Songs of Roland.

Half a century may not seem very long in the total perspective of human history, but in ballet terms it s a fair run. After all, fifty years ago our present standard Petipa-Ivanov version of Swan Lake (Four Little Cygnets and the Black Swan Pas de Deux, all that good and famous stuff), was itself just fifty years old. So fancy that. And Roland Petit, France's most celebrated choreographer since Marius Petipa (only Maurice Bejart could be considered a rival), has now been working at his art and craft since 1945.

The other month at the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.--nowadays one of my favorite spots for ballet--I was watching one of Petit's most recent ballets, Charlot Danse Avec Nous, insensitively translated, by the way, into Chaplin Dances, and walking back to my hotel I fell into a retrospective reverie on the various choreographic "songs of Roland." Remembering what Petit has offered to contemporary dance, my mind goes back immediately to Les Ballets des Champs-Elysees, which Diaghilev's last lieutenant, Bons Kochno, founded in 1945, with Petit as chief choreographer, and the great dancer Jean Babilee heading the company.

In fact, Petit's choreographic career had started even earlier, in 1942, at the age of sixteen when he was a very junior member of the Paris Opera Ballet, and two years later he was contributing works to the celebrated "Vendredis de la Danse," organized by Irene Lidova at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt. Nevertheless, it was Les Ballets des Champs-Elysees, with the creation of five ballets in that one year, including Les Forains and Le Rendezvous, that truly started Petit on the creative path that he still follows.

I can even now recall, with that Proustlike sense of evocative memory, going up, as a teenager, to the box office of the Adelphi Theatre in London in March 1946, and getting a pink and blue flyer announcing the opening London season of Kochno's Les Ballets des Champs-Elysees, Britain's first dance visitors from abroad since 1939! I eagerly scanned the list of ballets and dancers--I had heard of none of them. I looked in vain for the name of Serge Lifar--the one French dancer I knew about--but I bought tickets anyway. Then on April 9 came the first night, and it was a revelation.

British balletgoers (particularly those of my wartime generation) were witnessing three remarkable days. On April 8 the Royal Ballet's second company opened at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. This company, led by June Brae and Leo Kersley, was to become, many decades later, Birmingham Royal Ballet, but in those days it was called Sadler's Wells Opera Ballet--in fact, by an odd printing error on the first night it was known, on that occasion only, as the Sadler's Wells Ballet Opera! Then on April 10 Royal Ballet itself--it was, of course, still known as Sadler's Wells Ballet and had only been resident at Covent Garden since February--gave its first world premiere at the Royal Opera House of Robert Helpmann's monumentally boring dance drama-epic, Adam Zero, starring himself and the aforementioned Miss Brae, who was making a busily triumphant return to the stage after a five-year absence.

It was between these two helpings of well-meaning British stodge that the French arrived! Wow! Mon Dieu! How were they going to keep us down at the Garden after we'd seen Paree? It wasn't that the French were so wonderful, but they were so different. So smart. So chic. And they had the unbelievable Babilee. who was the only male dancer in this century who in my experience (of course I never saw Nijinsky) rivaled Nureyev, dancing in Janine Charrat's Jeu de Cartes. And they had Roland Petit and Les Forains, with its concept by Kochno and its designs by Christian Berard.

It was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with French ballet--which eventually even extended to the Paris Opera Ballet. But the basis was Petit and his dancers. He was so magically, magisterially theatrical. That first season Petit offered ballet after ballet--not just Les Forains, but Le Rendezvous with Babilee as a sinister hunchback, his then-wife, Nathalie Phillipart, as Death, and a photodecor by Brassai poems by Prevert, music by Kosma; then there were Le De'jeuner sur l'Herbe with designs by Marie Laurencin, and a marvelous Petit ballet, that for some copyright reason was lost almost immediately: Les Amours de Jupiter

Eventually--but not until we had had that fantastic, Cocteau-inspired Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, that Gothic hymn to Death and Existentialist Transformation--Petit broke with Kochno, and in 1948 formed, on his own, Les Ballets de Paris, showing us Margot Fonteyn (and later Colette Marchand) in Les Demoiselles de la Nuit, and Renee (later, of course, Zizi) Jeanmaire in Carmen.

Petit has always been a magician of the theater. And he has always been a master collaborator. The dancers he has found or encouraged could fill a book--the big names, of course: Fonteyn, Babilee, Elvin, Shearer, Gilpin, Nureyev, Jeanmaire, Plisetskaya, Makarova, Baryshnikov. He has created works for so many of the great European dancers of his time. And he has discovered so many more--Marchand, Oleg Briansky, Nelly Guillerm (Violette Verdy), Leslie Caron, Liliane Montevecchi, Dominique Khalfouni, Denys Ganio, Luigi Bonino; these lists are endless.

And, just as important, he has collaborated with other artists and painters from Picasso to Bernard Buffet, from Clave to Jean Hugo. He has worked with writers as varied as Georges Simenon and Cocteau and composers such as Sauguet, Messaien, and Marius Constant. More than any other dance creator he has maintained that Diaghilev-Kochno concept of ballet as a combined operation of the arts.

Looking at his inspired Charlie Chaplin revue--with its lustrously persuasive performances from Khalfouni and, particularly, Bonino, who is Chaplin to the life--I felt a huge sweep of gratitude for the animateur who had made all this possible. Petit is a true worker in the theater of miracles.

I remember with joy his silly but enjoyable pieces, such as L'Oeuf a la Coque or Cine'-Bijou, his weightless ballets such as Le Loup, or all those full-evening excursions into literature: Cyrano de Bergerac or La Dame de Pique. And I think of his own performances--for he performed brilliantly and for longer than any other choreographer. A whole half-century of wonders. Merci!

Clive Barnes has contributed to Dance Magazine for thirty-seven years.