Return of the lost ballerina

JUST hours before her first performance anywhere in more than 20 years, former ballet star Gelsey Kirkland is onstage at the Metropolitan Opera House, not only practicing her own moves but coaching American Ballet Theatre principal Irina Dvorovenko.

This is the only stage rehearsal Kirkland has had for her role in the new ABT version of “The Sleeping Beauty,” which the company premiered on June 1 (three days earlier) and will bring to the Orange County Performing Arts Center from Tuesday to next Sunday. But unlike some of her under-rehearsed colleagues, she knows the production in minute detail: Along with her husband, Michael Chernov, and ABT Artistic Director Kevin McKenzie, she planned it.

“I’ve had the blessing of starting work 16 months ago,” she would tell an interviewer a day later, “ ... getting my fingers into what I wanted to do and working with a theater director and mime coach.”

At 54, Kirkland needs mime skills for her ballet comeback, but her role as the wicked fairy Carabosse in this unorthodox “Beauty” also involves being the centerpiece of complex lifts and, for a time, even some aerial maneuvers -- though those have been deleted from the production since the New York run. No, she’s never done wire work before, or been a choreographer, for that matter, but she’s also never been afraid of a new challenge -- and playing someone she calls “a woman who is beautiful on the outside but evil on the inside” is definitely that.

On the crowded Met stage, you can’t miss her, not only because she’s the only dancer in full costume but because she still commands the extraordinarily focused intensity of her glory days as a classical ballerina. And the welcoming ovation she receives at her comeback debut that night (“A shock,” she says) almost convinces you that those days are still here.

Few dancers have been both loved and hated as Kirkland has. In the course of her tumultuous career, she watched her public image go from White Swan to Black Swan, from Time magazine cover girl to pioneer of a new kind of DUI: dancing under the influence. She started out as a wunderkind, becoming the only dancer to have works created for her by the four greatest classical choreographers of the age: George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Jerome Robbins and Antony Tudor. What’s more, she was chosen to be the partner of the art’s reigning virtuoso, Mikhail Baryshnikov, after he defected from the Soviet Union in 1974, and she never had a problem keeping up with him.

But even in an age of tell-all celebrity autobiographies, her bestselling 1986 book, “Dancing on My Grave,” shocked the fiercely self-protective ballet world with its revelations about her drug addiction, eating disorders, cosmetic surgery and love affairs -- not to mention her startling depictions of Balanchine, Baryshnikov and other icons of the art. The controversy left her virtually unemployable in America, so she finished her career with a brief flare of greatness at England’s Royal Ballet, ending as Princess Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty.”

The irony of her playing the she-devil Carabosse -- Carabosse the uninvited, Carabosse the spoiler -- isn’t lost on her, but she’s more absorbed with the practicalities of her current life. Sitting in the Met press room with Chernov (a former Australian dancer and theater director who married Kirkland in 1997), she talks about her years of international teaching and coaching projects -- many of them with Chernov -- and he interjects his own comments, sometimes finishing her sentences as if they’re sharing the same thoughts. If her dancing always projected airy lightness and a dimension of personal vulnerability, in person Kirkland radiates a sense of calm leavened with wry humor.

She says it’s impossible to say exactly who in the ABT production triumvirate is responsible for the wealth of new choreography in this “Sleeping Beauty.” “We worked as a team,” she says, “Misha [Chernov] on the dramatic and musical structure, me as the vocabulary person and Kevin fleshing it out in his way. It’s very hard to unravel.” She and Chernov have staged “The Nutcracker” in the Philippines, but this will be their most widely seen project.

In revisiting some of the subjects that dominated “Dancing on My Grave,” Kirkland declines to discuss what she terms “personal relations,” even to say when she and former husband Greg Lawrence (co-author of her books) were divorced. However, later in the interview she pauses to say, “By the way, in terms of Greg Lawrence, we’re great friends. You can say that.”

As for the larger issues she wrote about, Kirkland remains outspoken. “I have no qualms about what I said artistically,” she declares. “Some of the problems are still going on, maybe even more so than before. But at this stage of my life I would rather try and have some small impact within a company and suffer through those things than make such a big stink that nobody can trust to work with you. It’s very important in an environment of a big institution that people don’t feel threatened that you’re going to expose them in any way.”

She says that she believes “Dancing on My Grave” had an effect on the ballet world’s awareness of health issues and that her recovery from drug addiction may have taken longer than her books suggested, with psychotherapy and transitional drugs being part of the process.

Although many women have had serious problems with aging silicone implants, Kirkland says she’s had no difficulties with her famous lip job: the souvenir of an attempt, back in her New York City Ballet days (1968-74), to look more like Balanchine’s muse, ballerina Suzanne Farrell. “People notice me for sure,” she jokes. “Nothing you can do about it. Once it’s in you can’t get it out, so I recommend that nobody ever go there.”

If her relationship with ABT has healed, her contact with NYCB is still minimal, though Kirkland is encouraged by small warming signs. “I had a request for an old tape of mine to facilitate the setting of a pas de deux they’re doing,” she says. “I see things like that as a relationship.”

Indeed, indirection may be something of an NYCB tradition in such matters. “There was a stage when Balanchine and I didn’t talk,” Kirkland recalls. “I was trying to develop my classical technique as opposed to the fast-track technique that he was pushing. We were very quiet with each other. But after two years he saw what I was doing and sent messages through other people that, yes, this is good.

“In spite of my not going to his class and listening to him technically, he was very pleased with my work. And I was at peace that I was dancing his ballets as I felt they should be danced.”

Although her long, long feet are no longer in toe shoes, she says she finds the satisfactions of portraying Carabosse “comparable” to dancing classical roles. “It’s the same process,” she explains. “It’s not an easy role. It has to be layered through time, and so it is the same.”

Kirkland was always extraordinarily analytical about the characters she portrayed, and her second book, “The Shape of Love” (1990), contains a detailed account of her interpretation of Juliet, one of the most remarkable insights into the art of ballet acting ever committed to print. So it’s not surprising that she approaches “The Sleeping Beauty” in terms of the ideas in it that can be made stronger or more profound.

A different kind of ‘Beauty’

COMPARED with what happens in a traditional “Sleeping Beauty” credited to Marius Petipa (including the previous ABT editions), the Kirkland-Chernov-McKenzie “after Petipa” production features a number of changes. Some merely enhance what was always there (the emphasis on the infant Aurora in the Prologue, for instance). Others take the ballet in a new direction, suggesting that Aurora doesn’t merely sleep but actually dies (as Carabosse intends), only to be brought back to life by the Lilac Fairy -- and that her prince undergoes the same experience.

The gift fairies and their cavaliers from the Prologue now remain omnipresent as agents of growth and transformation, but nearly all the storybook divertissements in the last act are gone -- though the characters who used to perform them do appear in a promenade, their original Petipa motifs shuffled into a new context. There are also plenty of special effects -- flash pots, smoke, even rockets -- that Kirkland calls “pretty tacky but pretty exciting.” Indeed, getting too close to one will leave her with a burned hand by the end of the Met run.

Many New York reviewers were unimpressed with the result, rockets and all, but Kirkland professes surprise that things went as well as they did.

“In spite of the amazing lack of rehearsal time for a new production in New York,” she says, “we could actually see a ballet on opening night. We felt that was a miracle -- even with all the bad reviews.

“We have a production that needs work, but it’s very dependent on all of the technical crew working together -- and there’s no time available in tech now to fix the problems.”

Chernov adds his own grim reference to the “absurd, unheard-of” lack of rehearsal time, saying, “You realize that this [Met run] is an out-of-town tryout for Orange County.” That’s because the ballet must be re-teched in Costa Mesa for a new stage and crew. “We have found the solution to the second act [the prince’s story], but we haven’t been able to implement it yet,” he says.

“Everyone in the company is dealing with this terrible pressure,” Kirkland says. “Eight ballets this season. They’re overwhelmed. And I have a lot of compassion for people who can just get through it. Of course, that doesn’t help the audience understand.” But she believes that you have “to be able to accept that it’s good just to get everybody out there, functioning as a company, synchronized on the right counts, all of that.”

As a one-on-one coach, Kirkland says, she’s frustrated by dancers who don’t have enough time to absorb interpretive concepts that are central to what the production is trying to achieve. “By the last act, Aurora should not be still in any way a coquette,” she explains. “She has to express grace and majesty that’s of another world. The spirit that’s in her is about giving to the kingdom -- and to get that across to people [in the company] is impossible. It’s not happening. I have put in my two cents’ worth, and it’s been rejected. It’s very humbling: I realize that I’m powerless on many levels.”

She’s had more success with the gift fairies, she says. “They’ve done some fine, fine work. The Joy Fairy was truly joyful on opening night. You have to be able to take direction like that. You’ve got to fly with it. But this is where we are. It’s a trust problem. When we came into the company, the dancers had never worked with us. So in order for them to remain open and trusting, it takes patience and time. We can’t control everything.”

And so a woman who has always been a fighter -- and says that what she achieved in her career was “worth all the fighting” -- accepts a partial victory in handing on her insights into the deepest expressive resources of the art. “Even if the dancers can listen for a moment,” she says, “even if it doesn’t get manifest, that’s a real achievement because that means they’ve quieted down enough to be able to receive it. The process of getting it out of the body is something else.”

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lewis.segal@latimes.com

Segal is The Times’ dance critic.

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American Ballet Theatre

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

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $25 to $95

Contact: (714) 556-2787 or www.ocpac.org