal of intricate partnering, with the dancers rarely breaking contact, was the first to bring her together with Jeffrey Neeck. Two years ago, Neeck (who has since left the company to become a chef) became Aaron's partner in marriage, too.

A series of lyrical roles followed Embraced Waltzes - six more in two years - and it was clear that Aaron was fast on her way to becoming Feld's new favorite. Aaron handled the growing notice with characteristic aplomb. "We rehearsed all summer, and next thing I know we're ready for our season, and I'm in seven new ballets and a lead in every ballet," she remembers. "The girls in the dressing room are saying, |So how are you doing?' How are you dealing with this?' |You must be really nervous.' And I hadn't really thought about it - probably that was how I was dealing with it. I wasn't sitting there thinking, Wow, I have the lead in all these new ballets. There's too much other stuff to think about - like doing the steps."

In 1991 Feld changed everything. He created Savage Glance and exposed a fiercer, more violent side of Aaron's talent. Moving to Shostakovich, Aaron seemed trapped within her own body. She jerked her head and neck forcefully, repeatedly, and made a noose around her face with one elbow. Dancing with her hands fisted, she jerked around the stage, at times flinging herself at Neeck like some kind of killer insect. It was a disturbing image, and as far from the sylphide as Aaron had come up to that point. Yet she welcomed the turnaround. "When Eliot started with Savage, I remember thinking, This is different from anything he's given me before. It was very sharp and angular and contorted. Many things were uglier. And I was very glad. I don't want to be stuck in just one way of dancing."

Feld's departure from the traditional ballet lexicon is in fact one of the things that attracts Aaron to him. Although she prefers to take "a very basic ballet class to get me back to feeling square and lengthened," she enjoys the involuted, loose, and percussive style of Feld's dances. "It's so much more organic to use your muscles contracting and expanding and pushing," she says. "To me it feels so much more organic and earthy than trying to hold the torso and pelvis a certain way.

"In something like Savage Glance, there's a beauty and drama for everything not to be pretty. Everything in life is not pretty. It makes it more real."

It is precisely Aaron's ability to embrace change that Feld prizes so highly in her. Likening each ballet to a new language, Feld says that "she doesn't bring a British accent to her French. She listens and tries to speak the language. That's the game."

One game that Aaron won't play is the age-old romp known as kissing-up. That wrinkle in the ballet world was one thing for which Aaron was unprepared when she got to New York. She was bothered that people seemed to get ahead on the basis of something other than their talents. "Because there's only Eliot to please, because the director is the choreographer and they're all his ballets," she says, "you just have to worry about yourself I'm glad people don't have to kiss up to him, because when I came in I wasn't going to do that."

Both Aaron and Feld characterize their relationship as "professional intimacy," with Feld adding that their shared desire to be transformed through music is at the heart of the matter. And paradoxically, it is that professional intimacy that gives rise to a different kind of intimacy between Aaron and the audience. In a company that traffics in few secrets (as epitomized by their habit of warming up onstage with the curtain up), Aaron is especially revealing. In the solo Hadji (1992), for instance, she is every bit the shaman, consumed by the effects of the drugs she eats from her palm, twisted and trembling in every sinew. She is carried away in the paranoid, animallike urgency of the dance, not acting a part so much as being a part.

"You want to do something like you mean it," she says. "Letting go of secrets is what I wanted to do. And to have Eliot encourage that is great. His ballets are about whoever's dancing them. There are no stories or characters. It's about us, so you have to show something of yourself - be vulnerable, open up."

Perhaps the highest expression to date of Aaron and Feld's relationship is Endsong, the 1991 lyric masterpiece that Feld choreographed to Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs. When, at the last minute, the Strauss estate denied Feld the use of the songs, the ballet made its New York debut in silence. Even for the serene Aaron, the prospect of dancing without the music was unnerving: "I thought, Oh, my God, this is like a nightmare where you go out on stage and you don't have your costume on or the music doesn't start." Determined to get through it, she decided not to think about it. And when Feld advised her not to hold her breath (she feared that the audience would hear her), she discovered a new richness in the ballet. "The music wasn't there to give life to the steps," she says, "so I had to breathe into the steps to give them life that way. I had to make sure I had a breath."

And it's a good thing she's breathing, because rest assured no one in the audience is. Watching her - I had the immense pleasure of seeing her dance Endsong twice in Wisconsin before it was silenced - she is almost too lovely to bear. She dances as if she were born into those swirling, weeping steps. And perhaps, in a way, she was.

"Endsong is the ultimate. It's so beautiful, like heaven," Aaron says. "Dancing it, it's like when I was a little girl, and I had that image of being a ballerina."