Homage to Igor

STRAVINSKY: How much music will you want for the three dancers' first variation?

BALANCHINE: Thirty-one seconds, I would think.

STRAVINSKY: Could you settle for thirty-two?

They were not joking. One reason the late Composer Igor Stravinsky and Choreographer George Balanchine got on so well was that they both worried about craft at a time when everyone else was worrying about art. If art was the result of their labors, so much the better, but they did not agonize about it. "When I know how long a piece must take, then it excites me," Stravinsky said in explaining the importance of the discipline of limits. To him as to Balanchine, mastery of the work at hand was what counted, not the creation of so-called masterworks. As Balanchine once put it: "If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?"

To Agon. That masterpieces resulted anyway was amply proved last week as the New York City Ballet staged one of the cultural, or craftsmanlike, events of the decade. Billed as a Stravinsky Festival, the weeklong affair was nominally in honor of what would have been Stravinsky's 90th birthday. But the festival--featuring 3 1 ballets, of which 21 were world premieres, set to Stravinsky's music--was also a celebration of the greatest single creative partnership in the history of ballet. It had its start when the two Russian emigres were brought together in 1925 by the great Impresario Serge Diaghilev. It continued for four decades, during which Balanchine and Stravinsky created two dozen ballets from the romantic Tchaikovsky-esque The Fairy's Kiss to the stark, quasi-dodecaphonic "IBM-ballet," Agon.

In stirring his world-famed company into action for the festival, Balanchine made it clear that he wanted not a lugubrious memorial, but a joyous, entertaining celebration of Stravinsky's art and spirit. "In Russia we don't cry when a person dies," said Balanchine. "We are happy. We go home to an enormous table with vodka and blini, and we drink to the health of the guy that died."

Indeed, the only question was whether Balanchine's own spirits rose to the occasion or the occasion rose to Balanchine's spirits. At 68, four times divorced, czar of his own school of ballet and highly disciplined troupe, Balanchine has long been known for his total dedication to his work. But in the last six weeks, he doubled his efforts and enthusiasm, overseeing every detail of the festival and choreographing nine completely new ballets. He was at his happiest in his shirt sleeves at rehearsals, positioning his dancers and instructing them by singing out "Slow-slow-slow-one-two-three" and stepping through each part himself.

New Kiss. The opening night's Violin Concerto turned out to be Balanchine's finest work since his 1967 Jewels. Stravinsky's music is less assertive, less obviously heroic than most violin concertos. Instead, it offers a rich conversation with the soloist as a sort of Socratic anchorman. Balanchine's two principal dancing couples follow this dialogue, and sometimes invoke the unexpected by concentrating on minor or secondary themes. All to the point of producing a ballet that is mod, sexy and elegant--vintage Balanchine.

Balanchine also managed to choreograph (handsomely) a Stravinsky duo for piano and violin, as well as the taut, granitic Symphony in Three Movements. The latter is jazzy, athletic, impressive in its antiphonal choruses between the men of the corps and the women. Add to these a cheeky, naughty Danses Concertantes and a delicious new Fairy's Kiss, and you have Balanchine at his most vigorously creative period since the 1950s.

If there ever came a time, though, for Balanchine to step down, the one man who could best take over is Ballet Master Jerome Robbins, 53, the finest American-born choreographer working today. Robbins' contributions to the week's festivities were considerable, ranging from a breezy, sporting Dumbarton Oaks concerto to a swirling, twirling Scherzo Fantastique. There was also Circus Polka, with 48 little ballerinas, aged nine to twelve, scampering around to the direction of Ringmaster Robbins himself. (Stravinsky originally wrote the piece for "very young" elephants.) But Robbins' finest new ballet was the haunting Requiem Canticles, a breathtaking affirmation of the originality he has shown in recent years with such works as Dances at a Gathering and, last winter, a quasi-Oriental study in animated still life, Watermill.

On the Phone. Among the things that Balanchine and Robbins see eye to eye on (not to mention toe to toe) is their new jointly choreographed ballet Pulcinella. "Sometimes I would do a section and George would add details," explains Robbins, "and sometimes George would do a section and I would add." At rehearsals, for example, Robbins would work from a distance, calling the starting and stopping shots and shaping the overall picture. Onstage, Balanchine would "add" by moving dancers around, or changing the angle of an elbow or knee. Their joint Pulcinella is less of a display piece for virtuoso dancing than a big, bawdy, joyful romp bulging with mime and pantomime. It illustrates better than any of the other new works Balanchine's cheerful dictum that ballet dancers are "entertainers, professional clowns, comedians."

Balanchine, like Stravinsky a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, is also something of a mystic. When he cries aloud at a rehearsal, as he often does, "Let us pray to Mozart!" he means it. Mozart is there, somewhere. So is Gounod, Bach, even Sousa. Thus, when he came out onto the stage of the New York State Theater opening night, and said, "He [Stravinsky] is with us. I spoke to him on the telephone, and he said 'George, it's all yours,' " no one in the audience uttered a peep. That was simply the way it had to be, because, as Balanchine explained coolly, Stravinsky had taken "a leave of absence."

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