STRAIGHT FROM THE CITY OF LIGHT.

There's nothing quite like the Palais Garnier. You emerge from the Paris Metro and there it is, with its columns and cupola, its winged statues of Harmony and Poetry, medallions and friezes, masks and high reliefs, and, written across the facade in newly re-gilded lettering, Academie Nationale de Musique--the National Academy of Music. Known as the Palais Garnier (Garnier's Palace) after the architect who designed it, this magnificent building has been home to the Paris Opera Ballet (POB) since 1875.

Today, the company also performs at the Opera Bastille, a modern building on the square where revolutionary mobs once torched a royalist prison. But the Palais Garnier is where the company's heart lies. It is here that tourists flock and school groups come to visit. It houses a gallery and one of Europe's great libraries, as well as studios, workshops and public rooms of unimaginable opulence. The theater's domed ceiling was painted by Chagall. In the last ten years, the French government has poured millions into refurbishing the Palais Garnier, a testament to its enduring belief in high culture.

Since 1661, when Louis XIV founded the Academie Royale de Danse, the history of the Paris Opera Ballet has had close links to the French state. Today the company and its affiliated school are fully government-funded; they also account for a huge chunk of the total dance budget. When it comes to the Opera, the government doesn't skimp. No expense is spared on costumes, which are lavish and made in-house, often to designs commissioned from artists and stars of the fashion world. Guest choreographers are brought in regularly to set or create new works. And with more than 150 dancers, the company is enormous.

To describe them, the Opera has a lingo all its own. Principal dancers are either etoiles (stars) or premiers danseurs (first dancers). Soloists are sujets. Demisoloists, who perform in groups of six to eight, are coryphees. The quadrille is the corps de ballet. More than most companies, the Paris Opera Ballet is palpably linked to ballet's origins in an aristocratic order. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Grand Defile, or grand parade, when, at the start of each season, to the march from Berlioz's opera Les Troyens, all the company's dancers and students from its school advance by rank down the steeply raked stage in a spectacular vision of hierarchy.

Although hierarchy at the Opera is very old, the Grand Defile is what historians call an "invented tradition." The first took place in 1946. In fact, the Opera can seem remarkably cavalier about its heritage. Think of the romantic ballets that premiered there. Giselle, La Sylphide, La Peri--the titles alone conjure up a nineteenth-century world of tulle and fleeting balances on pointe. The greatest stars of the Romantic ballet--Marie Taglioni, Fanny Elssler, Carlotta Grisi--vied to dance at the Opera, and in its ateliers the tutu, that universal ballet uniform, was invented. Yet not a single work of theirs survived. Giselle went out of repertory in the late 1860s, only to be restored in 1924 by a team of emigre Russians. La Sylphide also vanished; the version now danced is Pierre Lacotte's 1972 reconstruction.

The Opera's twentieth-century repertoire fares only slightly better. Soir de Fete, choreographed by Leo Staats in 1925, is occasionally performed, but of the dozens of ballets by Serge Lifar, the company's artistic director for nearly thirty years, only Suite en Blanc and Entre Deux Rondes, both from the 1940s, appear to be in active repertory. And of the numerous productions from the decades following Lifar's resignation in 1958, only those by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are regularly performed. The Opera salutes tradition but is very much rooted in the present.

The company that returns to the United States this spring as part of a unique cultural exchange with the San Francisco Ballet reveals the imprint of Rudolf Nureyev, its artistic director (or "Director of Dance," as he was officially known) from 1983 to 1989. Under his leadership and in some cases decades after troupes of comparable stature, the company acquired its repertoire of late nineteenth-century Russian classics--Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda and La Bayadere (which will be performed at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House). Although Nureyev's stagings are idiosyncratic and at times far from loyal to the originals, with their tasteful opulence (an Opera trademark) they are company jewels.

Other jewels are POB's Balanchine and Robbins works. Balanchine had a long connection with the company, beginning in 1929 when he was briefly hired as artistic director. In 1947, he staged several ballets, including Symphony in C, or as it was called in French, Le Palais du Cristal. Five years later, he returned with his newly founded New York City Ballet, the first of its many visits to the French capital. In 1959, he set Gounod Symphony and in 1963 Concerto Barocco, Scotch Symphony, The Four Temperaments and Bourree Fantasque; ten years later he was back at the Opera to rehearse Symphony in C. With Agon, Orpheus, Apollo and Prodigal Son also in the company's repertoire, POB boasts the greatest--and best danced--collection of his ballets outside the United States. And it is one of the very few companies (San Francisco Ballet is another) that the notoriously picky Robbins allowed to dance such gems as Afternoon of a Faun and In G Major.

Since 1989, with first Patrick Dupond and then Brigitte Lefevre as artistic director, the company's repertoire has significantly expanded. Reconstructions of twentieth-century classics, including Millicent Hodson's of Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and Lorca Massine's of his father's Symphonie Fantastique, have underscored the company's link both with the Ballets Russes and the Russian diaspora tradition--while also acknowledging current ballet fashions, especially in Europe. At the same time, the company has continued its policy of inviting choreographers outside the classical tradition to work with its dancers.

"Crossovers" have a long history at the Opera. In 1973, Merce Cunningham staged Un Jour ou deux, an evening-length work without intermission to a score by John Cage. Four years later Alwin Nikolais choreographed Guignol, a phantasmagoria with huge, lumbering marionettes. Although these were not the first modern dance-influenced works to be produced at the Opera, they were the first to respond to the challenge of American avant-garde dance of the 1960s. Another response was the creation in 1975 of GRTOP (Groupe de recherches theatrales de l'Opera de Paris), an experimental group headed by Carolyn Carlson but composed chiefly of dancers from outside the Opera. Although disbanded five years later, GRTOP was crucial in making the company receptive to contemporary work on a regular basis.

Among the stars of this new "hip" repertoire is William Forsythe, the expatriate American director of the Frankfurt Ballet. Since the 1980s, Forsythe has choreographed several works for the Opera, including In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, which the San Francisco Ballet also dances. Another is Mats Ek, the former director of Sweden's Cullberg Ballet, whose controversial "rereading" of Giselle has sometimes been given at the Opera on alternate nights with the traditional version of the ballet--an example of adventurous programming few American companies risk. Still another is the Romanian-born Angelin Preljocaj, whose French-based company has not only performed at the Opera but done so as an "invited" guest. (His company plays the Joyce in New York City May 1-6 as part of the France Moves festival.)

Preljocaj brings to his choreography both classical training and a strong Cunningham background. He has studied Noh and directed several film shorts. He also has an unusual interest in history. (For the Ballets Russes program presented by his company at the Opera, he choreographed "remakes" of Parade and Les Noces.) One of today's most interesting French choreographers, he is something of a throwback, an avant-gardist working within the tradition of high theatrical art.

Le Parc, which San Franciscans will see, is a three-act work to Mozart string and piano pieces that Prejlocaj created for the Opera in 1994.

Reviewing the New York premiere in 1996, Wendy Perron called it stark and ominous, a work of "jagged magic" that "progresses from social flirtation to sublime love. Thierry Leproust's set, an abstracted version of formal French gardens, includes three flat towers upstage against a threatening sky, and several slatted cages on high stems in the wings." Diaghilev would have approved.

What is French these days about the Paris Opera Ballet is the dancing.

Nearly all the dancers are graduates of the company's affiliated school, directed since 1972 by Claude Bessy, and it is in their bodies that the heritage of French ballet is preserved and handed on. No one dances Giselle or La Sylphide with such a mastery of Romantic style. The lightness and sparkle of their petit allegro, the harmonious lines of their adagio, their exquisite feet, graceful carriage, marvelous port de bras, their charm--here, in the refinements of a great classical school, is the mysterious thread of continuity that leads back through the maze of history.

Standing at the very top of the Palais Garnier, for all of Paris to see, is a sculpture of Apollo with his lyre. Like Balanchine's god in the last moments of Apollo, he seems to be summoning his followers to Parnassus. This, too, is the Paris Opera Ballet's heritage--the idea, so very old-fashioned, that art is a heroic quest for the beautiful.

Paris Opera Ballet starts out in San Francisco ...

The Paris Opera Ballet performs at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco April 30 to May 5 in two full-length ballets: Rudolf Nureyev's La Bayadere and Angelin Preljocaj's Le Parc. The four performances of La Bayadere will take place April 30 to May 3; three performances of Le Parc will be presented May 4 and 5. Ticket information: 415/865-2000 or www.sfballet.org.

... then heads south to Orange County ...

The Paris Opera Ballet will go on to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, California, presenting Bayadere at Segerstrom Hall May 8, 9, 11, 12 and 13 (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 8 P.M., Saturday and Sunday at 2 P.M.) The company last visited Orange County in 1992. Ticket information: www.ocpac.org.

... while San Francisco Ballet visits Paris

In its exchange visit, San Francisco Ballet brings a mixed bill to the Palais Garnier May 12-14, including the Paris debut of Mark Morris's Sandpaper Ballet, Helgi Tomasson's Prism and Julia Adam's Night, followed May 17-19 by the European premiere of Lar Lubovitch's full-length Othello.

Lynn Garafola is a senior editor of Dance Magazine and the editor (with the late Nancy Van Norman Baer) of The Ballets Russes and Its World.