BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS FAUN

This article originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on October 16, 2005.

THE first vision to greet viewers at the Oct. 19 opening of American Ballet Theater's three-week season at the City Center will be what the program calls ''a room with a mirror.'' It is Jean Rosenthal's ethereal evocation of a ballet studio, created from diaphanous white silk, for Jerome Robbins's ''Afternoon of a Faun,'' a 10-minute boy-meets-girl duet with the evanescent, shimmering quality of a soap bubble. Ingeniously made and perennially popular, the 52-year-old work has just been staged for the company by the veteran Robbins expert Jean-Pierre Frohlich.

Like the set, the action of the ballet is simplicity itself. A young man, nude to the waist, in workaday black tights, dozes on the studio floor, then awakens, stretches indolently, rises and tries out a few steps. All the while, he examines his reflection, as dancers constantly do, in an imaginary mirror -- actually, the invisible wall that separates the audience from the stage. A girl in a practice tunic, long hair unbound, enters, intent on her own reflection. At first startled to see another person, the two begin to relate through a tentative pas de deux and the tentative stirrings of romance, always retreating to the familiar safety of looking at their images rather than at each other. Finally, the boy brushes a kiss on the girl's cheek. Wide-eyed, holding her hand to the place his lips touched, she backs away from him, out of the room. He returns to sleep, as if her presence and his desire had merely been a dream.

“Afternoon of a Faun'' is set to Debussy's impressionistic score, ''Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune'' (1892-94), a response to Mallarmé's celebrated poem of 1876 describing an indolent faun on a languorous summer day encountering a bevy of nymphs who arouse his sexual longing. When the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed his first ballet to this score in 1912, it was nothing less than revolutionary. Rejecting the conventions of classical dancing, the performers moved two-dimensionally, their heads in profile, bodies facing front, like the figures in an archaic frieze, their movements angular and rigid. A severely restricted vocabulary was offset by potent rhythmic and sculptural effects, which are implicit in the luminous photographs taken of the ballet by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Nijinsky's iconoclastic choreography went almost unnoticed, however, in the scandal over the ballet. Having essentially been propositioned, the head nymph flees, leaving behind her long, gauzy scarf, which the faun appropriates and uses to consummate his desire. The ballet concludes with him recumbent in his resting place, arching his body in orgasm.

Robbins knew this famous precedent, of course, but dared to try his own version of the material for the New York City Ballet. Fascinated throughout his career by the qualities of youth, he took his immediate inspiration from two serendipitous sightings involving young dancers. He was struck, first, by the ''animalistic'' quality of a teenager (Edward Villella) stretching at the barre. On another occasion, he was watching Louis Johnson and a student rehearsing the adagio from ''Swan Lake'' -- itself about an unexpected encounter, burgeoning love and thwarted longing. Robbins noticed that the dancers were so absorbed in their mirror images, through which they could correct their technique, that they seemed to ignore the erotic implications of their physical contact.

Co-opting Mallarmé's theme and Debussy's atmosphere, Robbins also echoed specific gestures of Nijinsky's. Yet he made striking inventions of his own. Among the ballet's memorable moments is the boy's ''stroking'' the girl's loose, rippling hair, outlining the luxuriant length of it while reverently keeping an inch of air between it and his caressing hand. Nonetheless, she seems to feel his touch and springs away from him into a formal ballet pose that transforms her from a young woman susceptible to love into a classical statue no more malleable than marble.

Another landmark in the ballet is an ingenious and beautiful lift. The young man makes a circle of his arms and cradles the girl's head between his palms. Then he widens the circle and lowers it to her waist while she slips through this hoop, reaching upward, and he cantilevers her body so that she seems to float horizontally, as if swimming in space. The mechanics are so well concealed, it looks like a miracle.

The most remarkable aspect of Robbins's ''Faun,'' however, is the air of utter simplicity and naturalness with which the choreographer insisted it be danced. As Mr. Frohlich, who has appeared in the title role, noted: ''This ballet is about real human beings. Sure, there are classical steps in it, but Jerry wanted it to be performed as if you weren't performing, just being there in the moment. He wanted everything to look casual. This quality is very hard for classically trained dancers to get, and some of them have trouble with it in the beginning. They're walking on their toes like princes and princesses. I say, 'Strip it.' You have to be sensitive. You have to be honest. You have to trust the choreography and do it for what it is.''

The original dancers of ''Afternoon of a Faun'' -- still, perhaps, uneclipsed -- were Francisco Moncion and Tanaquil LeClercq, to whom Robbins subsequently dedicated the ballet. On opening night at American Ballet Theater, it will be danced by Ethan Stiefel and Julie Kent, who is celebrating 20 years with the company. Subsequent performances will showcase other teams of stars and stars-in-the-making, recreating ''Faun's'' potent mood and its astute mix of artifice and ordinariness.

Copyright © 2005 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.