The Elusive Allegra Kent

Onstage, her persona has been elusive, mysterious, dreamy, full of hidden resonances. In keeping with that aura, Allegra Kent danced her last performance with New York City Ballet more than four years ago--but made no specific mention of when or where she might next turn up, if at all.

And now, like her self-devised water therapy system, the native Angeleno is in circulation. Although local fans won’t get to see her, she will be dancing with a new touring company put together by her friend John Clifford, another alumnus of NYCB.

“It won’t amount to much,” says Kent in a friend’s Hollywood Hills home. A vision of soft gray in sweat togs that match her eyes and complement her pale skin, Balanchine’s one-time muse minimizes her upcoming appearances as Terpsichore, the leading female role in the late choreographer’s “Apollo.”

“I have no commitment to perform,” she says, “but the word retirement has never come up either, even though I’m 50. Taking class is still part of my daily routine. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think maybe I’m in good shape and should dance.”

When that impulse hits her, Clifford and assorted audiences clearly stand to benefit. But during the few weeks when Kent joins him and his new Ballet of Los Angeles--an ad hoc troupe fulfilling contract obligations made by the now-defunct Chicago City Ballet for a 28-city, 2-month American tour--she says she will make those decisions on the spot.

Dancing, however, is just a partial enticement to Kent. Having accepted the title of associate artistic director, she inherits a bigger part of Clifford’s enterprise than that of an occasional principal. Meanwhile, she has a number of other projects to confront, including coaching a production of Balanchine’s “Bugaku” for the Royal Ballet and teaching ballet this summer at Harvard.

Clifford’s offer could not have come at a more opportune time, says the delicate, somewhat fey dancer, referring to the sudden death last summer of her fiance.

By way of explaining her present state of mind, she mentions that a theater near the New York apartment they shared was showing Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin movies.

“I saw them all and laughed and cried at the same time,” says Kent in softly equivocal tones. “It was good to have this invitation from John. We always got along well.”

But her stays in Los Angeles--as well as on the NYCB active roster--have customarily been brief. Claiming that her mother, too, was a nomad and thus shipped 9-year-old Allegra to boarding school in Ojai, she explains how she began to embrace the world of dance:

“I wanted an excuse to come home to Santa Monica to live, so I told my mother I would like to be a ‘ballereenee.’ And it worked. Being education-minded, she sent me to the best--first to Irina Nijinska and then to Carmelita Maracci. With Irina I spent lots of time in the library--I love libraries--looking up definitions of ballet terms.

“But without Carmelita dance would have meant nothing more than a mechanical discipline. I wanted to leap like a mountain goat and she appreciated that. She taught imagination in an imaginative way,” says the late teacher’s favorite pupil, whom Maracci once called “the most gifted dancer I ever taught.”

Above all, Kent says she “believes in childhood--so did Tolstoy.” But childhood, she regrets, was foreshortened for her. Sent to New York at 14, she became a member of NYCB a year later. Despite Balanchine’s high regard for her, the dancer appeared only sporadically over her three decades as a company principal.

“Balanchine understood me,” she says in a cryptic manner similar to her mentor’s. “He cast me in ‘The Seven Deadly Sins,’ intuiting, I think, that the role mirrored my life. How? In the character’s victimization.

“And we shared a private joke: that Allegra was giving her single performance of the season. But none of it was his fault. About childhood, did you know that John Stuart Mill’s father taught him Latin as an infant? Learning at that young age doesn’t have to be harmful.”

She goes on to explain her various absences from the stage--to enroll at UCLA for several semesters, to marry fashion photographer Bert Stern and bear three children who are now 27, 23 and 20--as drives that were just as strong as that for dancing. From somewhere in all this telling, though, comes a tinge of sadness.

“Life for a young girl in a big company, with competition built into the package, was difficult then, as it is now,” she says. “Problems like bulimia and anorexia existed. We just didn’t have names for them.”

Kent did have a name, however, for her exercise program: water therapy. And it is to this use of special water wings attached to the feet that she attributes her longevity as a dancer. Others, among them novelist Philip Roth, have become faithful followers.

Regardless of why the sinuous dancer has such staying power, John Clifford claims that “today she has everything she ever had technically.” He cites her “tremendous elasticity, strong jumps” and the ability to do “four pirouettes on pointe “ as well as “entrechat six.”

Reviewing her performance with Clifford’s company in New Jersey, Jack Anderson wrote in the New York Times last month that “as Terpsichore she was radiant, dancing calmly and confidently. Her movements flowed, her extensions were high. And although she seemed delicate, she possessed reserves of strength.”

“Nothing has changed,” Clifford says. “I remember Mr. B (Balanchine) standing backstage, just after returning from triple-bypass heart surgery. Mr. B, who hardly ever complimented anyone, watched her from the wings and said: ‘You know, she’s very, very special.’ ”