BALLET : Sad Dance With Reality : Beata Wiech learned that the steps to stardom are not automatic in a free world; now she’s back in Poland, resigned to limitations

Beata Wiech was 25, with seven years behind her in the Wielki Theater Ballet company, and it seemed a matter of now or never. She was at the top of her art and had danced most of the star roles--Giselle and Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake.”

Among the handful of ballerinas who claimed a following in the small world of Polish ballet, Wiech always had her fair share, those who brought flowers and devotion to her every performance, who shouted “Brava!” and led the surge of applause.

And so, two years ago, she left.

It was no longer a matter of defection, the way it was in Iron Curtain days when Russian dancers such as Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova made headlines and political sensations by high-tailing it to the West, to fame and fortune, in the name of artistic freedom.

Those days were gone. By summer, 1990, when Wiech left for Hamburg, Germany, the borders were open, Eastern Europe’s political world was upside down, and the economic guarantees that the old socialist order had always provided for its artists, that subsidized insulation of privilege and certainty, had fled the world.

An exodus was on, and she was part of it.

Wiech auditioned in a group of 100 dancers, a process that, in itself, suggested what she was up against. There was no question of her ability, her technical skill. But in the West, she was to find, nothing is automatic.

She was one of two accepted into the Hamburg State Opera ballet company, headed by John Neumeier, an American and one of the leading choreographers working in Europe. But she did not become a star. She never broke out of the corps de ballet.

And so, less than a year later, she came back. To Warsaw.

Some in the company still remember when Wiech walked back into company class at the Wielki Theater and took her place at the barre . One of them remembered thinking that she was the first--no, the only one--of all who had left to come back.

“Her face,” the dancer said, “it was like this . . . ,” and she pressed her fingers to her cheeks and pulled, heavily, downward.

But that part is past now. Gone. In its place is something else.

Reality, maybe.

And Wiech is, once more, a star.

These are hard times for the state-supported arts in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Once richly subsidized and proudly paraded as icons of socialist concern for culture, the state opera companies and ballet ensembles of Eastern Europe sold out their houses at largely irrelevant ticket prices--25 cents a seat, for those willing to wait in line--pegged within reach of the masses. The productions were lavish, the sets magnificent, the repertory wide-ranging.

But now, three years into the post-Communist revolution, the state is taking its last curtain calls and limping into the wings. The money for all the sumptuous productions, for upkeep of theaters and orchestras, the care and feeding of temperamental artists, is vanishing in budget deficits.

As state subsidies shrink, theater managers have found themselves having to think for the first time like impresarios. They must fill theaters with reliable, crowd-pleasing productions and sell tickets at prices (up to $10 a seat) that would have been shocking in 1989. They also must get their companies on the road, to Western Europe or beyond, to supplement earnings at home.

In the financial crunch, repertories have contracted, as directors try to steer clear of having to pay royalties and strive to hold down the high costs involved in staging a variety of productions.

As a result, ballet companies, for example, are underworked and underchallenged and their members often unhappy.

Last year, 15 Polish dancers quit and headed west to Germany. Many who remain feel they live in blighted times.

“We don’t have enough work,” said Anna Bialecka, a veteran principal with the Warsaw Ballet. “We don’t have enough variety. It is a very bad time for us.”

And yet, this is what was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? The political revolution was supposed to usher in all the rest of the changes that came with political freedom. And the free market was supposed to include the arts. Now, competing for the limited entertainment budgets of most citizens are those same forces that operate in the West--movies, coming with ever increasing variety; video rental shops, springing up on every corner.

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Prof. Janina Pudelek of the Warsaw Academy of Music, who has spent decades assembling a three-volume history of Polish ballet, is not only a scholar, but also, unabashedly, a fan. She understands the lament of some dancers and feels it herself.

“Now that we have freedom,” she said recently, “we have no money. The idea that ballet is having to compete in this new world may yet be a blessing, but the threat is more obvious now.”

The Warsaw Ballet’s most financially successful production this year is “Zorba the Greek,” described by some dancers as “demi-ballet” or, by Pudelek, as “a humbug.”

But, living up to the hopes of the company’s new manager, Slawomir Pietras, it has been that vital crowd-pleaser, a cash cow. With money from the Ministry of Culture (that is, the state treasury) covering only 60% of the year’s costs, “Zorba” has bailed out the company this year.

Pudelek and dancers like Bialecka (who says she loves performing it, though conceding its “demi” status) are able to see its value. It’s a way of hanging on, of making the transition--a process the entire country is being forced to undergo.

Reality.

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Wiech is a product of the system. Her mother swept floors in the government statistical bureau. Her father was employed in a warehouse, holding down three positions for one salary. The family lived in Wola, an area of industrial-worker’s housing, in a two-room apartment shared with another family.

“There were four people in our room,” Wiech says, “and four people in the other room.” The kitchen and bathroom were used in shifts.

They were as poor as it was possible to be in the Polish Socialist Republic, which meant that no one went hungry but no one really had much either.

Wiech’s aunt danced in a recreational folk troupe, and it was through this connection to dance that Wiech’s mother, Zofia, hit on the idea of having her daughter (who took naturally to the folk dancing) audition for admission to the Warsaw School of Ballet.

It was the Polish equivalent of the Russian system, in which lucky children who fit the basic physical requirements--a sense of rhythm and a natural, if undisciplined, grace--are accepted into a school. Carried to its end, this system would make them professional ballet dancers.

“I was 10 years old,” Wiech says. “My mother took me. She was confident I had physical ability. It was a kind of audition, about 100 people competing, and they took 30.”

She was accepted to the school, and it became her life: regular school lessons, reading, math, science--and dance, dance, dance. She excelled, passing every exam at every stage.

Her family had moved by then to an apartment district in southern Warsaw, only three tiny rooms, this time not shared with another family. But then her world at home fell apart. Her mother, married once before, left home.

Beata was 14, and something in her seemed to freeze. Her father was paralyzed with shock. He took to his bed. It became impossible for him to work. She was left to hold him together.

She held herself together too--and, in a way, is still doing so. Still in the same cramped apartment from which her mother fled 13 years ago, she lives with her husband, Ryszard Morka--an opera singer--and their 4-year-old daughter, and her father, now retired.

Sitting on a sunlit balcony at the theater, after a rehearsal, drinking tea diluted with soda water, she speaks of this part of her life only with difficulty and only as a way of explaining, as nearly as she is able, that barrier between herself and the world.

“A friend told me that’s when the curtain came down in my life,” Wiech says. She is not sure, exactly, what she learned from the experience except to say now that “when girls are 14 years old, they need a mother’s care. I missed that.”

In the ballet company, for example, she claims no friendships. Partly, some would say, this is because of the competitive nature of the ballet world, where one person’s misfortune is often another’s success, and where cold, critical appraisal never ceases. And yet other members of the company deny that the atmosphere is so tough that it blots out the possibility of friendships. This is simply Wiech’s way.

“I know,” she says, “I am a very closed person.”

It is all there, her critics would say, in the technical precision of her dancing: technique, that is, over artistry, the quality that sets one performance shimmering over another.

Her husband is sitting a short distance away, entertaining their daughter, waiting for her to finish the discussion.

“Am I a good actress, Ryszard?” she raises her voice to ask him.

“Meager, I would say,” he replies.

She shrugs. This is not new.

*

It was, perhaps, the best explanation for what happened in Hamburg.

By summer, 1990, it seemed, at least in a psychological sense, that dancers were leaving Poland by the busload. In fact, it was nothing compared to the early 1980s, just after martial law was imposed in Poland. At one time, the Poznan state ballet company went to Italy on tour and one-third of the company declined to get on the bus to come home.

But a decade later, the impulse was self-confirmation: Dancers wanted to see if they could “make it” in the West. Good male dancers, especially, were hard to keep. The defections of male and female dancers became a long roster: Miroslaw Gordon, Daria Dadun, Marius Malecki, Beata Nowinska, Arkadiusz Stepien, Elwira Piorun, Bogdan Cholewa, Anna Grabka, to name only a few.

Seeing others succeed, Wiech wanted her own confirmation.

The Warsaw Ballet had performed John Neumeier’s choreography. Anna Grabka, a dancer whose career was just beginning in Warsaw in 1985, had gone to Hamburg and become a Neumeier star. The company was world class. Wiech thought her chances of following Grabka’s success were good.

But after the audition that won her a place in the company, she seemed to be able to get no further. Grabka helped. She gave Wiech a place in her apartment, was generous with advice, taught her to stretch her body, tried to coach her in the Neumeier style.

Within the classical vocabulary of dance, however, the Neumeier style was looser, freer. It demanded expression, not mere technical proficiency.

And that, of course, was not Wiech’s strength.

She stayed in Hamburg 10 months. She remembers a day, halfway through that period, when she looked at the assignment board posted in the studio, checking her place on the rehearsal roster of a new production.

“There were always three groups, the first performers, the second and a third, which were sort of understudies. I was not even listed with the third group. I knew then it was over.”

There were other pressures too. Her husband had investigated the opera opportunities in Hamburg, and, in short, he had none. He could have joined the chorus in the city’s opera, but the starring and supporting roles he was assigned routinely in Warsaw were simply not going to open up to him. Ryszard decided to remain in Warsaw with their daughter. Wiech finished out her contract and came home.

Now, at least openly, she does not see her experience in Hamburg as a failure: “I never got a chance to show myself there. I didn’t go as far as I wanted. I didn’t get out of the corps, but I learned a lot there. I learned to concentrate more.”

Other realizations struck her too, although they come with an inevitable tinge of rationalization. She missed home. “I was born here and I belong here,” she says.

And, of course, here, in Warsaw, she was a star, even more so now that two of her leading rivals remaining in the company, Bialecka and Ewa Glowacka, are, respectively, 38 and 39 years old. A dancer’s career, as she notes, is brief and intense. You have to take what you can, where you can, while it lasts.

Reality.

Her base salary in the last year came to 26 million zlotys, or just over $2,000, which comes out to less than two months’ pay in Hamburg.

But last year’s earnings were reduced because of an injury that cut down on her performances, and she should quadruple that amount this year. Ryszard’s pay is comparable. They recently bought a new car, but beyond that proud acquisition, their demands are modest.

“So that’s it,” she says. She claims no ambition to go anywhere else. “We are happy here.”

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Wiech is at the Wielki Theater two hours before the curtain rises on “Swan Lake.” She takes a warm-up class with the company and shows no sign of nervousness, unless it is to suggest a flatter, steadier concentration.

By contrast, her partner, 25-year-old Slawomir Wozniak, is wired like an old radio, crackling with static, pacing in his dressing room, flush-faced and babbling to his wife and his colleagues. “I must concentrate,” he says. “I’m very nervous. Very, very nervous.”

On the last day of rehearsals, as she usually does with Wiech, ballet mistress Teresa Memches takes 30 minutes alone with her to discuss the dramatic content of what she is dancing. For Wiech, Memches says, this short, private session is “all about acting,” about trying to get her to reach beyond technique, to find the emotion behind the movement, within the story.

With Wozniak, it is rather the reverse, a matter of reining him in. “Remember, Slawek,” she had told him at the last rehearsal, “even if you do it your way, you still have to do it with the music.”

And so it goes for the performance. After her first turn onstage, Wiech comes off into the wings, perches on her hands and knees on a prop trunk for two or three minutes, catching her breath and, seemingly, meditating. Wozniak, panting, walks back and forth, shaking his head.

Memches watches the performance from a loge close to the stage, reserved for the company. The theater is nearly full. She frets that the conductor has disregarded her imprecations to slow the tempo. In the third act, through the solos and the difficult pas de deux, Memches appears to try to coach her dancers by telepathy and body language.

It is Wozniak who disappoints her. She sits back when he is finished, shaking her head. “No, no,” she says. “It wasn’t good. Not as good as he was in rehearsal.”

The deficiency is hard for an unschooled eye to pick out, but the other dancers know too that Wozniak was not as good as he could have been, as he should have been. But they expect a lot from him. He is going to be a star someday, if he is not already.

And Wiech? She was perfect, they say.

Afterward, Wozniak is still wired, and apologetic for his performance, but full of plans, excitement. He wants, he says, to dance for American Ballet Theatre.

“I saw them last year, and they were so impressive,” he says. He is still in his prince’s white leotard, sitting in his dressing room, his knees bouncing up and down as he talks. “I said to my friends, ‘I want to join this company. Do you think I can join this company?’ And they said, ‘Yes, possibly,’ . . . and the ABT has already promised for me an audition.”

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Of course, he says, it would depend, in part, on what he might be offered in Warsaw. “But they have no money here,” he says. “We don’t do so many ballets anymore. And I have a wife and two boys, so I have to think of them. But it’s not just that, not just the money. I want to start at a higher level, something that makes me better.”

It sounds like the prologue of a familiar story.

But then “Swan Lake” is familiar too, and potentially brilliant and born fresh in each retelling.

While her young partner goes on pouring out his hopes, Wiech--who makes it clear she has had enough of talking, especially about herself--has gotten out of her makeup and changed and is already in her car, headed home.