A Dance Success Story : Ballet: A young San Diego dancer lands on his feet with the famed Joffrey company in New York City.

Imagine this: A young man takes lessons on artificial snow at the sole sports outlet in Tucumcari, N.M., works hard and makes the Olympic ski team.

Calvin Kitten’s story is analogous, only his is true.

This summer, at age 21, the San Diego native joined the first company of New York’s Joffrey Ballet. That achievement is remarkable in itself, considering that paid positions in prestigious dance companies are few and the competition fierce.

More remarkable is the fact that Kitten grew up and trained in San Diego. Ballet struggles here, much like a ski shop in a desert town. Accomplished instructors and talented dancers are hard to keep, and public support and appreciation are limited.

Further, Kitten has chosen a profession that has difficulty attracting males because of peer pressure against it. He’s shorter than the ideal for male classical ballet dancers, did not take dancing seriously until his late teens and isn’t bullishly ambitious.

Despite those shortcomings,

Kitten has scaled Olympian heights, joining Joffrey’s A team, and each year he hopes to return to San Diego to teach, perform and get some sun.

“If there were a company here, I’d stay,” he said after a rehearsal last week at the California Ballet studios. “It’s more relaxed. New York’s OK; it’s dirty, people are very cranky, but it’s good for dancing. Things are constantly going on.”

Kitten will dance tonight at Pacific Beach Middle School in Judith Sharp’s “Inversion,” a ballet set to music by Anton Webern. Sharp’s is one of several short dances on the California Ballet program called “Choreographer’s Concert 1992,” a stylistic mix of works by San Diego’s Brenda Bjornson, Clarissa Mahon, Mary Reich, Paul Koverman, Kitten and others.

On Sept. 18-19, just before he returns to New York for the Joffrey season, Kitten will perform the popular “Peasant Pas de Deux” in the California Ballet’s production of “Giselle,” at Sea World.

Offstage, Kitten’s demeanor is open and personable, unlike the stern concentration he gives to practice and rehearsal.

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“I like to be very technical in class,” he said. “I didn’t use to be that way. I just liked to dance and didn’t care about how it looked. Now, with the Joffrey training, I try to be cleaner.

“It’s harder, more intense at the Joffrey. They show you (step) combinations only once, very fast, and you have to think, to use your brain,” he said, laughing.

Kitten danced and trained last year in the Joffrey’s second company. A Joffrey spokesperson, attesting to Kitten’s talent, agreed that it is unusual for a dancer to go from the second to first company after only a year.

Kitten didn’t expect to be considered for the first company so soon, and almost missed the opportunity.

“I got a phone call from New York, and the company manager said, ‘Have you gotten your mail?’ I said no, and she said, ‘Don’t you have your mail forwarded to California?’ ”

A letter offering Kitten a contract with the company had been sitting in his New York apartment for weeks. After that near miss, the paperwork to confirm his acceptance took a month to show up, somehow lost in the mail.

Kitten can smile about it now. “If it happens, it happens,” he said. “Good things come.”

This easygoing nature helped get him through a difficult nine-month period in 1989 at the Soviet Union’s Tbilisi Choreographic Institute, a study arranged by California Ballet’s director Maxine Mahon.

“Russia was hard,” Kitten said. “I didn’t understand the language, and the training is different.”

For one thing, at California Ballet, where Kitten took lessons for years, he was often the only male, and male ballet teachers, traditionally trained, weren’t available to him.

“I didn’t know that men never raised their legs above fifth level, waist level. On the first day (in Tbilisi), I had my leg way up, and the teacher came over and just hit my leg and yelled no! I was frightened out of my mind.

“There, it’s get your leg down; here, it was get your leg up. Here, I was used to hearing, ‘Good! Good Calvin!’ and this person comes up to me and was saying, ‘Not good!’ That’s about all he could say in English.”

His Tbilisi teacher, Vakhtang Chabukiani, is famous for inventing several virtuoso steps in the 1920s. He must have been exasperated with the chubby American student, Kitten joked, at least until Kitten improved his muscle tone, learned Russian and kept his legs down.

“I was so spoiled, so pampered here--having running water that works every day, getting to eat whatever,” he said. “Tbilisi was the first time I was really away from home.”

Communication with his family was infrequent when not impossible.

But he gained a great deal from the classes. The highly competitive training strengthened his legs and sharpened his technique.

When Kitten returned to San Diego, he performed as a soloist with California Ballet, and soon after was accepted into the Joffrey’s second company. Now that he’s made first company, he’ll work toward his goal of being a solo dancer.

But he keeps his expectations out of the way. “It if happens, it happens,” Kitten said. “Good things come.”