Young ballerinas breathe new life into the Kirov. (Young Dancer).

WHO AMONG VETERAN BALLET DEVOTEES WOULD EXPECT KIROV dancers to be experts on the difference between dancing the classics and dancing the zeitgeist? But this is a key moment in this company's nearly three centuries of history. For the first time since glasnost-perestroika, the Kirov is not just importing modern Western ballets it missed when the Iron Curtain was down. It's nurturing young choreographers from within its own ranks--and the young dancers to realize their visions. Among the dancers, Natalya Sologub, Daria Pavlenko, and Irina Golub lead the pack.

It's easy to get attached to a company's "character," and for me the Kirov's was always tied to the miraculous twentieth-century survival of regal ballerinas in the nineteenth-century mode. No matter how vigorous the steps, the old-style ballerinas radiated a glittering authority, decorum, and elegance. Even if they were formidable athletes, sports never came to mind when they were onstage.

On October 29, 2001, in St. Petersburg, Sologub, a pale, propulsive redhead of 24, changed my view of the Kirov Ballet. She cast off the old-world reserve to display an awe-inspiring athleticism. In the principal role in John Neumeier's Spring and Fall (1994), she threw herself into the churning choreography. Her new-style attack flowed through into old-style, sinuous, full-body phrasing. She was nineteenth-century elegance filtered through twenty-first-century physicality.

Sologub isn't alone in projecting a hybrid identity. Last fall, because I lived in Russia for the whole semester while teaching at the country's first liberal-arts college (called Smolny), I had time to see other young Kirov ballerinas. Twenty-three-year-old Pavlenko is tall, dark, and enigmatic where Sologub is pale and athletic. But Pavlenko is just as physical. The two danced together (with partners Andrey Mercuriev and Islom Baimuradov) in corps member Kirill Simonov's astonishing new ballet, Come In! (even in Russian the title is in English), which premiered in early December during the Kirov's 2001 fall-winter season. In flirty orange dresses and jazz shoes, these two ballerinas led their partners and a sixteen-member corps de ballet through an exploration of adolescent sexuality in all its vulnerable sweetness and raw energy--a topic that was unthinkable during prudish Soviet times.

On that same evening--a five-premiere feast, billed simply as "Ballets of Contemporary Choreographers"--another young ballerina, 21-year-old Irina Golub, infused Latvian choreographer Indra Reinholde's new work, Reflections, with a contemporary spitfire insouciance. Golub, in a green dress, responded to her partner, Ivan Popov, as much like a pouty Valley Girl as one could imagine in today's Russia. "I'm Everygirl in the ballet," she explains, then added, "In contemporary works you have to find the story and tell it to yourself."

"Contemporary work is so good for us," says Sologub. "It opens you up differently. On the first day of rehearsal for Come In!, Kirill showed me the steps, and I was like--`OK.' But my body couldn't do anything for three or four days. I didn't understand how to do it. In new work you have to hear an internal voice."

"Come In! isn't about crazy events," says Pavlenko. "It's about small changes when people start to relate to life differently. Maybe a person likes something but is afraid of it, or wants something not the norm--like between men or between women. Why not? These things have the right to be. I got some phone calls afterwards," she admits." `How can you dance this bezobrazie!' [the Russian word for anything out of line]. But I think such work means a small revolution for our theater."

Of course, these three young ballerinas with their pristine Vaganova training aren't just braving modern work; they're also moving up through the classical repertoire like generations of Kirov ballerinas before them. Pavlenko, given Swan Lake two years ago, is a veteran Odette-Odile by now. Sologub has danced Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty for a season. (She danced the role when the Kirov appeared at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in February.) Golub made recent debuts back home in Russia in Don Quixote and La Bayadere (as Gamzatti), and at the Kennedy Center, she was applauded as Sleeping Beauty's Diamond Fairy. But it was in Balanchine's Jewels at the Kennedy Center that Golub really shone. She threw herself into the let-me-at-'em, New World steps of "Rubies," high-kicking and strutting her way across the stage as if she'd studied tap, toe, and jazz in some California shopping mall her whole life.

In fact, Golub did start dancing unusually early. She whizzed around so much as a baby that her parents took her to the Palace of Culture when she was 2. She became a pint-sized principal in the children's folkdance troop before submitting to the painstaking discipline of St. Petersburg's Vaganova Academy. ("No dance at all for two years--only barre!")

The other two ballerinas danced early too. Pavlenko as a toddler imitated a beloved older sister who was studying in the Bolshoi's Moscow Choreographic School; there was never any question about the little sister's future profession. Sologub was a tiny gymnast in her native Ufa (in the Bashkir Republic). She moved over to the Ufa Opera ballet school when her gymnastic career peaked at age 8, then moved again at 21 to the "big city" and the Kirov.

Maybe their early introduction to physical motion, both dance and sport, has given these three an edge in that brand-new genre, the Kirov contemporary, which draws on a wider variety of movement styles than Soviet contemporary ever did. Before the Iron Curtain came up, Soviet choreographers created their own version of the contemporary mode that wasn't influenced by the outside. Now that the Kirov performs the works of Petit, Neumeier, and Bejart, and any dance video can make its way uncensored to Russia, Russian dancers and choreographers can draw on the same vast history as the rest of the dance world.

In American companies, ballet dancers often need help with the classics. They already know how to be dynamic and hip; they have to learn to be quiet and precise in the nineteenth-century manner. At the Kirov, however, dancers are steeped in the classics, so they are inventing a contemporary , style that's innovative yet keeps nineteenth-century dance values alive.

And dance lovers can't help but rejoice, for the ballet world will be richer for this new Russian-flavored modernity--and for the dancers themselves. Why shouldn't they join the rest of young Russia's mad embrace of the pop-youth culture that was so long denied them?

"It's B.B. King and Eric Clapton," says Sologub, when asked what she's listening to on her portable CD player. "The taxi driver played it coming in from the airport. I didn't think I'd like it, but I loved it. I went right out and bought it for myself."

Elizabeth Kendall is a New York-based dance and culture critic and the author of Where She Danced; The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930's; and American Daughter, a recent memoir.