Ballerina

Terpsichore takes on Tin Pan Alley in "On Your Toes," which opens the 11th season of Reprise! at Freud Playhouse, and it's a felicitous pas de deux. This 1936 landmark from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart may betray its age, but with songs like "There's a Small Hotel," "It's Got to Be Love" and the title tune, why dwell on period creaks?

In ballet there is no winning or losing. There is only the search for the impossible goal--perfection. --Bolshoi ballerina Nina Ananiashvili in "To the Limit." A rock climber scales the face of a treacherous cliff like a human fly. A skier hurtles down a slope at 60 m.p.h. A Russian ballerina leaps effortlessly into the air. Sweating and panting, speeding and soaring, the stars of the new giant-screen IMAX movie push themselves "To the Limit." Designed to explore how the human body works and proclaim its potential, the 38-minute film opens today on the five-story-high screen at Mitsubishi IMAX Theater at the California Museum of Science and Industry.

Even amid the routine of a sweaty, stop-and-start rehearsal, Natalia Makarova reveals an irrepressible dramatic flair.

Cynthia Gregory looked thoughtfully at a steaming plate of bacon and eggs just set before her and stubbed out a cigarette in an ashtray. The arrival of food interrupted her flow of talk after a recent late morning class at Stanley Holden's dance studio in West Los Angeles. With unflappable grace, the former Angelena resumed her discourse on life as a big-time ballerina.

Youth is always wasted on the young. When American Ballet Theatre introduced Sir Kenneth MacMillan's murky-kitschy production of "The Sleeping Beauty" to Los Angeles on Tuesday, the central tutu was entrusted to a very promising, very deft, very vapid dancer just promoted from the rank and file. She certainly looked the part of the rapturous 16-year-old princess. But she didn't exactly fill it. Wednesday, it was the turn of a bona fide, authoritative, mature, stylish ballerina.

Maurice Bejart has never paid a great deal of attention, much less respect, to tippy-toe tradition with his Ballet of the 20th Century. His ballerinas don't spend much time modeling tutus, and they certainly don't worry much about the niceties of impersonating swooning swans, pretty peasants or pallid princesses. That hardly prevents Bejart, however, from casting a satirical or demeaning glance, from time to time, in the direction of the hoary conventions he has scorned.

Strange things are happening with the Moscow Classical Ballet in Orange County. The over-vaunted touring company was supposed to introduce its full-scale version of "The Creation of the World" Wednesday night at the Performing Arts Center. But when a reported injury forced Ekaterina Maximova, illustrious guest from the Bolshoi, to cancel her participation, most of the "Creation" was canceled too.

Not long ago, a reviewer in these pages praised a visiting Chinese acrobatic troupe but doubted that acrobatics qualify as Art. It was a drama reviewer, of course, and defining Art seems to be a major matter in the legitimate theater. But dance writers are more flexible about such issues. With reason. For nearly a quarter-century, avant-garde choreographers have shown that any physical discipline can be the basis for serious movement compositions.

Beleaguered and bedraggled, the Kirov (a.k.a. Maryinsky) Ballet of St. Petersburg repeated its dated and dutiful "Romeo and Juliet" Wednesday night at the Performing Arts Center. Pyotr Williams' 1940 decors still resembled faded antique patchwork. Oleg Vinogradov's uncredited, somewhat truncated revision of Leonid Lavrovsky's original staging scheme suffered once again from dramatic obfuscation and melodramatic excess. Ensemble values remained ragged.