Youth movement

WALTHAM -- It's a characterless suburban industrial park with a health and fitness club: You smell the chlorine and hear the balls slamming into the wall of the racquetball court.

If you wander into a certain corner of the complex, though, you'll find another kind of exercise going on, with young women in white leotards and pale pink pointe shoes rehearsing George Balanchine's "Serenade" under the watchful eye of Adam Luders, who spent 19 years dancing for the master's New York City Ballet and became one of the more prominent men in a female-dominated company.

"Serenade," the first work Balanchine made on American soil, is the last item on the program for "Balanchine: A Centennial Tribute." Presented by the Massachusetts Youth Ballet on Monday night at Regis College in Weston, the eve-

ning is part of the worldwide celebration of the centennial of the great choreographer, who died in 1983. Pulling the program together has been "a labor of love and a logistical nightmare," says Jacqueline Cronsberg, the company's founder and director. She has guest artists coming from Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and New York City Ballet.

The San Francisco contingent consists of Sarah Van Patten, Moises Martin, and Sandra Jennings. Jennings is Cronsberg's daughter, a former City Ballet dancer and now a ballet mistress at San Francisco Ballet. The Boston-born Van Patten is a prodigy whose immense talent Cronsberg discovered a decade ago when the little girl started studying with her in private lessons on Sundays. "I taught Sarah every week until she left for Europe," says Cronsberg. "She was just 15 when she was invited to become an apprentice with the Royal Danish Ballet."

Van Patten took the classes Luders was teaching at the Copenhagen company, where he'd literally grown up, entering its affiliate school as a child. "I was thinking of leaving around the time Sarah was coming," he says. "I told her parents that if they'd let Sarah stay, I'd remain at the company to be by her side." In two years, both of them were gone -- Van Patten to join San Francisco Ballet and Luders to carry on a nomadic career of teaching and coaching.

A couple of hours spent talking to Cronsberg and Luders constitutes a crash course in Balanchine, whom they both adore. Luders is a member in good standing of the international ballet web that began to be spun in 19th-century Russia, and now links St. Petersburg and the Royal Danish Ballet with Luders and Balanchine. One of the greatest teachers Balanchine ever employed, the late Stanley Williams, was a Dane who had trained with a Russian, Vera Volkova.

Luders takes Williams as a role model in his own teaching, and he takes that teaching back to Russia after his commitment to Cronsberg's company is over: He'll teach the fleet, immaculate, detailed style of Williams to Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, and will also set Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" on the company.

`Apollo' is reborn After a preperformance talk by former Balanchine ballerina Merrill Ashley and historian/critic Nancy Goldner, the opening work on Cronsberg's Monday program is "Apollo."

The 1928 landmark about the birth of the young god also marked the birth of Balanchine's neoclassicism. Influenced by Stravinsky's score, the choreographer pared down the movement to essentials. It is not an easy ballet to dance.

The Balanchine Trust determines who can perform the choreographer's works. Jennings is one of the Trust's regular repetiteurs -- experts who try to match a ballet company with a Balanchine work appropriate for it, then teach it to the dancers and, if it stays in the company's repertory, return for periodic tuneups.When Cronsberg first asked the Trust if she could have "Apollo" for her company of teenagers, she did so with some trepidation. But Barbara Horgan, the Trust's head, told her, " `Balanchine always thought that dancers really learn to dance onstage,' and so she let us have it. Of course, it helped that we had Sandy," she says of her daughter's willingness to stage the Balanchine repertory for her nonprofessional groups.

When the Massachusetts Youth Ballet first performed "Apollo," in 2000, Van Patten danced the leading female role of Terpsichore. She was 15.

This time around, Van Patten plays Calliope, another of the muses; New York City Ballet member Miranda Weese is Terpsichore; and Boston Ballet's Sarah Edery is Polyhymnia. City Ballet principal Nikolaj Hubbe, who staged the ballet this time around, will also dance the title role.

The tiniest children in the program are those age 9 and up (but not far up) in the "Waltz of the Hours" from Balanchine's version of "Coppelia."

Augmenting the cast of pupils from Cronsberg's school will be seven on loan from the Boston Ballet. And Hubbe and Weese will provide the showstopper every gala needs -- in this case the "Diamonds" pas de deux from Balanchine's "Jewels."

The program ends with "Serenade," which is in a sense where American ballet began. It was the first classical masterpiece made here -- and it laid the groundwork for New York City Ballet, which many believe is the greatest performing-arts institution formed in the 20th century.

"Serenade" premiered on an outdoor stage erected on the grounds of the White Plains estate of the Warburg family, friends of Lincoln Kirstein, the Bostonian who had brought Balanchine to America.

Photographs of that first performance reveal the level of ballet technique at the time, hardly exemplary, but the soul of the work is clearly there -- as it was in that Waltham studio the other day.

Cronsberg's teenagers have more finely honed skills and sleeker bodies than those student-dancers of 70 years ago, but their dedication is the same.

At the opening of the ballet, then and now, the dancers' right arms are lifted, as if greeting the dawn of a new day. Then the 17 women-acolytes onstage abruptly turn out their legs and feet into classical ballet's characteristic stance, introducing their art to the New World.

("Balanchine: A Centennial Tribute" will be performed by the Massachusetts Youth Ballet and guests on Monday night at the Regis College Fine Arts Center in Weston. Proceeds to benefit The George Balanchine Foundation.; 508-435-5600; www.massyouthballet.org.)