Yulia Makhalina: a twentieth-century Petersburg ballerina.

Kirov ballerina Yulia Makhalina literally leaped to the forefront of international dancers for me in 1987, when she appeared in the one-act version of Paquita on the company's American tour. She immediately stood out among several young dancers with her 180-degree extension and soft landing and the ease with which her leg achieved ecarte a la seconde. Her physical beauty, proud demeanor, and aristocratic performing style have gained in refinement over the years, as dance audiences in New York City will discover this month. The Kirov Ballet returns to the Metropolitan Opera House, with Makhalina firmly placed in the forefront of company ballerinas and a representative of the finest traditions of the Maryinsky Theatre.

She was born in Leningrad, where she graduated from the Vaganova Choreographic School in 1985, after studying with former Kirov ballerina Marina Vasilieva. She was not born into an artistic family: her father, Viktor Makhalin, is an engineer, and her mother, Anna, is an accountant. They sent their daughter to ballet school at the advice of a doctor to correct a childhood leg injury. Throughout her training, her father kept waiting for her to either give up dance or be expelled for "professional ineptitude"; he wanted her to be a pianist, and Makhalina had studied music seriously. Anna, who had herself dreamed of becoming an actress and who had sung with an amateur group, wanted her daughter to become a ballerina, and loyally supported her daughter in that goal.

For a long time, Anna was the only one who believed in her daughter's talent. Makhalina's teachers told her, "Your place, girl, is in the corps de ballet." By the end of her last year of study, when the ballet school helps place students with companies around the country, Makhalina had signed a contract with a company in Lvov. That was when fate stepped in to set her career in another direction.

Oleg Vinogradov, artistic director of the Kirov Ballet, came to the school to observe the senior class taught by Natalia Dudinskaya (who, it was well known, always chose the best students). When he arrived, however, Vinogradov found Vasilieva's class still going on because Makhalina had a tear in her tights and everyone was waiting while she mended them. Makhalina felt so guilty about the delay that she wanted to sink through the floor, and after the class resumed she stood in the back row so no one would notice her. But Vinogradov did notice her, and he remembered her.

Tryouts for places in the Kirov were held later, and all the best graduates were to compete. Makhalina, who didn't know about these auditions, did not appear and was packing to leave for the provinces. When Vinogradov saw that she was not among the contestants, however, he asked, "Where is the girl with the face as round as the moon?"

Makhalina, it turned out, had already been made a member of the Kirov.

Once at a rehearsal for Swan Lake during her first year with the company, director Gennady Schreiber approached her and said, "Yulia, learn the part of the Swan." She was happy and supposed, naturally enough, that as a tall dancer she was to dance one of the four large swans. But when she told Vasilieva, her teacher didn't believe her. "Are you sure that Schreiber told you to learn the part of the Swan?" she asked. "Do you know what that means? That means you're going to be dancing the part of Odette. If the director had just wanted you to dance one of the four large swans, he would not have approached you, he would simply have posted the change in the list for rehearsals."

So it was that Makhalina danced the White Adagio for the first time and, later, the whole part of Odette-Odile. Olga Moiseyeva, one of the best Odettes in the past, helped Makhalina train for the role, and once again luck was on her side. In working with the young dancer, Moiseyeva did not, as many coaches do, insist: "Do it the way I did it." Instead, in Makhalina's words, Moiseyeva took her cue from "my natural attributes." The first person in the theater after Vinogradov to believe in the young woman's talent, she insisted that Makhalina dance Odette in her own way, to approach each role creatively. Makhalina still works on Swan Lake to this day.

Andris Liepa was another person who played a very important role in Makhalina's work on this classic, as well as in her career. A frequent partner, Liepa taught her how to conceal her natural deficiencies and how to respond to a partner onstage. To this day, Makhalina is uneven in performance. For example, she was so nervous before making her entrance in a Swan Lake at the Metropolitan Opera House that she danced almost mechanically. During the White Adagio she said to herself, "Yulia, wake up. You're dancing at the Metropolitan Opera. Wake up!" Later in Washington, D.C., where she and Liepa danced only the second act, she seemed a different Makhalina and a different swan. Her body sang like a musical instrument; her fluttering arms extended each musical phrase as her neck and flexible spine conveyed the movement of the tender, proud stance of Odette.

The season after Makhalina joined the Kirov she danced her first big role for a ballerina - Medora in Le Corsaire. Petr Gusev, who revived the ballet for the Maryinsky Theatre, personally worked with Makhalina. The role revealed many of her strengths as an actress - above all, the heroic bent of her artistic nature, and her strong-willed, energetic style of dance. Her Medora was more Byronic than balletic. Solo and ballerina parts followed each other.

Vinogradov believes that one should look at young dancers not in the classroom, but onstage, in performance, and then decide their fate. Although Makhalina passed the stage trial, her path has not exactly been strewn with roses. First she fell victim to the "St. Petersburg claque," an ugly phenomenon left over from Imperial times. It is composed of that element of the public that goes to the ballet to spread rumors about the private lives of dancers and to disrupt the performances of their favorites' rivals. The loyalty of a claque can be bought with ease, however, and has been throughout Russian history. The claque now is made up for the most part of the old guard, who are no friends of Makhalina. Members have waited for her outside the stage door to snarl, "Why don't you leave the theater? We're not going to let you dance anyway."

I was present at the Maryinsky Theatre in 1990 during a performance of Swan Lake being filmed for television in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Tchaikovsky's birth. At the end of the first act as the dancers took their bows, someone in the upper balcony threw a bouquet of branches - the type used by peasants as brooms - at Makhalina's feet. Makhalina proudly picked it up and turned to the television cameras. Makhalina's mother collapsed in the dressing room. Liepa was furious with the perpetrators. "What kind of people are these?" he screamed. "What kind of country is this?" The insult had a completely different effect on Makhalina. She danced the third act more brilliantly than ever. Eventually, the harassment stopped.

Makhalina herself has detected a change in her dancing during the past year. She believes it began after Igor Zelensky, a young Georgian who had left to join New York City Ballet as a principal, partnered her in a competition in Paris. (They won first prize.) Indeed, a partner who is her equal is important to her. With Zelensky she has also danced Don Quixote and Balanchine's Apollo and Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, and their youthful energy has illuminated the stage. For the competition, Makhalina also began working with a new trainer, Gennady Selusky, a former premier dancer with the Kirov. "Selusky has a remarkable eye," she says. "He sees the particular beauty I can create in the role ahead of time. He works to the point of collapse. He helps me overcome my deficiencies, and he has an amazing sense for my potential in each role."

Her most brilliant roles continue to be in the romantic repertoire. Nikiya in La Bayadere did not come easily to her, and she only finished working on it this year. Her Nikiya is a free, proud woman, akin to the heroines of Greek tragedy. There is a sense of the tragic in Makhalina's gifts as an actress. She dances the Kingdom of the Shades act in the grand manner of a ballerina of the Imperial Theatre.

For Giselle, a work Vinogradov was reluctant to let her dance, Makhalina has rejected all the interpretations of her predecessors. Far from being a naive village girl, her Giselle from her very entrance seems ill-suited to village life - a baby swan in a family of ducks. Her Mad Scene was unique in that it contained no trace of insanity. Stunned by the discovery of his betrayal, she gives Albrecht an open, fixed stare, straight in the eye; there is no madness in her gaze but the cold realization of treachery. She dances to her death as though ill with fever, in a manner strikingly reminiscent of a butterfly's struggle to escape its cocoon.

In the second act she is a liberated Giselle, the Giselle God intended, who forgives Albrecht as though viewing him from another, higher level, her brow still creased by the suffering that settled upon it in Act I.

But there is a third role - one from the contemporary repertoire - that has presented similar challenges and triumphs: Brunnhilde in Bejart's The Ring Around the Ring, set to the music of Wagner. Originally she danced Fricka, Wotan's consort, but on short notice she had to replace a sick ballerina as Brunnhilde. It was a revelation to see a ballerina trained in the Russian academic tradition dance Bejart as though she had performed such repertory all her life.

The role consists of three parts. First, she is the warrior maiden dressed in black armor and a winged helmet who traverses the stage in a long jete. The whole role is on pointe. After Wotan strips away her godlike powers for disobeying him, Brunnhilde comes onstage in a chiton dress and dances on demi-pointe. (Unlike the first Brunnhilde, Katarzyna Gdaniec, Makhalina's Brunnhilde retains the proud soul of a divine maiden and the memory of free flight even in the free plasticity of a mortal woman.) Then she was especially effective in the last part of the ballet, in the long pas de deux with Loge, the red-haired deceiver, when it seems Brunnhilde has again acquired the sense of flight; at first she mechanically submits to her partner, but then she becomes more independent, decisive, and brave - as though she wants to free herself from human suffering and from the humiliating role of an earthly woman.

These three different images are united in Makhalina by one genuinely romantic feature. Another world, a world of light harmony and exalted feelings, always shines through the world of reality to these heroines. It is in the name of this faith that Makhalina's heroines, whom she endows with an open soul and an uncompromising heart, choose death, rejecting the imperfection of this world. Makhalina's Brunnhilde inspires the murder of Siegfried, not so much in revenge for his betrayal of her as in recompense for his betrayal of his own romantic ideals.

Last season, in addition to her performances at the Maryinsky, Makhalina appeared with Royal Danish Ballet and with Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, dancing principal roles in ballets by Balanchine and Robbins. When Liepa restaged Fokine's ballets, first in Moscow (1993) and then at the Maryinsky, Makhalina became the first interpreter of the title role of The Firebird (and she recently made her debut in the role of Scheherazade). During the past two seasons, she has also danced the tragic role of Mekhmeneh Banhu in Yuri Grigorovich's Legend of Love (one of the best performers of this role in the past, Alla Osipenko, coached her), Bournonville's Sylphide in Copenhagen and Moscow, Maria in The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, and the Fairy Godmother in Vinogradov's Cinderella. Makhalina analyzes all her roles so thoroughly that each performance is unlike the preceding one.

Though a genuine heir to the traditions of Russian ballet, with its combination of the classic and the neoclassic, Makhalina is also one of those avant-garde dancers who advance their art. And though her acting abilities have not attained their peak and have yet to be completely revealed, she reminds me of Kreisler, the romantic musician in an E. T. A. Hoffmann tale, whose music always strove for diverse, wondrous forms.

Nina Alovert is a contributing editor of Dance Magazine.