Ballet

The cabdriver knows exactly whom you're talking about. "Ah, Sarabita, the ballet dancer!" he exclaims when you mention Rolando Sarabia, a rising young star of Cuba's National Ballet. The dimpled 18-year-old is so popular that his fans have glued the suffix of endearment, -ita, onto his name like a kiss. The scene at the National Theater on a brilliant Saturday afternoon is even more astonishing. Sarabia is debuting, in "Don Quixote," and the theater is mobbed.

The Kirov Ballet is coming to the United States in July and the Orange County Performing Arts Center is on the list of potential venues, according to representatives of the Metropolitan Opera, sponsor of the tour. John Wilson, a Met company road manager, told The Times that an Orange County stop is definite, and that it would be the only tour stop in the greater Los Angeles area.

Terry Vincent and eight of her 11 children will perform together in the "The Nutcracker" ballet--believed to be the first time that nine members of the same family have appeared together on a local stage in the traditional holiday offering. The Nutcracker opens at the Westminster Cultural Arts Center on Saturday and at Golden West College on Monday.

First Lucille McClure's ballet school crumbled. Then her health crumbled. And then she found out who her friends were. The Whittier building that housed McClure's school was damaged so badly by the Oct. 1 earthquake that it had to be razed. McClure, 67, a venerable figure in the cloistered world of ballet instruction, moved her school into a 64-foot-long wooden trailer in a parking lot behind the demolished building, but soon the shock and anxiety caught up with her.

Since she first saw "Swan Lake" as a young child, Anna Chang has dreamed of being the ballerina in the spotlight. After five years of hard work, Chang got her shot Sunday to prove she had the talent to dance with the best--the School of American Ballet in New York City. Jittery, Chang peered through a window at her competitors. Mirror images of one another in black leotards and white tights, dozens of young dancers glided and pirouetted their way through auditions.

A benefit performance by 59 Soviet ballet dancers from the Soviet Union's Donetsk State Opera and Ballet Theatre will be held at Baltimore's Lyric Opera House tonight to aid the dancers, who have been stranded in Baltimore since their tour of 15 Midwestern U.S. cities collapsed last weekend. The tour is facing severe financial problems, and according to California producer David Hermon, between $200,000 to $250,000 must be raised before the tour can continue.

One by one they enter the studio--these West Coast acolytes of the late George Balanchine, with every hair neatly pulled into sleek little chignons, faces smooth and scrubbed, attention taut, thoughts silently composed. Regimen-bound, each one takes a place at the barre. It is a special, chaste, insular world they inhabit.

In a break in the impasse between the management of the embattled Joffrey Ballet and its former artistic director Gerald Arpino, it was announced Tuesday that Arpino has "agreed that the company may use the Arpino ballets" during the remainder of its season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. However, no ballets choreographed by Arpino will be back on the schedule until May 25 and 27 when "Italian Suite" and "Trinity" will be performed as originally scheduled.

The strong dramatic basis of Valerie Bettis' one-act ballet "A Streetcar Named Desire" allows it to survive the largely anti-choreographic approach that has come to be standard on the PBS "Dance in America" series over the last few years. And the strong character-dance emphasis in the training at Dance Theatre of Harlem allows its dancers to remain credible in extreme close-up, even when performing actions intended to register at full-theatrical scale.

Local balletomanes have endured a pointe-less summer since the Joffrey departed at the end of May. But all that changes on Tuesday, when two major classical ensembles open Southern California engagements: the Australian Ballet at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa and the Bolshoi Ballet at Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Each has announced its casting.