E-Mail This Article to a Friend Waking Dream Rare Balanchine at Lincoln Center BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

NEW YORK — In 1966, four years after George Balanchine choreographed A Midsummer Night’s Dream (it was his first original full-length ballet), he joined with director Dan Ericksen to film the work with a cast of wonderful young dancers he’d trained at the School of American Ballet. The fate of that film, still to be resolved, moved into another phase last Sunday night at the Walter Reade Theater. The Film Society of Lincoln Center gave a one-time screening of the most complete version of the movie known to exist, a converted-for-television, remastered and color-corrected, projected-in-a-theater adaptation of a video print.

Balanchine created the Dream to display the diverse resources of New York City Ballet at its peak. Made before anyone devoted much attention to translating art dance to the screen, the film looks a little primitive, and there are traces of Hollywood in it from Balanchine’s years making movie musicals in the 1930s. It’s a document, a memory, a treasure. It also dampens a few myths about the Balanchine enterprise.

The 21-year-old Suzanne Farrell is ravishing as Titania, and not only in the worshipful glamor shots and close-ups. Dancing the pas de deux with NYCB stalwart Conrad Ludlow, she’s a queen with authority. Lifts and falls that today would be considered submissive she attacks with daring. Her competitive but affectionate Oberon, Edward Villella, who’s now remembered mostly for his butch roles, in Rubies, for instance, is an elegant danseur noble who masters the fastest, loftiest beats and leaps seen to this day.

For the second-act divertissement, Balanchine made another stunning pas de deux, to Mendelssohn’s little-known String Symphony No. 9, one of several selections he added to the composer’s incidental music for the play. It’s danced in the film by Allegra Kent at her most refined; she’s partnered by Jacques d’Amboise, who didn’t have much classical line but could make a girl feel totally secure in his hands.

Balanchine is supposed to have rejected mime and expressive acting of all kinds, but following Shakespeare’s lead, he superimposes a quartet of foolish mortal lovers onto the magical kingdom of Titania and Oberon. For the film, he trimmed the comic passages of mix-up and wrangling among the bewitched lovers. But Patricia McBride and Mimi Paul have great little dramatic dance scenes as Hermia and Helena, the jilted or too-sought-after Athenian girls.

Arthur Mitchell’s Puck connects the two worlds, spinning a tangle of well-meaning but miscalculated sorcery. My favorite moment in the entire film was Mitchell’s slow, cringing realization of his first mistake, as he suspended the racing tempo of the whole first act with a funny, "uh-oh" pause.

Balanchine feared the constricting effect that cinematic framing would have on his work, so he replotted the Dream to fit. The action of the fairies, mortals, and rustics is confined to shadowy little forest clearings; you can see how so many mistaken identities and blundering chases could occur. The space opens out, though, for the big formal dances of the second act.

The movie wasn’t a great success in its initial showings — after all, at the time you could see the whole thing, with all its stellar personnel, on the living stage. When it got reformatted for television, the outside edges of its Panavision picture had to be cropped off, and Balanchine disliked it so much, he pulled it from circulation. Then there was the question of who had the rights to screen it again in public. The newly spruced-up video shown on Sunday was the result of a five-year retrieval effort sparked by Patrick Bensard, director of the Cinemathèque de la Danse in Paris, who’s still tracking down a usable film version.

Farrell, Villella, and Kent appeared on Sunday to add their comments to the odyssey. Neither Farrell nor Kent was in the ballet’s first cast. "I wasn’t the original but I was the original understudy," remarked the still-playful Kent. "I thought I was going to be Puck." Too bad this didn’t happen at least once. Farrell went out and got her first cat when Balanchine advised her to rehearse with a pet for her spellbound love scenes with the donkey, a/k/a Bottom the Weaver. According to Villella, when he saw his own solo before the soundtrack was added, it was so fast he couldn’t make sense of it.

None of them seemed nostalgic about their vanished youth as so superbly displayed in the film. Nothing to regret, they all said, just privileged to have been in on it. And so were we.