New Kid on the Block

Meet Alicia Graf: ballerina, rising star at Dance Theatre of Harlem and recent high school graduate. Graf finished her last high school requirement, passing a class called “U.S. Constitutional Law,” just in time to embark on DTH’s current tour, which will bring the company to Torrance on Friday and Saturday.

Graf has made a poised--if unusual--transition from school kid to professional dancer. On her way to rehearsals at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on this dark and rainy morning, she sits ramrod straight in her chair in a hotel dining room, clutching a folded dark-red ski sweater against the chill and wearing the obligatory ballerina’s bun. Barely a trace of makeup emphasizes her delicate, finely chiseled features. She is polite, reserved--even shy.

Still, it’s been a heady 15 months since this 18-year-old got The Call from DTH Artistic Director Arthur Mitchell. She had auditioned during a summer of studying in New York, and Mitchell told her to come to the next regional audition near her home in Columbia, Md. That was in the fall of 1996. His reaction was immediate. “Come as soon as possible,” he told her.

So in December, with her parents’ blessing, she packed her tights and pointe shoes and moved to New York City. Instead of a traditional senior year she would have a full-time job, with school (independent study supervised by New York’s Professional Children’s School) relegated to part-time work. It was an easy decision, she says. She told Mitchell: “I would be happy to be a tree at the back of the stage.”

But that’s not exactly what Mitchell had in mind.

Last September, Graf made her featured-role debut as the Siren in George Balanchine’s 1928 “Prodigal Son,” showing off a formidable technique and sky-high leg extensions. Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times called her “born” for the part and the newspaper subsequently picked her emergence on the scene as one of the 10 highlights of dance for 1997.

After Graf’s just-completed Bay Area performances, where she danced “Prodigal” as well as the “Choleric” movement of Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” Allan Ulrich of the San Francisco Examiner, said she would “not be dislodged from the memory. . . . She possesses the physique of the Balanchine dancer--the small head, the long, tapered legs, the superb alignment. And she wields the hauteur, the balances, the speed and the articulation.”

All that hauteur comes as a bit of a surprise. Graf had two summers of Balanchine-style training at the American Ballet School in New York. But most of her training came from a small private school near her home--and only in the last four years did she hone in on ballet, as opposed to also doing tap, jazz, hip-hop and African dance. Her ballet training was primarily in Cecchetti and the Russian school, so the Balanchine technique was a real challenge.

“Everything was different and it is so much faster,” she explains. “But it was a good thing that I took it, now I can use it.”

In Southern California, Graf will dance in two contemporary, African-influenced works. One is Geoffrey Holder’s luscious “Dougla,” based on a royal wedding ceremony. The other is a piece from South African Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe called “Sasanka” (Pride). It evokes the richness and teeming vitality of African wildlife. Both of these works demand rhythmic sophistication, an articulated torso and extended use of syncopated body movements.

“I like to do it all,” Graf says of the mix of repertory. Like the teenager she is, she revels at the idea of wearing “Dougla’s” luxurious costumes and in what she calls the choreography’s “floating feeling.”

“Sasanka” offers different delights.

“We have to be together in the unisons, but in other sections Mr. Mantsoe gives us some freedom to do our own movements,” she says. She gets in at least one of her straight-to-the-sky kicks. You won’t be able to miss them. At 5 feet, 10 inches, Graf is the tallest of the troupe’s women.

Graf got her start in ballet in the usual way--childhood lessons that turned into an obsession and a dream. She is the second oldest of a quartet of siblings. She says her father, a community organizer, and her mother, a professor of social science at Howard University, have always supported her ambitions.

“They told me to go for it, and the rest would follow,” she explains.

Distantly related to famed Diaghilev designer Leon Bakst, Graf remembers her grandmother going to the ballet in New York City and telling her about it. Her parents took her to dance events at the nearby Kennedy Center in Washington, and her summers at the American Ballet School also increased her exposure.

In 1995, she was a finalist in the International Vaganova Ballet Festival Competition, dancing a solo, “Night Bird,” choreographed by her hometown teacher. She got to perform in the legendary Marinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. (“It was sooo amazing,” she remembers. “There were thousands of people there, all of them Russians.”)

As for the hurdles of the past year, she takes them in stride. She has had to master such day-to-day challenges as learning how to balance a checkbook and juggling laundry and homework schedules. No problem, she contends.

“Since I have been going to ballet class all the time, I have always been fairly independent of my parents,” she explains.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in front of Graf now is one no amount of experience can remedy. At over 6 feet in pointe shoes, she will tower over many a male dancer--a situation that didn’t come up all that often before DTH, since her advanced dance class didn’t have any boys in it.

Duncan Cooper, her current partner in “Prodigal Son,” calls her “baby Guillaume,” after French ballerina Sylvie Guillaume, another tall dancer with extraordinary extensions. “I know that finding partners could be a problem,” she calmly admits. “But Mr. Mitchell told me he is looking for someone for me.”

Just once does an eager teenager’s impatience break through her polite reserve. “In a big company, you spend so much time waiting. I try to tell myself that I have to be patient, but sometimes it’s hard.”

How hard? She gives an example. “You have a choreographer come in on a Monday to try out people, and then you have to wait all the way till Friday to find out whether you have been cast!”

BE THERE

Dance Theatre of Harlem, Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m., Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College Center for the Arts, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance, (310) 329-5345. $26-$36.