DANCE : Class From the Old School : Choreographer Agnes de Mille, standard-bearer for a past generation, keeps on writing, rehearsing: ‘What else would I do?’ she says

They’re making dancers better than they used to, but on the other hand, they’re not making dancers like they used to. Listen to choreographer Agnes de Mille, and her perceptions of American Ballet Theatre--52 years after she was present at the creation--make perfect sense.

“They don’t build personalities and stars, just incredible technicians and excellent dancers,” said the 87-year-old De Mille recently in her Greenwich Village apartment. “The type I like are comedians and actors.”

For “The Other,” which has its West Coast premiere Tuesday night as part of ABT’s engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, De Mille needs no comedians. Set to Schubert songs, climaxing with his “Death and the Maiden,” the message of this ballet--with De Mille, there’s no doubt about the existence of a message--is that death must be accepted as a part of life.

It’s a rapprochement with which De Mille has become achingly familiar. She had a stroke in 1975 and when she’s not working in the studio, she spends most of her time in bed. Although she’s continuing a remarkable recovery from the near-fatal cerebral hemorrhage that left her right side paralyzed, she is the sole survivor of her generation of major dance figures. Of her contemporaries, she noted matter-of-factly, “they’re all dead.” A few years ago she lost her husband of 46 years, theatrical agent Walter Prude, whose handsome visage shares dresser space with photos of her two grandsons (her son, Jonathan, is an Emory University history professor).

But De Mille is still writing, still choreographing, still rehearsing. “What else would I do?” she asks rhetorically, with an expressive shrug.

De Mille, niece of Cecil B., is one of dance’s living legends, thanks in part to her 13 books, many of which tell the stories of her own disasters and triumphs--including “Dance to the Piper,” every young dancer’s favorite autobiography; “Reprieve,” about her stroke and, last year, “Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham,” offering home truths--some stranger than fiction--about her friend and idol’s strengths and weaknesses.

De Mille exhibits the same loyalty to ABT that she did to Graham, although she feels she was ill-used by director Lucia Chase, who, with Oliver Smith, co-founded the company. Chase “considered me a rival. I was a dancer, Lucia was not. She couldn’t take a stage, I could. What Lucia wanted, Lucia got. I never had a formal position. Oliver Smith would advise her to have another ballet from me. I was hired for each project, then dismissed. She never took my advice on any single instance I can remember, and she did herself out of a lot of good things.”

De Mille’s other choreographic outlet, of course, was the Broadway musical, most notably “Oklahoma,” “Brigadoon” and “Carousel.”

“Balanchine despised the Broadway stage,” she alleges. “I didn’t.” His New York City Ballet was never an alternative because Lincoln Kirstein “genuinely dislikes my work,” De Mille said.

So she’s stood by ABT and vice versa; not a bad exchange, particularly in a year when the company, $5.7 million in debt, isn’t commissioning new work.

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For “The Other,” De Mille and ABT balletmaster Terry Orr, who has worked closely with her for the past decade, needed to get the cast accustomed to using the entire body to express the story.

It fell to young soloist Roger Van Fleteren to invest the title role with weight and dignity. “Roger had been just a silly boy,” De Mille said. “But every time he started getting fancy with his wrists, I’d break in: ‘Roger, you are Death. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to be cute.’

“It’s a ghastly role,” De Mille said with relish. “It requires tremendous strength. And the turns--he looks up as he turns, which of course is a no-no (because it makes dancers dizzy). There’s control, to the fingernails.”

The piece is constructed so that “none of the dancers get applause,” she said. “It builds the tension, but it’s not easy for them, after they’ve done incredibly difficult things.”

The ballet received mixed reviews last year--better in Washington than in New York. But there were no mixed reviews for De Mille, who, wearing a gown of deep red, was helped to her feet from a wheelchair on the left aisle of the Metropolitan Opera House to acknowledge a standing ovation. Because “it’s very hard for me to travel,” she doesn’t plan to attend the Orange County performances.

“I was terribly interested to see,” De Mille said, “that the older men are deeply moved (by “The Other”)--Isaac Stern, people like that”--by the contrast between “death and this young, beautiful thing.” That would be Amanda McKerrow, who opens the ballet wrapped in a cloak of red. The sculptural quality of her gestures make her a very different dancer from the ballet prodigy who won a gold medal in Moscow at 17.

The trick for McKerrow as the Maiden was to become “a real person, to have enough weight and be grounded enough to give enough value to the movement,” McKerrow said on the phone. “I have a tendency to move through things, and I needed to try to stay there a second longer.”

De Mille is “very definite about what she wants,” McKerrow said, yet “she gave me the freedom to find my own interpretation. You’d think she’d be limited.”

Working in the studio as De Mille, seated, watched, McKerrow found that “the expressions on her face are a body language to me. Her emotions come through her face so strongly, you could almost visualize her out of her chair, doing it.”

De Mille needs to work quickly if possible, as she can only work a couple of hours at a time before she becomes exhausted. Orr--part demonstrator, part notator, part imaginator--downplays his creative role, but admitted to working with her on the story, an elaboration upon De Mille’s 1978 “A Bridegroom Called Death,” choreographed for the Boston Ballet, which never satisfied her. Orr feels free to disagree with her and is impressed by her flexibility.

“I’ll say, ‘That’s not working and this is redundant,’ and she’ll say, ‘I think it’s great!’ But then if she thinks about it and doesn’t think it’s working, she’ll toss it out like a 17-year-old kid.”

The company is mounting a De Mille tribute at the Kennedy Center Feb. 5--she’s planning to attend--that includes “The Informer” (1988), the revival of “Three Virgins and a Devil” (1941), and “Rodeo” (Ballets Russes, 1942; Ballet Theatre in Germany, 1950; in New York, 1951).

Based on McKerrow’s success with “The Other,” Orr, who was acclaimed in the ‘70s for his performances in “Rodeo” as the Champion Roper, prevailed upon De Mille to let McKerrow learn the role of the Cowgirl. “I auditioned for it, and she was very hard on me,” McKerrow said. “In the part where I was bucked off the horse, she said the movement had to come more from the pelvis. I think she was testing me, making sure if I was game to do it.”

“I think she’ll be enchanting,” De Mille was saying in her bedroom. “The Cowgirl has to feel herself as a misfit, an unsuccessful baby woman.”

That was De Mille’s role Oct. 16, 1942, when her ballet premiered with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera House--”the old Met, the good Met,” says De Mille, who hates the one at Lincoln Center because, she says, nobody past the eighth row can see the dancers’ facial expressions.

De Mille had a meeting with Ballet Russe impresario Sergei Ivanovich Denham about doing “Rodeo.” “I was very, very poor. I had to borrow a dress and hat from my sister.

“ ‘How much do you want?’ Denham asked me.

“I said, ‘Five hundred dollars. If it’s no good, it’s the end of me--and if it’s good, you’ve got a hit for very little. And I have to dance the opening. I must have $15 per performance.’

“Opening night was not a very good performance. Casimir Kokitch forgot one entrance and I had to play one scene as a solo; my dress was too tight around the throat and I nearly strangled.” No matter. “It just went, on a great tidal wave of enthusiasm. We had 22 curtain calls.”

After the opening, Denham doubled her pay per performance to $30.

“I couldn’t jump the way the others could,” said De Mille, “but I got a laugh every time I wanted to. I knew where the laughs were coming.”

She knows about tears, too. When they rehearsed the prologue of “The Other,” McKerrow said, “we spent an entire hour in the studio, just she, myself and Terry. I think she wanted to set the gravity, but at the same time the joy, of living and moving and finding the peace in one’s existence.

“There’s sort of a sadness,” he said, “appreciating the beauty and knowing it will die, and enjoying it anyway while you can.”