One of the basic poses in ballet, arabesque takes its name from a form of Moorish ornament. In ballet it is a position of the body, in profile, supported on one leg … with the other leg extended behind and at right angles to it, and the arms held in various harmonious positions creating the longest possible line from the fingertips to the toes. The shoulders must be held square to the line of direction.
—The Dover Dictionary of Classical Ballet

The arabesque looks simple at first: a storklike standing on one leg, the other leg arrowed straight back, a banner, a comet’s tail. The arabesque is odd (which explains the mixed metaphor in the previous sentence). It is complex, a pulse point of oppositions: vertical versus horizontal, stillness versus flight. And it is subject to strict rules. Dover’s dictate about the shoulders—that they must be held square—is much like the fairy godmother in Cinderella saying, “Leave by midnight.” The image dissolves when the rules are broken.

Arabesque is the queen of ballet steps— its own rule. That long line from fingertips to toe is a kind of horizon, a sovereignty surveyed. It can even seem a flying carpet, the dancer’s torso riding up above the earth. Among the lost Balanchine ballets most mourned by the late Lincoln Kirstein was The Figure in the Carpet from the 1960s, a work whose dances, he wrote, “suggested the age in which the arabesque of Islamic ornament wove itself into Western European fashion and design, just as the arabesque, our ballet position, fixed the place of Islam in a royal academy of dancing at Versailles.” Kirstein remarks that The Figure in the Carpet “was too unwieldy to maintain”; others suggest it was musically monotonous. Arabesques, too, are prey to such failings—this statuesque design can quickly become static, heavy. As the Oxford Companion to Art reminds us, the arabesque was abstracted from a plant form. It must breathe and grow.

And so the great arabesques are more than a pose; they are a phenomenon, like Caruso’s ringing high C or Montserrat Caballé’s stratospheric pianissimo. They can suggest the high wire, held note of a violin; or silence within a soliloquy, that stirring in the shadow of language (another kind of held note). In fact, arabesques actually do cast shadows. And as George Balanchine showed in his 1928 Apollo, they are like rays of sun.

Dancers, of course, need not think about the arabesque in such fanciful terms. They learn by example, trying on the signature arabesques of ballerinas, no two alike. And they fight for their own arabesque: the lift in the leg, the hold in the spine, the continuous, coursing energy required to keep the toe pointed and the shoulders from slipping open like a loose door. They fight to keep the arabesque alive. A good arabesque never gets easy.

And a great one is unforgettable. Margot Fonteyn’s—unembellished, never higher than the hip, but not giving an inch of what it had—was English iconography. Moira Shearer’s really did look like a leap from a balcony (she of The Red Shoes fame). On film, Russia’s Natalia Dudinskaya shows a power forging through the hip that is practically continental, like the coming of cold. Irina Kolpakova of the Kirov? Her light, slim, big arabesque was a maiden’s search through silver birches. And let’s not forget Gelsey Kirkland’s diminutive, driven arabesque (she who wrote Dancing on My Grave): taut, fraught, her pink toe-tip dipped in curare.

Suzanne Farrell’s arabesque embodied an era (the Farrell Era). Huge, unforced, eternally new-looking, it could be cool and blinding—blizzard white—or balmy, a white night. You could live in it if you had to. After Farrell retired, Maria Calegari carried the flame—a small golden one compared to Farrell’s blue flare. Calegari reminded me of a dictionary drawing of the “parabola,” her lifted leg taking its momentum from the tensile U in the small of her back. When she performed that stationary, hand-turned arabesque in Balanchine’s Serenade, her persimmon hair down around her shoulders, her arabesque rising like a tightening bow, she was goddess Diana securing a cliff top. Kyra Nichols, who is now the reigning ballerina at New York City Ballet, has everything but a memorable arabesque. Perhaps that is why her command has been so retiring, so lacking in ceremony.

Where are the great arabesques? This is the question that slowly formed in my mind, expanding to fill the available space left by the spring season’s handful of banal new ballets. At NYCB, Peter Martins can no longer make a choreographic ripple. His ballets, whatever the idiom, are increasingly unmusical and indistinct; divorced, it feels, from warm-blooded classicism (they’re test-tube ballets). Kevin O’Day, a former Twyla Tharp dancer who has been a quick hit as a choreographer, makes aggressive little Gen X dances, Calvin Klein ads dressed in glam black and trapped in a kaleidoscope. As with this season’s Badchonim (merry-makers), they wow the audience with their zip and symmetry but require no commitment at all from the dancers. At American Ballet Theatre, the revolving door spun and swept Jiri Kylian back into the Metropolitan Opera with a New Age, or Old Egypt, ritual called Stepping Stones—solemn, sinewy, po-mo, pompous. There was also a new Tharp wiggle-world, The Elements, and a pretty but inconsequential production of Cinderella borrowed from the Houston Ballet.

The companies didn’t play up the premieres. Their focus was on young dancers—new girls and star boys. And anyway, one no longer expects a communicative piece of choreography. Premieres post-Balanchine haven’t been hot events since Baryshnikov left ABT, Mark Morris plateaued, and Twyla Tharp turned into her own bowl-cut cottage industry. Debuts are what’s left. Huge hopes get pinned to kids barely out of the academy—young things from the School of American Ballet or the Ukraine. Premature hopes. This year, the NYCB “It Girl” is Maria Kowroski. At ABT, it’s Paloma Herrera.

Maria Kowroski was already talked about last year, but she broke into important roles this spring, receiving raves. I went time and again to figure out what the fuss was about and saw a very long, very loose-jointed dancer with pretty, rather glassy good looks. In a performance of Symphony in C—the second, jewel-box movement—Kowroski was like melting taffy, overextended and going weak. Was this a clueless performance or a terrified one? By her first attempt at Terpsichore (in Apollo), Kowroski had pulled herself together and marked through the ballet without incident. I say “marked” because she wasn’t exactly dancing—she was getting the steps right. Unhinged again in The Prodigal Son, Kowroski’s Siren slam-danced the poor Prodigal.

Kowroski will improve. She will learn to get through ballets in one piece. She has an instrument. What one doesn’t see is technique invested with a personality. Indeed, Kowroski’s arabesque is a rubbery type that is increasingly the norm at NYCB (is it becoming state of the art?). A trombone slide into height that’s out of sync with a composed whole, this arabesque has no interior opposition and therefore no dynamics—it’s a trick arabesque. The perennially promising Margaret Tracey and the double-jointed Diana White are of a kind with Kowroski. These are big arabesques, way above hip level, but they are not good ones. An antidote arabesque came in Who Cares? It was the parallel-to-ground, swift spear of senior ballerina Merrill Ashley (Who cares? She cares!) Complete clarity is more impressive than automatic height.

Compared to Kowroski, the raven-haired, twenty-year-old Argentinean Paloma Herrera is vividly present, and she really does have a textbook technique. Her proportions are as perfect as Kowroski’s, though on a smaller scale—short yet supple from waist to shoulder, extra long from hip to toe— and she has a strength that rarely accompanies these proportions. Furthermore, she’s a textbook drawing in three dimensions; there’s a sense of curve and volume in her dancing, a palpable roundness in her head-on attack. Her long arched pointes grab ground like talons. I liked Herrera better as a budding soloist, when she had more glow and desire, as well as more weight. Now catapulted to the top of the roster, it’s as if she’s set her jaw and locked her mind.

One of the few gifts Herrera was not granted is an easy smile, though it used to be easier and more charming. As Kitri in Don Quixote, she was in a snit rather than high spirited, grudgingly happy. Trying to live up to her star status, she punctuates heavily, selling stunts when she should be exploring the music (even bad music). Like a slot machine hitting the jackpot, Herrera hits her balances with a ker-chink!, holding them through wobble and sway like an exaggerated vibrato, sending the audience weirdly wild. In this she was abetted by partners who are right for her in stature (Julio Bocca, Angel Corella) but wrong in spirit. If Herrera has the potential to be more than a Technique Machine—which is what ABT’s Susan Jaffe has become, having been given the same rush in her ingenue years—she should be allowed to find out now, not goaded into circus work with Tasmanian Devils in dance belts. The modest, plummy, loving performance she gave four seasons ago in Ashton’s Symphonic Variations is a kind of dancing now lost to her.

But as spring progressed there were signs of return. Mid season, Herrera did not oversell her solo in the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty, a part built around balances on pointe, and her Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux with Corella grew lighter, more musically spontaneous. And throughout the whole season, even during the most discouraging grandstanding, there was Herrera’s arabesque—undeniably superb, utterly dependable, a lush physics that might have been devised by Oppenheimer in a moment of whimsy. Julie Kent, of the Wedgewood beauty, the couturish bones and pale tones, is more gorgeously inventive than Herrera. Amanda McKerrow is more refined. But neither has an arabesque that can compete with Herrera’s for might, security, the infrastructural play of opposing forces, curves sprung tight inside angles. Kent’s inconsistency in this step—her arabesque line large and ecstatic in Romeo and Juliet, brittle and smack up against her limitations in Swan Lake—spoke to her technical inconsistency all around, a disappointment in a dancer with so much imagination. McKerrow’s season was simply off, her arabesque rarely square, authority slipping out the door. But Herrera’s arabesque—it kept bringing me back to her and to the question: Will it ever be the summation of an expressive whole?

That kind of arabesque belonged to but one person this season, a man, ABT’s Vladimir Malakhov. For possibly the first time in this century, men’s arabesques were more compelling than women’s (I’m thinking also of NYCB’s Ethan Stiefel and Igor Zelensky). The spring ’96 season in general belonged to the men; Lincoln Center could have flown a flag tagged “Where the Boys Are.” And ballet management played up the testosterone: Balanchine’s nod to masculine splendor, Apollo—with its big, juicy, heroic role—was in repertory at both NYCB and ABT, an unusual occurrence. Many men danced it, though rarely more than once (leaving no chance for skill to build). Still it was fascinating to see such a variety of types chisel into that ice-white iconography. As if to stress the tipping scales between gender, a program conflict cropped up early in the season, leaving the unhappy choice: Julie Kent at ABT in Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading or Ethan Stiefel at NYCB in Apollo. These were long awaited debuts for both dancers. With Stiefel soon to leave NYCB for a European company, I went to Apollo. (Quite reasonably, another critic I know chose Kent because Stiefel was leaving, rendering his performance “an experiment in a void.”)

When I first came to care about classical dance, I paid no attention to male dancers. Ballet was turnout and toe shoes and women had both, while men, with their tighter, narrower pelvises, could hardly muster half as much rotation in the hips, and of course didn’t go on pointe. By college I did care about male dancers. Nureyev was a household word, and Baryshnikov had just defected. But even then, I only loved Rudi for his love of ballet. Because men didn’t have the turnout, they just didn’t have the territory of women—or the poetic power. Baryshnikov, plush in turnout, with a stately, plump arabesque, was the exception that proved the rule.

In the persons of Vladimir Malakhov and Ethan Stiefel, however, we are now seeing male dancing based on a fully rotated and integrated, almost female, turnout. When male strength meets such technical refinement the result is jawdropping clarity—a kind of enchantment. Stiefel is never better than in magic-forest ballets like Valse Fantaisie, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Sleeping Beauty Act Two; in roles of classical scale this smallish dancer seems to grow a foot, phrasing daringly, leaving the limits of tradition behind. His arabesque is ardent. In more prosaically scaled work (Robbins, Martins) Stiefel can seem slight, under-engaged. He needs classicism.

And Malakhov. When you first see this dancer set foot upon the stage, though blonde and not overly muscled, you can’t help thinking Rudi. He has the deliberate, pantherine walk—that sexy gravity—and the stage-bound self-containment. When he enters for the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, the cape is redundant—he’s already caped in concentration. Clive Barnes called him a “Rudi wannabe,” sarcasm that missed the larger point. Malakhov is more important for the ways he’s unlike Rudi. Where Nureyev brought dark force to his dancing, Malakhov brings lightness, restraint. Where Nureyev dragged sexuality into the picture, Malakhov can seem beyond it. And unlike Nureyev, he’s not out to conquer classical technique, he’s in league with it. He can break your heart with a tendu.

Malakhov has feet any female would be pleased with; his demi-pointe (work on tiptoe) is sensitive, springy, fascinatingly feline. Heading into a leap he gets finer, feathery, lofting off the ball of his foot—not heavier as most men do. In every step Malakhov shows you the interior logic of ballet technique, its unique system of torsion, lift, and leverage. Not only does he have quintessentially pure “placement” (the solar plexus properly positioned over the hips), he enunciates through the torso with amazing equilibrium and nuance, bracing brazenly back into big air moves (as only Misha did), calibrating balances so that they look like expressions of idealism. This fluid and articulate discipline gives Malakhov a special phosphorescence. He glows in the dark. And I like the way Malakhov has absorbed both Nureyev and Baryshnikov into his system—making for yet another electric opposition. When Malakhov’s on stage, everyone stands up straighter, high on his high.

There are those who feel Malakhov’s best move is his grand jeté and in his body it is a thing of surreal beauty. Soaring in a perfect split, he has a particularly arresting way of just floating at the top—a countertenor who’s hit his zone—super-suspending the moment with a gentle gesture of the palms, as if silencing the sky. Still, I think his alabaster arabesque comes first. Partly there’s the shock of seeing it on a man. Partly there is Malakhov’s deep belief in it. This arabesque has aura—an Apollonian symmetry and sensation of ascent (the arabesque design, it turns out, first appeared in Hellenistic times).

And yet, despite what would seem to be a natural fit, Malakhov—and Stiefel as well— looked disconnected from the role of Apollo, as if technique was getting in the way. It is well known that Balanchine viewed this Apollo as a rough young god. The role was choreographed for Serge Lifar, a rough young Russian with not much turnout or finish. The man who commanded the role of Apollo this season was Igor Zelensky, a large, rough-hewn dancer with a mountain-range arabesque, simple but good, and upper-body strength to burn. The audience still prefers this kind of macho, and in the first round of Apollos, I preferred Zelensky, too. The sheer size of his commitment was moving.

Apollo is an allegory about the making of a dancer, an artist, and the centrality of Apollo this season is an allegory in its own right. In this ballet, man is the center of the universe; women are handmaid, mother, or muse. The role of Terpsichore is equal to Apollo’s, but only if the dancer makes it so, and none did. It is a curious time in classical dance when men seem the center of its universe, when women are stuck while men are evolving. What could account for this? Well, to the novice audience, male virtuosity is a good deal more accessible than female. It’s certainly easier to market. (Hence the hyping of that little twister Angel Corella, an eager talent, too eagerly sacrificing alignment for bravura.) More insidiously, it is easier for today’s choreographers to create for men: men don’t have the female’s historical/metaphorical baggage (they were never handmaids, mothers, or muses), men don’t possess that parallel universe—pointe. Twyla Tharp, for example, reconstituted her cloying ballet from last year, Americans We, by upping the masculinity quotient and dropping Corella into its center. Now it’s whiz-bang rousing. Her new ballet The Elements comes suddenly into focus, plugged in, whenever men take center stage. Women are too complicated, caught in limbo between a rich poeticized past and the meaningless postmodern moment. What do ballerinas want? I used to feel I knew. What’s missing? Choreographers who care about arabesque.