COVER STORY : AGAINST ALL ODDS

At age 5, Darci Kistler wanted to be a ballet dancer. At 14, she left home to train in New York, where she became the last in Balanchine’s great line of proteges. Now 27, she has overcome a career-threatening ankle injury to reign as the most mesmerizing American ballerina of her generation.

The din of stagehands’ hammers nearly drowns out the pianist playing the Gershwin music to “Who Cares?”--a ballet by George Balanchine. Most of the dancers are simply “marking,” walking through the steps to save energy for the evening’s performance at Lincoln Center. But as rehearsal unfolds, one ballerina is dancing full out, caught up in the music, oblivious to the background noise, so happy she looks as though she is in her idea of heaven.

Darci Kistler dances so intensely that as she whips through a chain of fast turns, her very long strawberry blond hair--the hair Balanchine once told her never to cut--flies loose from its bun and twirls out like an endless streamer of silk. Kistler, 27, the last of Balanchine’s proteges and clearly one of the most gifted American ballerinas of her generation, bursts into laughter.

A few weeks ago, in a performance of Balanchine’s “Walpurgisnacht Ballet,” it was evident why the late choreographer told her never to cut her hair. The ballet begins with the female corps dancers wearing ponytails, and the lead ballerinas with their hair pinned up in traditional buns. But the last variations of the dance bring a stunning effect as the corps, and then Kistler, appear on stage with their hair down completely, flowing freely behind them. The image of cascading tresses perfectly complements Kistler’s distinctive way of moving.

The former baby ballerina from Riverside is at her peak, as critics this year attested repeatedly. She danced the lead role this spring in the premier performances of the New York City Ballet’s lavish new production of “Sleeping Beauty,” one of the biggest events in American ballet in years.

Arlene Croce, the New Yorker’s venerable dance critic, wrote: “The old ballet can never have seen more consummate debuts. Kistler was as fragrant, as tender, as poignant as one could have wished, not just a storybook character come to life but a real human being struck down by fate.”

That Kistler is able to dance at all, however, is little short of miraculous. Her winning performances this spring were the culmination of a nine-year rehabilitation. Overtaxed from dancing as many as three leading roles each evening, she suffered a devastating injury at the age of 18, just before Balanchine’s death in 1982. A fractured right ankle, originally misdiagnosed, forced her to stop dancing completely for 2 1/2 years. The break left bone chips in her ankle joint, requiring two operations. The first went awry when a local anesthetic wore off while she was undergoing surgery.

Ballet cognoscenti thought she would never dance again. But they underestimated her determination. She made the long fight back, beginning with months sitting before the entryway mirror in her mother’s home in Riverside, her leg in a cast, listening to classical music and practicing arm movements for hours on end. She returned to the stage in 1985. Recovery of her full powers as a dancer, however, at first was slow and full of setbacks. Compensating for her ankle, Kistler suffered minor injuries to other parts of her body, including her elbow and back. She didn’t bounce back completely until 1989.

For now, she has conquered the injury. In this year’s spring season, in addition to Princess Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty,” she took on a wealth of new roles. Her reviews were uniformly glowing. She is one of the City Ballet’s leading attractions, vital to the company at a time when older stars such as Suzanne Farrell have retired or, in the case of Merrill Ashley, dance infrequently because of injuries.

But there is poignancy to all of Kistler’s performances. As with all dancers, she is in a race against time. There is always the risk that her ankle eventually will give way. And the doctors have told her that the next step, should unbearable pain recur, would be another operation. The surgery would involve cutting a nerve, leaving her unable to feel the floor and thereby ending her career.

The injury is one subject she emphatically does not like to talk about. She does not want people to think about it. There isn’t a hint of it in her dancing; the thought of pain shouldn’t intrude on the magnificent image.

“I don’t think of it as a problem,” she says in a conversation after daily class. “I mean, it is part of me and it is what I have had to deal with, but I don’t like to talk about it because all that’s important is when you’re (on stage).”

On stage in Peter Martins’ “Four Gnossiennes,” the self-possessed smile on her face appears to radiate from deep inside. In her quick steps she is fanciful and girlish. Yet as one leg points effortlessly toward the sky in a developpe extension, or as Kistler arcs low in an arabesque, she is also majestic.

Kistler believes that her life was largely determined by a moment of destiny. In 1975, her small ballet school in Riverside was taking students to a Los Angeles audition for Balanchine’s school in New York, the School of American Ballet. Her regular teacher wouldn’t allow her to go because, at 11, she was one of the youngest. But that teacher abruptly left for Europe, and her replacement at the last moment allowed Kistler to come along. She confounded her older classmates by winning the audition.

Although she spent two summers at the school, she was too young to move to New York, and at the school’s recommendation studied in Los Angeles during the school year with Irina Kosmovska, a former member of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo (Kosmovska still teaches at the Lichine Ballet Academy in Beverly Hills). Then, at 14, she moved to New York on a full scholarship to the ballet school. Her mother remained with her for only two weeks. Kistler lived in a boarding house for young women and took academic classes at New York’s Professional Children’s School.

Balanchine focused on her almost immediately, struck by her performances in school workshop ballets. At 15, she became the last ballerina--in a line of great ones that included Farrell, Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil LeClerq, Allegra Kent and Gelsey Kirkland--singled out for Balanchine’s undivided attention. During the last two years of his life he showered her with leading roles. At 17 she became the New York City Ballet’s youngest principal dancer ever.

Balanchine wasn’t alone in his appraisal. Rudolf Nureyev, in an interview published in 1981, said: “Have you seen that new one--Darci Kistler with the New York City Ballet? Such aggression in her legs, such attack; you are hypnotized by her legs, by her feet. There are four other top ballerinas on stage and she’s the one you’re looking at . . . there’s that devil inside. She already knows how to move to make everybody watch.”

Experienced and wiser now, she somehow has lost none of her youthful enthusiasm. During an interview in the New York State Theater, dressed in a bright cactus-emblazoned T-shirt from a ballet fund-raiser, white lace-patterned stockings and black leather boots, she seems more like a whimsical kid than a self-consciously great ballerina. For the interview, rather than choosing a sitting area in the stately foyer of the theater, she picks the snack room in the basement.

Above all, she has the aura of someone who at first had expected life to turn out badly and is unbelievably grateful for the good fortune she has been dealt.

Of Balanchine she says simply, “He gave me a life.”

Her original dim expectations seem to relate to her father, Jack B. Kistler, who she says “was never nice to me.” According to her mother, Alicia Kistler, he was a stern, demanding father who devoted much of his attention to Darci’s four older brothers, egging them on to achievement in sports. Now divorced, Alicia Kistler says her ex-husband often told Darci she would never be able to do anything with ballet. “He seemed to resent ballet--or Darci,” she says.

The Riverside physician denies that he wasn’t nice to his youngest child and only daughter, or that he ever disapproved of ballet. But, he says, “I was always busy on weekends with my four sons. I was always working or with the boys. . . . I think (Darci) probably resents the fact that I spent more time with them, which I thought was natural. But looking back I was probably wrong. She didn’t get the attention that the boys did.”

Darci says she decided to be a ballerina at the age of 5, when her mother took all five children to the Shrine Auditorium to see Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev dance in “Sleeping Beauty.” From then on, her mother says, she begged to take ballet lessons. She roamed the house in a tutu a neighbor had given her for a Halloween costume. For her to dance the lead role in “Sleeping Beauty” more than two decades later, she says, was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

But if “Sleeping Beauty” was her inspiration, Kistler’s determination and stamina came from a drive to match the early accomplishments of her brothers, who were state wrestling champions and went to college on athletic scholarships. As a child, Darci accompanied her brothers all over the state to tournaments. Their home was filled with the boys’ trophies from wrestling and racing dirt bikes and motorcycles.

“I loved the fact that I could work as hard as (my brothers) worked at something,” Kistler says.

Kistler’s mother says her ex-husband was always telling Darci’s brothers “that if you do something and don’t sweat, it’s not worth anything. She felt she had to do the same thing.” And when she enrolled in her first ballet classes, her teachers didn’t know what to make of a young girl who worked so hard that she hyperventilated.

Kosmovska recalls that Kistler was her only student to insist on practicing steps with all of the groups in her ballet class, not just the one she was assigned to. “She was pushing herself to the maximum,” Kosmovska recalls. “I never could catch her relaxed.”

Kistler brought that same intensity to City Ballet and her work with Balanchine. Some of the criticism of the choreographer that has emerged in the years since his death has been painful for her. Since the publication of Kirkland’s widely read memoir, “Dancing on My Grave,” Balanchine’s reputation has been tarnished, hurt by Kirkland’s and others’ complaints that his method of instruction was physically harmful to dancers; that he was at times indifferent to their health.

But Kistler, like former Balanchine ballerina Farrell, denies this characterization of “Mr. B.” Kistler states flatly that Balanchine was a father figure to her, and that, indeed, “I wished he was my father.”

In him she found someone who respected and believed in her, but also demanded extraordinary effort. When her mother was invited to watch rehearsals, she was amazed that Darci and the septuagenarian Balanchine, then the world’s most eminent choreographer, talked and joked as friends.

Kistler’s close friend Toni Bentley, a former City Ballet ballerina who wrote “Winter Season” about her own experiences, said in an interview: “He gave her so much. Even in that short period, they had a lot of contact. She learned fast, and he knew she learned fast. They had an understanding that went way beyond what they could actually talk about.”

Kistler says that rather than trying to mold her into his idealized image of a ballerina, Balanchine “gave me myself.” There were some who blamed her injury on Balanchine, for putting her in such a relentless schedule of performances in leading roles that her ankle simply gave out.

“Some people felt that Mr. Balanchine overused her and it might have caused the injury. I don’t feel that way, and she doesn’t feel that way,” said Kistler’s mother, pointing out how much her daughter learned from Balanchine in their short time together.

Kistler now must pace herself, and when she feels her ankle acting up she drops out rather than risk a major setback. Will the injury prevent her from doing things she really wants to do?

“I don’t even want to say,” she says. “It’s the way it is--and that’s that. There’s no ‘if.’ There’s no ‘should.’ No, as long as I’m in the moment and giving my 100%, I’m not going to live thinking that.”

She showed her courage after a major flare-up last winter season that caused her to miss several weeks. When she returned this spring, rather than starting with easy roles, she went immediately into rehearsals of “Sleeping Beauty.” A project conceived in Balanchine’s time, the new staging was meant, with the help of ballerinas like Kistler, to enhance City Ballet’s bid for recognition as the leading classical ballet company in the world.

The ballet’s lead role is one of the most difficult in the classical repertoire. In one adagio, the ballerina displays her virtuosity by repeatedly stopping dead still for seconds, unsupported, arms and one leg extended, in a seemingly impossible balance on a single pointe .

“It was a real leap of faith,” she says. “It’s not a ballet you come back to. It was very hard because in the beginning you don’t want to be seen struggling. And you had to do that in front of the entire company, all the dancers, because we didn’t have private rehearsals.”

Her determined struggle contrasts with the apparent effortlessness of her performances. In June, New York Times critic Jack Anderson wrote of Kistler in Balanchine’s “Chaconne”: “The way Ms. Kistler smoothly glided and sometimes posed in high extensions made her appear to be a being from another world who chose, for her own pleasure, to set foot on this earth and dance with Mr. (Philip) Neal, the noble mortal who was lucky enough to be her partner. She was a serene and lovely apparition.”

Kistler says she is still infused with Balanchine’s presence, and that she draws much of her inspiration from her memory of him. “Mr. B” remains with her “every night . . . every night you dance one of his ballets,” she says.

Kistler praises Peter Martins, the Danish former bravura dancer who is now the City Ballet’s artistic director. She describes him as a master technician, adept at pinpointing flaws and able to convey exactly what he wants. But she can’t help betraying a certain wistfulness about life without Balanchine.

“It’s like apples and oranges,” she says. “You just can’t (compare). You’re going to make yourself unhappy.” She adds later: “You have to find a way of surviving. . . . To wish something was the way it was, or to want something that’s not there, it’s kind of like death in a funny way.”

One of the attributes Kistler brings to her dancing is a kind of physical fearlessness. After being tossed around as a child by her big brothers, and watching them risk their necks in daredevil motorcycle races, she comes by it naturally. Not long ago she went off on her own to the Caribbean to conquer scuba diving. On a trip to Africa with Bentley in 1985, she showed nothing but exhilaration--Bentley was in terror--as they sailed tiny native dhows out beyond huge Indian Ocean breakers. She is also a whiz at changing tires, a skill that came in handy in African game preserves when their rented safari vehicle was driven over thorns.

During her childhood, Kistler says, the heroine she most wanted to emulate wasn’t a ballerina but Amelia Earhart.

But Kistler brings more than simple daring to the stage. Bentley says: “She has an incredible love for dancing. And not all dancers have it that deeply, not even all great dancers. She has everything--a beautiful body, incredible technique. A lot of people do. But it’s infused with who she is. It’s a great presence.”

Although Kistler has now danced “Sleeping Beauty” and talks about accepting offers to dance in other full-length dramatic ballets--possibly outside the company--she remains resolute in her view that acting is not a part of ballet. It is a view that Balanchine was noted, and criticized, for. It also gave rise to one of the perennial criticisms of City Ballet--that it focuses exclusively on dance and music without instilling dramatic motivation in its dancers.

Acting, Kistler says, “is a caricature of what you’re doing. I mean, obviously you’re not doing what you should be doing if you’re acting.”

All the motivation that’s necessary, she believes, is inherent in the music. “Music moves people more than anything in the world,” she says. Tchaikovsky’s music to “Sleeping Beauty” is moving enough, she says, that there’s no need to look elsewhere for inspiration. “Is that not going to make you feel and react a certain way? Of course it is.”

“She reaches you,” Kosmovska says. “She touches you through her movement. So few dancers especially nowadays have this quality because they are so aware of technical achievements that the artistry and expression and love for the dance suffer a little bit.”

Balanchine’s advice not to act, Kistler believes, saved her when at 16 she was called on to dance Odette/Odile in City Ballet’s opening performance of “Swan Lake” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Kistler says she was terrified, feeling that she had to interpret the role as performed by such great ballerinas as Natalia Makarova and Cynthia Gregory.

“He said to me, ‘Don’t act. Just be in the moment,’ ” she recalls. “He took away every inhibition, every problem with doing something like that at such a young age, of being overwhelmed by it, in being not ready, in two words--’Don’t act.’ ”

Kistler lives now in a ground-floor apartment with a small garden on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She has a white baby grand piano that she has learned to play. And she shares the apartment with her bird, Eagle, a cockatoo. She returns to California frequently, spending time with her family and on the beach. “I love to visit. I love my family,” she says. “I don’t think I could live there though after living here.” She has become, decidedly, a New Yorker.

Kistler maintains that she had no qualms about leaving home at 14 and moving to New York on her own. “For me it was a chance of a whole new life. All I did was dance. It was all I wanted.”

When Kistler first prepared to leave California, her mother took her to a high school football game. “I told Darci she would be missing all of the high school social life and so on,” her mother recalls. “And she said she knew what she wanted to do and there was nothing to miss.”

Kistler says she doesn’t regret this choice. “Yes, I would love to have gone to college. But would I have wanted to have lost this direction and not gone this way? I don’t think so.”

She calls her mother, a real estate agent in Riverside, her best friend. They talk by phone four or five times a week. Her mother, she says, is nearly the opposite of a stage mother, supporting her no matter what. Far from pushing her to further her career, Kistler says, her mother reassures her that it would be OK to stop anytime.

When she decides her dancing time is up, Kistler says, she hopes to leave ballet gracefully and completely. She doesn’t plan to try to hang on for most of her life, as Fonteyn did.

Choreography doesn’t interest her, although she jokingly says she sometimes is accused of doing impromptu choreography during performances. “You know, I love to do so many things,” she says. “I always thought that (retiring) was scary and would be a problem. But there is a part of me that would like to have a whole different life.” One of her interests, she says, is veterinary medicine.

She isn’t fearful of the future, she says, “because of what I’ve learned and the discipline of the way I work. If you know how to work, you can work at anything and survive.”

And her work is invested with remarkable concentration. Bentley recalls that while they were in Kenya during the trip to Africa, a hippopotamus lumbered out of the water and stopped, rubbing its side against a tent. The camp guides grabbed their rifles. Everyone held their breath for a seeming eternity; finally, the hippo moved on. Kistler was unaware of the incident. She was wearing headphones, absorbed in Tchaikovsky and her barre exercises, oblivious to the scene just outside her tent.