Magic in the down-to-earth: the Royal Swedish Ballet's 225th-anniversary celebration in Stockholm revealed a promising future as well as a noble past.

It is exciting these days to encounter a ballet company that represents its own country as distinctively as the Royal Swedish Ballet does. The majority of its dancers have come through the Swedish Ballet School, and it shows. Their down-to-earth approach allows them to inhabit the stage as real people. They move with an easy flow rather than emphasizing virtuosity per se. Although individual Swedish dancers have had success abroad, the company itself was too little known until its nine-day festival in June, which attracted international attention. The 225th-anniversary celebration showed the onstage historical and contemporary breadth of the Royal Swedish Ballet. Plans are jelling for the company to visit the United States next year.

The city of Stockholm itself set the stage for the festival in subtly evocative ways. During the long days of June, patterns of sunlight and cloud shadow played on graceful spires and domes and gently handsome public buildings. When the sun set, it struck showers of sparks from the waterways that thread the city' s vistas, then magically wheeled its afterglow round to the north, to bring a luminous dusk to the night, before rising again. Lilacs were in bloom, and seagulls cried in the streets. In the heart of the city, just across a bridge from the soft brown neoclassical Royal Palace, stood the similarly understated 1898 Opera House; like a geode, it revealed its secrets when you looked inside: the lustrous neobaroque extravaganzas of the auditorium and the Golden Foyer.

The festival was the idea of the company's Danish-born artistic director of three years, Frank Andersen, who as head of the Royal Danish Ballet had pulled off a similarly successful festival dedicated to August Bournonville in 1992. Judging by brief earlier acquaintances with the Swedish company, its dancers now seem to be performing with a new confidence and bold sweep under Andersen's regime, while happily the character of the roster has not changed, as often happens with a new director. For the festival, Andersen presented a spectrum of ballets, Swedish and international: the company's own eighteenth-century reconstructions; a program he acquired of lost repertory of Les Ballets Suedois; and recent acquisitions, including a charming Swedish Nutcracker by Par Isberg, whom Andersen has named resident choreographer. Andersen's acquisition of Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling and John Neumeier's Mahler's Third Symphony were firsts outside the choreographers' home companies.

In addition, a closing-night gala, unusual in presenting a true company retrospective, amplified on its 225-year history, with apposite guest contributions and clarifying program notes. (A scene from Bournonville's Bellman, or The Grona Lund Reel, a salute to the Swedish poet and composer Carl Bellman, choreographed by Anne Made Vessel after Bournonville and danced with finesse and charm by Danish guests Henriette Muus and Johan Kobborg, recalled Bournonville's work in Sweden. Andersen is scheduled to stage the Danish choreographer's La Sylphide in Stockholm next April.)

Much food for thought about the company's long history was provided during the festival by tours of historic sites; an international symposium that complemented the performances; and a lively and informative costume exhibition, organized by Erik Naslund, scholar and director of Stockholm's Dansmuseet. King Gustav III (whose 1792 assassination in his opera house was the inspiration for Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera) founded the opera and ballet in 1773 expressly to celebrate Sweden's own culture, which had been eclipsed by French and other influences. The festival showed that the ballet company, in its present strength, continues to reflect Swedish culture in very positive and interesting ways. Naslund, in his opening remarks at the symposium, pointed out that the Swedish tend to downplay their accomplishments. This characteristic vividly corresponded with the company's attractive modesty of presentation and its ensemble approach.

The re-created eighteenth-century ballets have become a distinguishing mark of the company, felicitously performed in the original theaters, which have been restored and reopened only in this century. The presence of these ballets in the school and in the active repertory, with their often virtuosic folk dance as well as courtly elements, has probably contributed to the dancers' natural elegance and to their big, bold movement, their solid connection with the earth, and their sense of weight.

The early ballets don't have an unbroken tradition of performance, as the nineteenth-century Bournonville repertory does in Denmark. They disappeared until the revivifying directorship of the English Mary Skeaping in the 1950s. Extensive archives in Sweden have vastly aided in research, which continues to the present day. Andersen named as first ballet master a historical scholar as well as former dancer and director, Gunilla Roempke.

The old theaters, treasures in the environs of Stockholm, flourished under the fascinating (and absolutist) monarch Gustav III, who was himself a playwright and actor. When you walk into these settings, each distinctive, you are at once transported to a refined, neoclassical environment, intimate with soft illumination. The now-unraked auditorium of Confidencen at Ulriksdal Castle feels like an aristocratic salon, a gathering place of friends, with a delicate, softly golden stage curtain. The better-known Drottningholm Court Theatre has deeper space on either side of the footlights; narrower, with raked seats, it immediately funnels your attention toward the stage. Its priceless original theatrical machinery is still in working order, and the numerous, elegant sets continue to slide in and out of the wings almost instantly in performance. (Ingmar Bergman duplicated it as the setting for his 1974 film of Mozart's The Magic Flute.)

A third early theater, no longer in use, which we visited at the imposing Gripsholm Palace, gives an even better idea of Gustav's involvement in theater. (Here he is said to have gone directly from the theater in costume to attend cabinet meetings.) The Gripsholm theater is a miniature crown jewel of illusionistic architecture, fitted into a round tower. The exaggerated perspective of the stage decor increases the feeling of depth. The semicircular seating area has its own ornately grand decor, with chandeliers and gilded half-columns reflected in space-expanding mirrored walls. Below stage, contrastingly, one can view up close the complex wooden stage machinery, the wheels and pulleys whose unvarnished reality facilitated the theatrical unreality.

Of the early ballets, all engagingly and adeptly danced, Skeaping's version of Filippo Taglioni's The Return of Springtime had relatively simple combinations, contrasting with a sudden flurry of grande promenade turns that appeared out of place; the ballet's satiric tone seemed to poke mild fun at ballet itself.

But the complexity and variety of period steps and combinations that are now known was discussed at the symposium by current authorities Regina Beck-Friis and Ivo Cramer, with demonstrations, and was very visible in their ballets performed at the festival. Mime was smoothly integrated with dancing. With an aristocratic air, Beck-Friis's delightful Pygmalion held minuet-like danced conversations, very Watteau. Softly upturning hands connected the characters across space. The articulation of efface, croise, and ecarte became expressive in itself.

But most of the eighteenth-century offerings at the festival concerned ordinary people. Cramer's extensive work with the commedia dell'arte tradition was seen in his Harlequin, Magician of Love, with much wonderfully Harlequinesque angular movement and lots of theatrical effects--a cloud machine, a trap door, a dragon, and rapid scene changes.

From the beginning of the national ballet, Swedish folk dance has held an unusually important place. An excerpt from Beck-Friis's staging of Opportunity Makes the Thief from 1785, one of the first ballets using Swedish folk material, showed peasant dances for a village wedding with the big, athletic steps that were allowed for regular folk onstage. Two men en travesti added to the high spirits. The Highwaymen or The Magnanimous Soldier, Kramer's comic ballet, had an especially charming score of popular music by Edouard Du Puy, the Danish composer and soldier whose flirtatious character, as well as music, are central to Boumonville' s Lifeguards on Amager.

Anders Selinder, the first Swedish-born ballet director (for periods from the 1830s into the 1850s), made a specialty of folk dance material; he was represented by an homage choreographed by Pierre de Olivo, a delightful courtship dance. Folk dance can be seen in Swedish ballet down to current times, for example in the servants' earthy Midsummer's Eve celebrations in Birgit Cullberg's well-known Miss Julie, shown at the gala.

The talent for conveying real people suffuses the company repertory. Antony Tudor, for example, once remarked that he was able to make his Echoing of Trumpets on this company because the men were believable as soldiers (as was shown in a gala excerpt, in which the versatile artist Madeleine Onne vividly danced an impassioned partisan and victim).

Dramatic expressiveness, a quality of the company that began with Gustav III's involvement in drama, has been reinforced over the years by the company's work with choreographers such as Michel Fokine (1913-14), Tudor (1949-50, 1962-64), and Cullberg (from 1950). This gift for drama glowed with special luster in the MacMillan Mayerling. The large cast's dance-acting was not only up to the level of the British choreographer's own Royal Ballet, but the wrought-up story of the famous suicide pact came to seem less about melodramatics, more about real people. Jan-Erik Wikstrom's Rudolf stunned with his Dionysian intensity and in the end won complete sympathy in his suffering. The chameleonlike and subtle Wikstrom was a standout in a wide variety of roles during the festival; his tremendous technique, aplomb, flexibility, and Swedish ease of movement were completely at the service of the ballets. Anna Valev was totally involved and convincing as Mary Vetsera.

Among other influences on the company is modern dance, long appreciated in Sweden. The school's performance during the festival showcased not only its ballet but its modern dance department, said to supply most of the dancers to Sweden's active modern dance scene. The company, too, looked at home with sections of Paul Taylor's Company B and with Neumeier's muscular and gymnastic (if static and portentous) Mahler's Third Symphony, showcasing the company's strong male contingent, led with dignity by the Apollonian Goran Svalberg as an innocent Everyman.

Swedish interest in modern dance--and in Fokine's work--gave impetus to the early-1920s-Paris-based experimental company Les Ballets Suedois, the subject of recent interest, which was represented by the opening program of the festival. The choreographer and leading dancer Jean Berlin and many other members of the group were drawn from the Royal Swedish Ballet. Cramer's new choreography for El Greco conveyed Berlin's pictorial inspiration. The team of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer presented their reconstructions of Dervishes, which Berlin oddly set to a score by Alexander Glazunov, and Within the Quota, to a Cole Porter score, but their best effort was their version of Bedin's Skating Rink, originally made for Zurich Ballet; performed in Fernand Leger's cubist costumes, it was controlled chaos--a roiling mass of dancers circling with highly stylized, almost mechanical skating movements. One was reminded, however, of the constant need for reality checks in looking at such reconstructions. It was clear from discussions that while Hodson and Archer's cultural researches are enthusiastic and admirable, their Ballets Suedois work drew on much inference and imagination. And it was disappointing to hear them say that they had studied only the French terms and drawings among Berlin's notes, not his comments in Swedish.

A work that strongly evoked the Swedishness of the Royal Swedish Ballet was Isberg's Nutcracker (the resident choreographer will premiere another full-evening ballet in the spring, Mr. Arne's Hoard, from a novel by Selma Lagerlof). The Nutcracker libretto by Isberg and Naslund happily incorporates a Swedish traditional Christmas after a story by children's writer Elsa Beskow. Their Nutcracker is a story of ordinary villagers touched by magic--two orphans anticipating their first real celebration of Christmas; a housemaid and a charcoal burner, transmuted by love into the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince. The ballet has an easy, generous flow of movement, especially from the greatly talented Marie Lindqvist and Hans Nilsson, and sweetly light, fantasy acting. The whole story takes place in a country cottage that undergoes an iridescent nighttime transformation. Even the Act II divertissements don't stray from home, as they concern ornaments from the Christmas tree, or, with special beguilement, a sleepwalking episode that Isberg cleverly sets on the Arabian music, or three mice in red pointe shoes delicately competing to the music of the Marzipan Shepherdesses. Genuinely humorous touches are everywhere. In the happy ending, everyone goes off by sleigh to church.

Finding magic in the down-to-earth is a special talent of the Royal Swedish Ballet.