MUSIC/DANCE : MANON BECOMES HER : After a Rocky Start in the Role, ABT Star Says It’s Now a Favorite

There’s a slide in the ballet “Manon” that principal dancer Cynthia Harvey will never forget. She was rehearsing the title role during a Royal Ballet of Great Britain tour of the Soviet Union in 1987 when disaster struck.

“My foot caught in a gap in the stage,” she recalled. “I tore all the ligaments in my left foot and broke the bone in three places. I went to the Bolshoi (Ballet) clinic, which told me nothing was wrong!”

But the mounting pain soon told her otherwise. In a few days, the company had to send her back home to New York, where her injury was correctly diagnosed and therapy started.

“Why they didn’t tell me in Russia, I’ll never know,” she said.

She didn’t get to dance the role in performance until the following summer when the Royal was touring Australia. And then, because the other woman scheduled to dance the part was injured, Harvey danced Manon four times, with four different partners.

“Just getting up and doing that slide again was like getting on a horse you’ve fallen off of,” she said. “You just know there are some things you have to get over. The fact that I was able to do that maybe made me sympathetic to this ballet.”

In fact, Manon is now one of her five favorite roles, she said. (The others are Giselle, Aurora, Kitri and Cranko’s Juliet.)

Harvey will be dancing Manon on Tuesday and again on Sept. 24 during the American Ballet Theatre engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Two other ABT principal dancers--Julie Kent and Susan Jaffe--will also dance the role.

A native of San Rafael, Calif., Harvey, 37, joined Ballet Theatre in 1974. She rose to soloist rank in 1978 and became a principal dancer in 1982. From 1986 to ‘88, she danced with the Royal Ballet--the first American ballerina to be made a member of the company. She returned to ABT in September, 1988. She now spends half her year in New York and half in England, where her husband is a design director for the Grand Prix.

While she was with the Royal, Harvey worked directly with Kenneth MacMillan, who choreographed “Manon.”

“It was really pleasant to get firsthand training from him,” she said. “I see Manon as a person who is in love and does things that are not rational, a person who lives for the moment and does things not necessarily thinking about their consequences. She’s capricious in that way.

“But she’s also afraid of losing her social distinction. She was not born of a great class, unlike (her young lover) Des Grieux, who was born into a better family. She will do anything to not go backward in her social status.”

Because “Manon” is a story ballet, “I don’t think you can simply do the steps,” Harvey said, “although MacMillan has put so much passion into the pas de deux that (the character) becomes clear through his choreography. She’s carried around a lot. I actually quite like it. I don’t have to stretch my feet so much.”

Does she ever worry about being dropped?

“Yes. We have some very tall men. Standing on their shoulders, I’m higher than I ever would be, and then I have to go head down into a dive. You have to trust them. So far, touch wood, nothing has happened.”

Which points out one of many differences Harvey sees between herself and Manon. “I’m not a kind of person who doesn’t think about consequences. I’m fairly aware of them,” she said.

* What: American Ballet Theatre dances Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” on Tuesday, Sept. 20, and Sept. 23 through 25. (The company dances shorter repertory by James Kudelka, Twyla Tharp and Natalia Makarova on Wednesday, Sept. 21, and on Sept. 22.)

* When: Tuesday, Sept. 20, through Sept. 25 at 8 p.m.; also Sept. 24 and 25 at 2 p.m.

* Where: The Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

* Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Avenue exit north, then go right on Town Center Drive.

* Wherewithal: $18 to $55.

* Where to call: (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster) or (714) 556-2787.

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