The ballerina as a species of theater artist has been endangered worldwide for a quarter of a century; however, two organizations still regularly produce new generations of them. One is the Paris Opera Ballet; the other is the Kirov. Both are huge companies with old, distinguished schools, and both have large repertories stocked with works that require a ballerina's presence. What is the nature of that presence? My favorite answer is George Balanchine's. In The Nutcracker, he once observed, "the ballet is the tree." He meant the Christmas tree in his own production, which, as an appropriately scaled evergreen, serves as the focus of the family party, and then, in the vision of the child Marie, mysteriously swells in sync with Tchaikovsky's ascending musical scales, until the only parts one can see are the very bottom branches, each about the size of a house in East Egg. The rest of the tree, one imagines, is creating havoc with the landing patterns of airplanes making for Kennedy and La Guardia. That is, Balanchine was talking of transformation, a certain kind of stage illusion associated with magic, music and what was once called the sublime.

Of course, a family Christmas tree that has sprouted to the size of the Chrysler Building is thoroughly inappropriate to a domestic setting. And that's the point: Ballerinas require a special setting--a surround of music, space and light in which they can grow--and partners who think of them before they think of themselves. Balanchine's ballets, regardless of their complexity in other ways, always clear such spaces. As he showed his audiences, over and over again, a ballerina catalyzes a ballet company's energy and summarizes something of its style, but she is not simply one more player on a team. She is, rather, the thing, the principle, the radiance, the life force that the team is playing for, or fighting to protect. The very concept harks back to chivalric codes and contains, as well, an element of the sacred. In a world where nothing seems sacred anymore--not religious sculptures the size of a mountain from the seventh century, not the privacy of intimate communication, not Christmas--it's a wonder there are any ballerinas left at all.

And yet, in February, during a brief season at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Kirov was able to field at least four ballerinas of international stature during two performances of Jewels, the spectacular, evening-length storyless ballet, for a cast of sixty-six dancers, that Balanchine made for the New York City Ballet in the mid-1960s and slightly reworked about a decade later. The structure is both very simple and rather devious. Jewels consists of three "acts"--that is, of three individual ballets--each focused on a precious stone: "Emeralds" (to excerpts from Fauré's late 1880s Pelléas et Mélisande and Shylock), "Rubies" (to Stravinsky's 1929 Capriccio for piano and orchestra) and "Diamonds" (to Tchaikovsky's Third, "Polish" Symphony, with the first movement omitted). Only "Rubies" has since proved excerptable, able to stand on its own as a repertory item, and it may not be a coincidence that the music for "Rubies" is the only score of the three that Balanchine used as the composer wrote it.

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