DANCE : The Company He Keeps : Drawing on his experiences with a dance world legend, Edward Villella is leading the Miami City Ballet to new heights

The image of his dancing is frozen in memory--most famously, the powerful leap in George Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son”: suspended in midair, muscular thighs clenched, his face full of rage and determination. From the late 1950s through the mid-’70s, when he danced that and many other enduring roles with New York City Ballet, Edward Villella became one of the most famous American male ballet dancers of his era--perhaps the nation’s first widely celebrated male ballet star.

His tough, athletic, masculine demeanor somehow blended with a receptiveness to, and aptitude for, Balanchine’s swift, intricate, streamlined, distinctively American choreography. The volatile street kid from Queens met up with the dapper, reserved, brilliant Russian ballet master, and while sparks occasionally flew, the result was two decades of landmark choreography and brilliant performances during what can now be fondly recalled as New York City Ballet’s golden era.

Now more than a decade past his farewell to the stage, Villella has himself become the guide and mentor to a new generation of dancers. Since 1986, he has been the artistic director of the 34-member Miami City Ballet, which makes its Southern California debut Friday and Saturday at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Balanchine figures prominently in the company’s pedigree and repertory--five of the eight works to be performed on the two programs are his--but the troupe also features the work of a very active resident choreographer, Peruvian-born Jimmy Gamonet de los Heros (represented by three ballets at UCLA), and reflects the distinctive flavor and style of its home city.

At 55, Villella is at the same stage in life as Balanchine was when the feisty Italian-American dancer first entered New York City Ballet at 21. His dark, good looks remain striking, his body is still trim and lean, his intensity is undiminished.

He passed through his native city recently to serve as master of ceremonies at the annual Dance Magazine Awards. Looking sober and responsible in his dark suit, he displayed the relaxed, communicative public-speaking manner he has honed during decades of lecture-demonstrations across the country and numerous occasions when he has served as a tireless public spokesman for dance.

Bright and early the following morning, Villella took time for an interview before flying to Buffalo, N.Y., for the opening performance of the company’s current tour. Dressed in jeans, sneakers and a sweat shirt bearing the troupe’s logo, he looked more the way he would in the dance studio than in the boardroom. As he discussed his decision to take the job in Miami and the very active and productive six years that have ensued, he made it clear that an artistic director in the 1990s has to be equally comfortable in both places.

“I made a 1 1/2-year pre-production plan to raise visibility, form a steering committee and a board,” Villella said. “Then I did a three-, five- and 10-year production plan. I did five years of programming before we even opened, and I related it to the level of dancer I thought we’d attract. We attracted very good people--dancers, administrators, production staff.”

The company has surpassed Villella’s early expectations, having already doubled its roster and attained an annual budget of $6.3 million. Much as he loves working in the studio, revitalizing the ballets he once danced, Villella is also comfortable rattling off figures and statistics and can speak unapologetically about “the business of art.”

“You’ve got to make sure the company is stable financially, that politically you’re going in the right way, that the audiences out there are aware of you,” he said. “Unless you’re deeply involved in the fund-raising, public relations, marketing and finances, you don’t have a full perception. I think that a lot of artistic directors know how valuable the artistic side is, yet we can’t convince a board of that. I try to take the board’s point of view, and my own point of view, and work toward the middle.”

When he decided to head into uncharted waters and join a dedicated Miami group determined to found a ballet company, he recalled, “a lot of my New York buddies said, ‘Don’t get stuck in Florida--it’s a cultural wasteland.’ I certainly examined it--I didn’t just plunge in. What truly attracted me to Miami was the people, the community and the potential.”

The potential he foresaw tapping into included the statistic that 900 to 1,000 people a day were moving to Florida. “I did some demographics to find out where they’re coming from, and I found they’re from major urban areas, where they’re used to opera, symphony, fine arts.

“The other thing that came into focus was that you have Fort Lauderdale 40 minutes up the road from Miami, and another 40 minutes up the road from that is Palm Beach. These are three separate counties that don’t talk to each other, that look askance over their shoulders at each other--three separate but interrelated communities. I wanted to have between three and five home cities, which would be fiscally responsible for us--because given the ambitions the people had down there, as well as my own personal ambitions, I knew there wouldn’t be one community that could support the company.”

Although the attempts by various ballet companies during the 1980s to operate out of two or more home bases did not, in most cases, meet with long-term success, Villella’s vision of the three nearby counties sharing the troupe has become a reality.

Miami City Ballet produces performances in the above-mentioned three cities and is also presented in the Gulf Coast city of Naples. This season, which included 32 performances of the Balanchine “Nutcracker” in five different locations, the 6-year-old troupe is giving an astonishing 160 performances.

Fiscal realities played an important part in solidifying three home bases, but Villella had other reasons for establishing this arrangement: “I was concerned that the dancers would get studio fever without enough chances to perform, that they’d be stuck in a rehearsal-and-class environment and wouldn’t have the opportunity to progress.

“I feel that you really progress on the stage--it’s under combat conditions that you either make it or don’t, so that was very important. We have three or four casts for every ballet, so when you come to us, you will dance.”

The repertory already numbers 63 ballets after six seasons (including 28 Balanchine works and 19 created by Gamonet de los Heros for the company) and was designed by Villella to feature speed and musicality rather than to wow audiences with spectacle and familiar narrative works.

“It’s a repertory that develops the dancers,” he said, and it has attracted established performers from the Joffrey, Pennsylvania Ballet, New York City Ballet and other companies, as well as younger dancers drawn to the troupe’s size and approach.

Villella envisions a maximum roster of 40 dancers, a size he feels allows him to maintain individual contact with each company member.

While the many administrative obligations of his position makes considerable demands on his time and energy, he maintains his priorities: “I force myself to be in the studio. I’ll quit before I lose contact with my dancers--that is my primary function, and the rest of it is protecting that function.”

His years with Balanchine included a degree of struggle and conflict (their relationship over the years is vividly documented in Villella’s recently published autobiography, aptly titled “Prodigal Son”) but yielded artistic treasures and left Villella with a sense of responsibility.

“It’s up to those of us who were associated with him on a long-term basis, those who worked with him directly, day in and day out, to pass on to young dancers our intimate knowledge of him and his aesthetics,” Villella writes in his book. “ . . . If ballet is to flourish in the 21st Century, Balanchine’s aesthetics and his legacy must be kept alive so they can be absorbed and understood by future generations.”

As Villella coaches his dancers in such Balanchine works as “Tarantella,” “Rubies” and “Bugaku,” all of which were made for him, or in older ballets in which Balanchine coached him, such as “Apollo” and “Prodigal Son,” or in other of the choreographer’s many masterworks, he aims to impart “the importance of music and the ability to physicalize music.”

This is the essence of what he learned from Balanchine. “I choose dancers because they have a quality of movement and they can relate movement directly to music, almost be an extension of the orchestra,” he explained.

However, Villella is not an adherent of the Balanchine aesthetic in dancers--the “long-legged, small-headed, narrow-waisted female,” as he describes it. Miami City Ballet boasts a more diverse-looking roster but one whose members, he hopes, can “move and react to music in a similar way.”

“Even though we are not uniform in our look,” he said, “we’re uniform in the way we approach dancing. That, to me, is much more interesting.”

His concern is more with phrasing than with a line of identical skinny bodies.

“The first obvious phraser I ever saw was Violette Vedy,” he said, referring to a celebrated Balanchine ballerina of Villella’s era and his frequent partner. “My mouth just fell open. I had always been right on the beat, but to see someone play with that, to hit it just before or just after the beat--wow! Then it became very obvious how Balanchine was phrasing these things. When I go to a performance now, I really watch the minds of the performers. I can’t stand it when people are not playing with the music.”

Villella cites other ways in which Balanchine’s influence and teaching have helped him in his current position: “First of all, in terms of planning--he was a very planned man. I used to think he just walked into the studio and tossed off a ballet, but then he would talk about spending 10 years studying a score.”

Also influential, Villella said, was “the incredible integrity that man had--a grand respect for the art, for doing qualitative work and not playing to an audience’s belly. Also, he had great respect for the people who work for you, in particular the dancers. I try very hard to have a very open relationship with them.”

That was not always the case at New York City Ballet.

“Balanchine had this enormous respect and a certain intimacy with his dancers, but he always kept them at arm’s length--especially me,” Villella said, laughing good-naturedly. “He kept me off balance all the time--and rightfully so. I was a mere mortal, a crazed kid, and he was beyond us all. He basically humored most of us.”

Next season, Villella’s company will become the first aside from New York City Ballet to present Balanchine’s plotless, full-evening “Jewels.” Villella is also planning an original full-evening, three-part work in connection with the Columbus quincentennial. It will be, like “Jewels,” an abstract work consisting of sections that can also be performed independently. The work will depict Spain, the Caribbean and the “New World”--Florida--at the time of Columbus. Two sections will be choreographed by Gamonet de los Heros, and the third by Peter Anastos.

Although Villella did not always envision becoming an artistic director, the various jobs that came his way after his retirement--teaching, directing, touring with lecture performances--led him to the realization that running a company would encompass his various interests and talents.

“I really missed being directly involved with dance,” he said. “I still miss the physical act of dancing. As things worked out, it’s been very fortunate for me--I like the idea of having another identity.”