DANCE REVIEW : Balanchine Celebration Begins in New York : BALLET: Celebrating Balanchine

“You have to show the audience that it’s starting,” master ballet-master George Balanchine used to tell his dancers. On Tuesday night at the New York State Theater, New York City Ballet, the company that the Russian-born Balanchine founded, elaborately showed the start of something big.

The theater itself was festooned with banners, inside and out, including a red one with a reproduction of Balanchine’s autograph in gold over the box offices. A less gaudy and largely black-and-white gala performance, however, opened the troupe’s ambitious “Balanchine Celebration,” which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the choreographer’s death.

The solitary exception to the exclusive Balanchine repertory scheduled for the upcoming eight weeks--73 ballets in all--was a surprise curtain-raiser. This was created by company Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins to mark the birthday of Lincoln Kirstein, who turned 86 that day.

After a large-screen video presentation recalled Balanchine’s close partnership with the New England-bred Kirstein, conductor Hugo Fiorato struck up a polonaise from Mikhail Glinka’s “A Life for the Tsar.”

Onto the stage filed small, medium and grown-up dancers, their ranks caringly paced through well-mannered polonaise steps and formations. Eventually a complement of 32 couples of children (from the company’s affiliate School of American Ballet) knelt in salute to Kirstein. Framed by older students and company dancers, the outspread cluster of white-clad dancers climactically sang a round of “Happy Birthday.”

The granitic Yankee who helped Balanchine establish classical ballet in America rose from his seat and blew kisses to the stage full of beaming well wishers. Once he sat back, the company presented a sampling of the choreography that today makes Balanchine’s name a cornerstone in American culture.

More show-and-tell video clips offered archival television footage of Balanchine and his ballets. The dancing in the program’s first half showed excerpts from three now-classic Balanchine works.

The opening segment proved the most vibrant. After a Balanchine sound bite telling that he made “Serenade” to show dancers “how to be on a stage,” the curtain rose on a group of senior girls from the School of American Ballet. Instead of wearing the usual, long, blue tulle dresses, these proud charges wore simple, short tunics.

Reminiscent of the radically plain costuming in which Balanchine first showed his 1934 American masterpiece, this elemental statement from eager, nascent ballerinas went to the heart of much that we now call Balanchinian.

Out of this simple and momentous beginning--showing the audience something special is starting!--these young women rode the crest of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings like nymphs in the moonlight.

Eventually 20 City Ballet women, in the now-regulation “Serenade” skirts (by Karinska), swept into view and danced the excerpt into the night. Their dancing, however, especially that of the leads (sometimes aided by a lone male partner), frequently showed more effort than expressiveness.

The first movement of “Concerto Barocco” (to Bach) and last half of “The Four Temperaments” (to Hindemith) gave clear indication of Balanchine’s musical and dramatic reach. But, isolated like this, not even the grandeur of Kyra Nichols (in “Barocco”) nor the intensity of Adam Luders (in “Temperaments”) could do much more than suggest that.

To cap the program, pride of place went to “Symphony in C,” possibly the most voluptuous and glorious program closer in all of classical ballet. Four distinct movements of music (by Bizet) inspire four separate layers of classical dancing. Irradiated by constellations of women in satiny white tutus and select ranks of men in shiny blacks, this symphony of ballerinas and escorts alternately sings, sighs, soars and surges.

Except, however, for the high-flying and fine force that Peter Boal and Margaret Tracey brought to the third (Allegro Vivace) movement and that Damian Woetzel gave to the first (Allegro Vivo) movement, there have been far more exquisite performances than the ones on view on this celebratory night.