Assoluta.(a review of American ballet dancing)

Divas are a dime a dozen. Pop singers are divas, actresses are divas, models, anchor ladies, female CEOS, even women who snap at cabbies are divas. The term "diva" has its most revered usage at the opera, where it is enshrined in a spectral aria--"Casta diva"--sung by Norma, the title character in Bellini's masterpiece. Norma is a Druid priestess who, duty and desire at swords' points, goes up in flames for love, a flashpoint you might say, for the kind of power that now dominates in America: dark power, chthonic power, the id simmering, "issues" spitting, entitlement and empowerment stirring in the brew. There is something of witchcraft about divas. Singers plant themselves onstage (think of Judy Garland's wrestler's stance) and pull up their arias through the ground, the gut, the ribcage, the clavicle, the throat. Incanting, decanting, they obsess about phlegm and sediment, fearing they will open their mouths and hear nothing, the cauldrons below gone cold (Kathleen Battle, a diva well named, threw fits if anyone looked at her lips). Temper is never plucked from blue sky.

Great female ballet dancers are not called divas, or even prima donnas, though they may act like ones. They are ballerinas. Or prima ballerinas. Or prima ballerina assoluta--it doesn't go any higher. And yet these glorious titles have gone out of use. It is now only and simply ballerina.

Ballet dancers pull up too. It is part of the technique. The five positions of ballet positions of the feet and the alignment of the body over them--are primary, placements, architectural foundations. But they are not dug in, planted. In any position, weight must hover, angelically poised, above the balls of the feet. In this way the dancer is ready, like a dandelion puffin a breeze, to lift in any direction--light, effortless, a different kind of power. Classical ballet is not earth and fire, it is water and air--the dewpoint of a culture. Ballerinas are not bitches throbbing out molten wants and recriminations (though in postmodern ballets they're often asked to stomp and throb). They are cultivated like pearls or white peacocks or royal roses. They are trained on the luminous. National treasure and north star, the ballerina's floating authority is informed by all the arts--music, painting, poetry, history, fashion, as well as la danse--with a little Euclidian geometry as underpinning. Like Cinderella, mothwing and spider's web are her adornments, a toilette of tulle and tiara. As for the fairies, sylphs, wills, sprites that are so often her subject, well, today we understand these folklore apparitions are not so much tricks of the eye as they are events of energy, thermodynamic transmutations--flash, blur, ripple, wave--a healthy wood or meadow in a split-second bliss of iridescence, a shiver of pleasure escaping. This is what a ballerina must be, an extent of pure unplanted energy, and why she is so rare.

Today, the term itself is slippery. The general public thinks any girl who makes a living in toe shoes is a ballerina. Subscribers, a bit smarter, assume that the top of the roster--"principal dancers"--are the ballerinas, though it is wrong to think they are simply corps girls grown up: the mark of ballerinadom is often perceived way back in the academy, where one girl is already different, more, than her peers. Balletomanes like to play with the word, sometimes using it to describe an aura of romance or theatricality: "He's not strong," I once heard it said of the French dancer Alexander Proia, who wore his hair like Liszt, "but he's a real ballerina." Then again, it's not unusual to hear a 'mane despair, deadly serious, of a major ballet company: "But they have no ballerinas." Which is not to say the company is without stars. You can be a star without being a ballerina (just look at ABT's Paloma Herrera), and today there are many ballet stars trouping the world's stages (just not many ballerinas).

The late David Daniel, a dance and music critic of easy erudition, had a particularly withering phrase for the classical dancing he was seeing at the end of the twentieth century. "But you know, dear," he would say, "it isn't dancing. It's what I call"--and here the poison pause--"doing ballet." That glib verb redolent of corporate lunches and busy-bee lists--to do. For David there was an unbridgeable difference between dancing and doing, between artistry and athletics, art and airs, a dancer answering the history encultured in her muscles and one who hears little, who gives a silhouette of a performance, a facsimile, all steps accounted for, a faceful of agony or ecstasy pulled on cue. It was the difference, finally, between going to the theater and staying home. "Have-a-nice-day ballet" is what the critic Joel Lobenthal calls it--dancing that is shiny, smiley, skinny.

In the seventies there was a corps dancer at American ...