Helene Alexopoulos’ Pregnant Pause Pays Off : Dance: Most ballerinas have to choose between love and art. The New York City Ballet principal dancer has gracefully included motherhood.

“Children had never entered my mind, and it was no secret that Balanchine thought ballerinas shouldn’t have them.”

-- Suzanne Farrell,

“Holding On to the Air”

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Her thick black hair twists off her forehead into a ballerina bun, every strand in place. Her feet are bare, the ropy veins betraying their strength. Instead of a leotard, she wears a demure black bathing suit, faded by chlorine.

She holds her baby son, Grayson, in the crook of one elbow, like a football, and his twin sister, Alexandra, in the other.

Gracefully, with that splayed ballerina walk, she descends the Persian-tiled stairs, sinking into the steamy blue water. Her poise and stage-presence suggest a grand entrance at the New York State Theater, perhaps in some lost Balanchine ballet, but it’s just the kiddie pool of the 63rd Street Y.

“Oh my God,” Helene Alexopoulos announces. “You gotta watch this. Grayson might go under water.” He ducks beneath the water as sleekly as a little seal, and emerges unruffled, as if nothing has happened. Alexandra, not to be outdone, goes next, as mother, teacher and bystanders applaud. “Wow,” Alexopoulos coos. “Wait till we tell Daddy.”

It’s a long way from the stage at Lincoln Center, tossed in a whirlwind of light, sound and motion, to Alexandra and Grayson, drooling with the other babies as their moms sing “The Wheels on the Bus” in the Shrimp-Flipflop class at the Y. But as Alexopoulos, mother and principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, takes the stage this season, her almost-year-old twins stay at home with their grandmother.

Ballerina lore, from “The Red Shoes” to “The Turning Point,” tells us that ballerinas don’t have personal lives, let alone husbands, babies or twins. Their dedication to their art is supposed to be so consuming that human love--as opposed to love of their art--is a crippling distraction, and marriage a sacrilege. In “The Red Shoes,” when forced to choose between love and the dance, Moira Shearer, in full ballet regalia, throws herself in front of a train.

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The reality is not so far from the myth. Two of the great ballet legends, Shearer and Margot Fonteyn, never had children. In a real-life echo of “The Red Shoes,” Suzanne Farrell was fired from City Ballet in 1969, just hours before a performance, after she defied Balanchine to follow her heart and marry a fellow dancer. The marriage of Balanchine himself, the late co-founder of City Ballet, to ballerina Maria Tallchief, was annulled on the grounds that she wanted children and he didn’t. (Although he married four ballerinas, he never had children.)

“He felt that anyone can have a child, but not everyone can become a prima ballerina, which I certainly was,” Tallchief recalls.

It is, after all, a profession in which youth is at a premium, in which women, no matter how old, are still called girls, and men, boys. Out of 88 dancers, both male and female, in City Ballet, only six (three men and three women) have children. All three women--Valentina Koslova, Lourdes Lopez and Alexopoulos--are principals (the highest rank) and only Alexopoulos has more than one child.

At competing American Ballet Theater, only two women--Christine Dunham, a principal, and Lucette Katerndal, a soloist--have children. Sheryl Yeager, a principal, returned last spring after having a baby and then retired. None of the ABT men has children.

As a practical matter, nine months must seem an eternity in the cloistered, feverish world of ballet. “If they’re in the corps, most girls have retired by the time they’re 27,” says David Howard, the international ballet teacher. “If they’re a soloist, they go to about 30. Every year after 30 is an exception.”

Alexopoulos detects another trend: Only the most secure ballerinas--primas like Tallchief, Natalia Makarova, Allegra Kent and Melissa Hayden--dare to have children, and even they often wait until the twilight of their careers. Tallchief was 34 when she gave birth, in 1959; Makarova was 37. Alexopoulos remembers only one woman at City--Karin von Aroldingen--who had a child while in the corps and rose to become a principal. “You had to show that you could do both successfully and that your interests or abilities were not diminished,” she says.

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Her pregnancy was liberating, Alexopoulos says. For once in her life, she could let her body take over; she could forget the obsession of ballerinas with diet, thinness and appearing ethereal and childlike rather than womanly. “I loved being pregnant,” she recounts. “For the first time, I could look in the mirror and it wasn’t me, me, me, self, self, self. I had a strange sense of disappointment after giving birth, when I realized I wasn’t pregnant anymore.”

Her pregnancy did not stop her from dancing. She danced a “Live from Lincoln Center” tribute to Balanchine, in June, 1993, when she was a few weeks pregnant. “Grayson and Alexandra, the dancing zygotes,” she jokes, relishing the idea.

She danced in Saratoga, N.Y., that summer and continued taking class until Nov. 20, on the cusp of the winter season, when her doctor advised her to rest. The twins were born eight weeks early, on Jan. 15, 1994. Alexandra Grace came first, at 3 pounds, 11 ounces, and Grayson Evan followed 20 minutes later, at 3 pounds, 13 ounces. They spent their first 28 days in intensive care at New York Hospital, encased in plastic isolettes. “I breast-fed them all day long,” Alexopoulos says. “I got to know all the nurses.”

Alexopoulos is the archetypal Balanchine ballerina--tall, fragile, swift on her feet. At 5 feet 7, she is “gigantesque,” as she puts it, by traditional ballerina standards. Her head is small and neat, a series of oval planes like a Brancusi marble. Up close, her eyes are clear Aegean green. She is known for her sensuous movement and vulnerable manner, an impression heightened by her Mediterranean beauty, willowy legs and strong extension.

She has suffered her share of dance injuries: a broken wrist, a fractured foot and a bad knee that required surgery. Still, getting back into shape after pregnancy, she says, was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Your abdominals really get pulled apart; my stomach is still not solid.”

With the help of physical therapy, she resumed performing five months after giving birth, even though she was still nursing. Her exercise regimen called for Pilates exercises to restore balance, sit-ups to tone abdominal muscles and workouts on the UBE machine (a type of rowing machine) for upper-body strength. She was svelte enough last May to pose for fashion spreads (published in August) for GQ and Mirabella.

But caring for two babies has been more difficult than she anticipated. “I thought, oh yeah, you diaper one, you diaper the other. One takes a nap, the other does too. Sure . . . ,” she recounts, laughing at her naivete. Instead, she stays up late slicing sweet potatoes and carrots for the next day. “By midnight, I’ve pretty much had it. Then I realize I forgot to sew my pointe shoes.

On a visit to Maria Tallchief’s class in Chicago, where Alexopoulos grew up, Balanchine expressed an interest in the teen-aged Helene. Deferring admission to Harvard, which came with a scholarship, Alexopoulos moved to New York in 1977. Although her family disapproved, the gamble paid off. Within five months, Alexopoulos became an apprentice at City Ballet. She joined the corps the next year, was promoted to soloist in 1984 and to principal in 1989.

“She is very lyrical,” Tallchief says. “She has great poetry when she dances. When she’s in form, you can’t get much better than Helene, frankly.”

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Alexopoulos is not letting life pass her by. She met her husband, insurance lawyer Lance Warrick, on a blind date, engineered by mutual friends. He had seen her picture in the New York Times Magazine, having a dance choreographed for her by Peter Martins, and his first reaction was that she did not look as big in person. He took her to Grassroots, a cafe in New York’s East Village, “a neighborhood she’d never been to before,” he notes, a testament to the insularity of her dancer’s world.

When Alexopoulos toured Italy, he “tagged along,” because he’d never been. She performed the pas de deux from “Agon,” a Balanchine ballet, just outside of Venice. “The Venetians went wild,” Warrick recalls. “I decided that if I was ever going to ask her to marry me, this was it.”

They married in 1985. Affable and unpretentious, he took the last six months off to run a losing congressional campaign in his home state of Washington. Now he’s devoting some time to the kids, “so they know I’m the father and not Pedro the doorman,” he says.

In Warrick, the liaison has cultivated a taste for ballet. His favorites are “Serenade,” “Prodigal Son,” “Behind the China Dogs,” “Agon” and “Waltz Project.” In Alexopoulos, it has spurred a curiosity about the world outside ballet. Until the kids were born, she spent her Mondays taking a variety of classes, from economics to art history, at Columbia, Warrick’s alma mater; she has completed about two years of study but has not yet declared a major.

Although she declines to tell her age, some quick arithmetic suggests that Alexopoulos is in her mid-30s. So why have children now? “I didn’t want to wait until I was 40,” she says. The time lost, she says, was minimal. “In the time some people spend being injured, I could have five kids.”

Teacher David Howard argues that “the right formula is to lead as normal a life as one can lead.” Motherhood, he says, can make better dancers, by piercing the veil of self-absorption. “Their personalities blossom,” he says. “They are dancing as women rather than dancing freaks.”