E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ten to a hundred Balanchine at Harvard, ‘Ten’s the Limit’ at Green Street BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Everyone in the dance professions develops an acute sense of time as a flexible, almost palpable substance. Performing careers are short and must be cultivated for all they’re worth. Unexpected moments on the stage can be inscribed in memory for years. The unwritten rules that determine how long a dance should be — or a performance, an intermission, the life of a dance work or a dance company — are constantly shifting. Last week we got to contemplate some of the longest and shortest intervals of dance time.

First, the Harvard Theater Collection celebrated George Balanchine’s centennial with three public events, an all-day symposium, a talk by Balanchine’s iconic ballerina Suzanne Farrell (this organized by the Office for the Arts at Harvard), and an exhibition from the Collection’s diverse holdings related to the great choreographer. The show, arranged by curator Frederic Woodbridge Wilson and Phoenix contributor Iris M. Fanger, will be up at the Pusey Library through 28 May.

More than one speaker on Thursday acknowledged that the choreographer, who died in 1983, remains a continuing presence in their lives. I realize he’s never far from my thinking either, as a reference point for the dance I see and study. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew his repertory the way other people know books or music. When music historian Charles M. Joseph started his talk at the symposium by playing an unidentified Stravinsky passage on the piano, I saw Calliope’s little running steps on pointe, saw her arms sweeping up in those dramatic gestures that identify her as the Muse of epic poetry.

Maybe we can’t expect the whole educated world to know Apollo as well as it knows Hamlet, but how about the ballet audience? Balanchine created scores of works during his lifetime; he was generous about allowing them to be performed by companies besides his New York City Ballet. After his death, the body of work that’s out there was bound to shrink, despite the efforts of the Balanchine Trust to keep the ballets alive.

When a choreographic repertory is no longer being created, it shifts into the plane of history, where it requires a different kind of effort to be brought to the public. Not only do retention and recovery of a ballet become more problematic, but it has to compete on stage with new, hipper dances that look more familiar to the audience. According to symposium presenter Toni Bentley, author and former New York City Ballet dancer, Balanchine saw no need for the preservation of his works, and to Bentley’s mind, film and videotaped ballets are good only for providing examples in lectures.

Fortunately, the rest of the world is not ready to leave Balanchine in the limbo of nostalgia. Boston Ballet has just announced two Balanchine revivals, Rubies and Divertimento No. 15, for its 2004-2005 season opener, and Farrell will bring back his legendary Don Quixote for her Kennedy Center–based company in June of 2005.

But no one on the Harvard program was really willing to talk about the future of Balanchine. Asked by an audience member whether she worries about changes that could creep into the choreography when it’s handed down to new generations of dancers, Farrell answered that Balanchine often left the dancers some expressive choices. But this doesn’t account for changes that Balanchine didn’t authorize, like wholesale misunderstandings or revisions of style, small dancers cast in what were big dancers’ roles, liberties taken with steps, tempi, costuming. These things are happening. Some of them still give us credible Balanchine. But where do the keepers of the flame draw the line? When does the evolving DNA of a ballet produce a different ballet?

Only Farrell’s interviewer, New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella, was willing to look at the hereafter, a generation already into its third decade. Acocella finds the closest imitators of Balanchine the least interesting. The line will be carried on by the individuals who find their own voice, after absorbing his lessons about order, seriousness, music, and the use of stage space. She named Karole Armitage, Twyla Tharp, and Mark Morris as current inheritors.

Harvard’s symposium, perhaps understandably, concentrated on the more manageable questions of musicological research and documentary information. Now that the first-hand spectators have diminished, there will be deconstructive takes on the work, revelations about it, critical assessments and prescriptions. Photographer Costas had refreshing observations about the choreography he’d been capturing for 30 years at New York City Ballet.

Most of all, the future of Balanchine will lie with those dancers who teach and perform his ballets. Suzanne Farrell is gradually building a base for them with her company. In her conversation with Acocella, she seemed delightfully un-neurotic about her mentor, mindful of his voice but concerned to apply it in her own way to young dancers. She coached her former student Katie Daines, now a Harvard senior, in a variation from Divertimento No. 15, pointing out how the dancer’s small rhythmic adjustments and spatial generosity could make the subtle difference between blandness and genius.

CRASHARTS presented its third "Ten’s the Limit" showcase for Boston choreographers at Green Street Studios over the weekend. These 10-minute commissions give young artists some visibility, but they also encourage a short attention span, which is just as unfriendly to the development of serious ideas in the arts as it is in politics. Five of the eight pieces on the program were billed as work-in-progress, so maybe their creators plan to deepen what they showed us.

Most satisfying to me were two solos danced by their choreographers, Malinda Allen’s About Time and Pei-Yi Cheng’s Born and Reborn. Both works seemed to be about personal journeys, both were simply designed but intensely performed.

As soon as she entered, Allen swept open the curtains covering one wall of mirrors, then danced across the room to confront the opaque surface of the other wall. When the music changed from the loud, contentious rock of Siouxsie and the Banshees to a slower, strumming song by Sheryl Crow, Allen stripped down to shorts and a bandeau. After possibly searching out an alter ego, she started walking into the audience and the lights went out. Allen moves with an eclectic but very accomplished mix of balletic beats and turns, acrobatic floorwork, moonwalking, and wild jumps that reminded me of the great African-American modern dancer Pearl Primus.

To the sound of a woman singing a Chinese folk song, Cheng appeared on her knees, at one end of a long panel of white silk that had been spread on the floor. She began with very slow, deliberate gestures of curling, flexing, and bending back of her hands. She allowed this effortful rippling to expand into larger movements of her whole body, until she was rolling and wrapping herself in the silk. As she progressed along the silken pathway, she seemed to get stronger, more determined, and after a brief flurry of hand shaking and jumping, she’d reached the end of it. With the cloth bunched around her like a nest, she sat in it and hummed the same song. Finally she gathered up the silk, now an unwieldy bundle, and started out, trailing it over her shoulder like a garment too old to care for but too precious to leave behind.

There were two group works and a duet that could be read as being about partnering, friendship, cooperation, competition — in other words, they proposed movement structures as social situations. Meghan McLyman’s Dancers in Orange had a trio of women interacting with themselves on a video screen (filmed by Eric Fisher).

In Small Sleep, by Brenda Divelbliss, Alissa Cardone and Janet Slifka draped over and leaned on each other, then separated. Whenever they were in contact, they moved slowly, sensuously, and as soon as they were apart, they sped up. Even then, they seemed attached, synchronizing or imitating moves, or covertly keeping track of each other.

A program note said that Dzelsz Prieskars (Iron Curtain), by Meredith Butulis, is about fleeing oppression, but the dance came across as a circus. The five women did a continuous string of lifts and kinky carries, group formations, flips, swings, crawls on the elbows, always running into place, as if they were trying for a record number of tricks before the time was up.

The other pieces were Dawn David Loring’s Self-Indulgent Solo and two big production numbers. Story Book Ballet, by Alice Hunter, strained to get the requisite 10 minutes’ mileage out of a cute idea: one character peels back part of the set to show parts of other characters behind it. Species, by Jamie Jewett/Lostwax Productions, had one dancer (Sara Vasiliou), a blown-up film of body parts and jittery moving forms, and a collage score that began with an discourse on fish biology and descended into multi-vocal chaos. Vasiliou, swaddled in a puffy white costume done up in black string, leaped and pivoted softly. She crawled and rolled and picked delicately at her body. She seemed to be lost in a field of overdeveloped signifiers.