A NEW GELSEY KIRKLAND: <i> THE</i> COMEBACK OF ’86

NEW YORK —  “Dancers learn to turn out their feet, but they never think about turning out from their hearts and their minds.”

That, asserts Gelsey Kirkland, accounts for many of the lackluster ballet performances that contemporary critics--and audiences--have taken to task.

“But it’s not their fault,” Kirkland adds. “Today’s young dancers can’t say anything powerful because they haven’t learned how.”

Kirkland, 33, is arguably the most acclaimed dramatic ballerina of her generation. Yet her impressive career on stage--first as a teen-age whiz-kid in New York City Ballet and later as Mikhail Baryshnikov’s chosen partner at American Ballet Theatre--has been counterpointed by offstage turmoil.

With both companies, she earned a reputation for outrageous temperament, challenging choreographers, battling with management and canceling performances on what seemed like mere whimsy.

At Ballet Theatre, her erratic professional demeanor escalated through a cycle of firings and rehirings before a final rancorous break in May, 1984.

After nearly a two-year hiatus from the stage, Kirkland returned to performance this spring in London. She danced twice with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden as Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet”--ironically the same ballet that her former company, Ballet Theatre, has been presenting for the same past two years. Kirkland also went on to repeat the balcony scene at a special Royal Command gala celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s 60th birthday--an event televised throughout Britain.

For those who doubted that Kirkland would return to the stage, much less last three full acts, cynicism wilted in the revelation of her still secure and sophisticated technique. Her jumps were light and feathery, her backward swoons soft and trusting, her port de bras a fine filigree of intent.

Moreover, Kirkland harnessed her technique to realize an honorably Shakespearean complexity. This was above all a thinking Juliet, but one no less passionate for her intelligence and will.

Originally scheduled to dance further with the Royal Ballet this month in Frederick Ashton’s “The Dream” and the classic “Giselle,” Kirkland suffered a stress fracture in her left foot soon after the gala.

Temporarily hampered by a cast, she was sidelined from the stage--but not from ballet. She has been teaching an unconventional and provocative class to students at the Royal Ballet School as well as coaching Spanish teen-age ballerina Trinidad Sevillano for her “Giselle” performances with London Festival Ballet this summer.

Moreover, by October--a month before she expects to resume dancing in the Royal Ballet “Sleeping Beauty”--Kirkland’s autobiography, “Dancing on My Grave,” should make it to the shelves, elaborating her artistic philosophy and candidly putting her past troubles into perspective.

“Dancing on My Grave” has reportedly received a six-figure advance from Doubleday, where editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has shepherded the project. In this backstage memoir, Kirkland discusses her tempestuous love affairs with several ballet stars, relating the emotional scenarios that produced sparks on stage but frequently led to bitter disputes off.

Kirkland also forthrightly acknowledges the underlying drug problem that characterized the last few years of her dancing at Ballet Theatre--and the resultant toll on her body and spirit.

Along the way, Kirkland endured several supposed comebacks but she now describes those as “frauds. . . . You can’t come back on cocaine and pretend you’re not an addict.”

“I’m living healthily now--as opposed to dying,” the petite, deceptively frail-looking dancer says. What seemed to many an escape from ballet two years ago was actually a journey of self-discovery. In the intervening time, she kicked her drug habit “for real” and strengthened her body by doing her own kitchen counter barre at hideaway cabins in Upstate New York and Vermont.

Kirkland pursued the path back to vitality with her book’s co-author Gregory Lawrence, now her husband, and credits him with much of her present success. “I learned more about my mind than anything,” the dancer reveals, noting a study regimen that ranged from Plato to Jean-Jacques Noverre, the great pre-Romantic choreographer acclaimed as the Shakespeare of ballet.

Indeed, Kirkland bridges that gamut in surprising ways. Whereas ballet class is traditionally a rote, repetitive exercise, followed silently and unquestioningly, she engages the students by means of a Socratic dialogue. “My method of teaching,” she explains, “is to ask questions--because I believe we deserve an answer for everything we do. Why do we turn out? Why are we on pointe ? How do we say, ‘I love you’?

“I’m basically a scientist. I’ve always found most fulfilling the work and the analysis. I enjoy the process much more than the performance. I’m happy teaching and coaching.”

Kirkland is even losing her reputation for being short-tempered at rehearsals, now that she feels capable of articulating her intent. “I always knew what I was trying to do, but I’ve learned to speak to other dancers, to involve them in the process, too,” she says. “I was never able to do that before.

“My own major breakthroughs came by approaching dance as an actress and by extending that insight into technique. Technique can then be used to illuminate, allowing the dancer to breathe life into the steps. Most people think expression can’t be taught: You either have it or you don’t. But the process is really very methodical. And if it can’t be exactly taught, it could at least be inspired.”

Certainly Kirkland’s appearances as Juliet have provided that inspiration. In Harpers & Queen, a British magazine, David Daniel suggested that her ovations in April could “only be measured by those accorded (Margot) Fonteyn in 1949 for her Aurora and (Maria) Callas’ debut as Norma.”

Critic Clement Crisp, writing in the Financial Times, lauded Kirkland’s interpretation as “decisive, closely argued at every moment . . . Like a Method actress, she plainly knows and feels every step of the character’s journey.”

John Percival, in the Times of London, concurred: “Somehow every detail is brought to life, made into a vital part of a living, moving, whole.”

Jann Parry of the Observer also praised Kirkland’s “gift of stillness”--a gratifying response to the ballerina, as she had worked especially hard on those few moments of the last act when Juliet must sit motionless on her bed as Prokofiev’s music swirls bombastically about her. It is a “decision” scene, in which Juliet overthrows her fears and decides to act for her own love and ideals.

For all the quietude of her pose, Kirkland describes “the constant invisible movement that takes place inside the body” in order to animate that stillness. Without such kinetic motivation, she says, the intended climax “looks dead” and will fail dramatically. Without similar motivation, Kirkland warns, “a plie or a tendu can look just as dead.”

Kirkland shared her curtain-call tributes with partner Anthony Dowell, the Royal danseur noble set to become that company’s artistic director in the fall. It was Dowell who invited Kirkland to London to resume a congenial stage relationship that dated back to happier Ballet Theatre days. The 43-year-old dancer, rumored to be on the verge of retirement as a performer, appeared boyish and energetic once again in Kirkland’s catalytic presence.

Kirkland praises the encouragement of Dowell and the other Royal dancers during an especially hard rehearsal period--she insisted upon extra studio and stage time and engaged even the corps dancers in discus sions of interpretation.

“The time that was given to me here allowed it to happen,” she declares. “At ABT, the subject would not even be open to discussion. They would be too impatient.” And at New York City Ballet, of course, most of the abstract Balanchine repertory rejects such dramatic concerns.

With such a frank assessment of one previous affiliation--and further critical revelations about to be published--has Kirkland burned her bridges behind her? “Of course, I’d love to dance in America,” she admits. “But on my terms. At this point, that doesn’t seem possible.” What does seem possible is Kirkland’s continuing stage presence in London and, just as important to her, a continuing role as teacher, coach, and perhaps eventually director and choreographer.

This summer she plans to film an instructional video for Karl-Lorimar, a Los Angeles-based production unit, and when she returns to the United States to promote her book this fall she may offer master classes to illustrate her unique approach to ballet aesthetics.

“What I’m doing is using drama to inspire a re-examination of classroom technique,” she says, “finding exercises to extend our expression and make it more powerful--so we can say something. That gives us a reason to work in the studio every day. That’s knowledge that every dancer should own.”