Neither American Ballet Theatre nor the New York City Ballet did anything millennial for their Spring 2000 seasons at Lincoln Center, and that’s a blessing, because neither American Ballet Theatre nor the New York City Ballet is in a position to do anything definitive right now. American Ballet Theatre is deep into blockbuster mentality—a kind of denial, really— whereby we get week after week of full-length story ballets (five Taming of the Shrews, for example, followed by eight La Bayadères), long stretches separated by two to three days of under-rehearsed repertory programs. Across the plaza, NYCB looks just joyless, as if the strain of survival in a boom-rich, arts-fickle New York, plus the monumental legacy of George Balanchine, is too oppressive a load to cart into the next century. ABT is bottom-heavy and ramshackle; NYCB is thin and rattled. At both, top-tier female dancers are aging or injured, with no great push coming up from underneath, and day-to-day performance has all the consistency of a marble in a pinball machine.

For the past few seasons, the light—the tilt!—at Lincoln Center has come from two young men at ABT: Ethan Stiefel, an elegant Apollonian blond, and Angel Corella, a boyish brunette with a burning happiness onstage. Like Hamlet and Fortinbras, both are princes, but physically, chemically different. Cast in the same roles on different nights, facing the same challenges, these two have been the show within a show at ABT, a match game score-for-score. Who’ll dominate in Push Comes to Shove? Who in Billy the Kid? It’s the best kind of competition, not only because it is an even match (in the days when Mikhail Baryshnikov technically outstripped all the other men there were no even matches), but also because both dancers have innate taste. Neither guy wants to win ugly, so everybody wins.

Stiefel was produced by the School of American Ballet and rose to principal dancer at New York City Ballet, a young man with musical daring and a rapier technique, going for the big moves. He has a clear line like a quill pen in a beautiful hand moving across the page—a graceful continuity even though he has a rather tight-knit physique. His i’s are dotted, his t’s all crossed, and Lord his toes are pointed! Stiefel left NYCB meticulously finished, yet the finish never got the better of the phrase. He was a golden boy, with round baby blues much like Baryshnikov’s but a lighter, sweeter touch —something between Leonardo DiCaprio and early Brad Pitt.

Stiefel joined ABT in 1997, already refined. Angel Corella came into the company with more bottom on him (literally and figuratively), two years before Stiefel. A corps dancer in Spain, he was spotted in a ballet competition in Paris (spinning no doubt) and was taken up by ABT, who promptly dropped him into Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, the ABT rite of passage in which all men-with-potential get dropped like fledglings over a choppy sea. It’s fly or swim or sink—flying’s best. Corella was a little chunky in those days, a little thick through the leg, but so game, so charmingly eager to please, and to please through dancing. Watching him not let go of a multiple pirouette, hanging on to the spin while losing his center, I thought: another tousle-haired tornado! I preferred Vladimir Malakhov, who also joined ABT in 1995, a dancer of long-limbed articulation and feral glow.

But there is no second-guessing desire, especially when it is buttressed by discipline. And it’s easier to improve alignment than it is to amp up the passion (again, Baryshnikov’s a case in point: he never could make his perfection look passionate; the harder he tried, the stagier he got). Corella was making the right choice, and by his third year at ABT his technique was catching up with his heart. The arrival of Stiefel didn’t hurt.

The two dancers first went memorably head to head in 1998, in the company’s production of Le Corsaire. A Maryinsky-vintage piece of ballet exotica (beautiful slave girls are sold in the square, then rescued by their pirate boyfriends, etc.), Le Corsaire is today a choreographic hodgepodge that contains priceless nuggets of Petipa—one of them the iconographic Corsaire pas de deux, the slave-and-lady dance that famously framed Rudolf Nureyev for the public eye. Performing it with tea-finger Margot Fonteyn, he flexed, he coiled, he threw himself in spasm at her feet. It was Russia wowing the West, Rudi bent on arousal, slave to the audience (and enslaving the audience in return). Stiefel, however, likes to give contained, structured performances, and he danced the role with gleaming self-effacement, a dark gleam, making of himself a burnished totem. Corella compressed even further, curling deeper, kneeling lower. But more trusting of abandon, he opened at the top, let himself tear loose in quick synaptic riptides. Stiefel brought the house down. Corella carried it away.

In spring 1999 all eyes were on the ABT revival of Push Comes to Shove, Twyla Tharp’s 1976 hit vehicle for Baryshnikov, a role for him to show off in. It’s a curious piece, a portrait of Misha that’s really a portrait of ABT’s dependence on Misha as an attraction, an energy source, a bright, sharp focus. Tharp showed a certain disdain for the women around him; they’re dippy, kooky, wobble-bodied. He’s the crack smart-ass, and also “beauty like a tightened bow.” The man who steps into this role must have the reverb of that bow, and be the arrow too. He has to be taut, shooting, heightened at once, otherwise the jokes don’t fly. My money was on Stiefel.

But it was Corella who had the edge. Stiefel danced Push like a long classical variation (albeit one with snotty asides), giving every step 100 percent, fully stretched, fully pointed, and wearing himself out fast by holding on too hard, not winging along. It was a heroic performance in which Stiefel’s good faith got in the way. Push is to some extent a bad-faith ballet. It’s energies are those of the stand-up comic: aggressive, anti-social, out of control. This guy (a far cry from Rudi in Corsaire) uses the audience as a reflection in which to check his hair (and then he gives the audience an “up yours”). Corella—relaxed, class-clownish, but zapping the steps—rode his own virtuosity like it was something silly. It was the best Push since Misha. And more fun.

The next face-off was Billy the Kid, Eugene Loring’s back-pocket masterpiece of 1938, a brilliant collaboration with Aaron Copland, who turned in a haunted score that cleared space for a haunting ballet. Billy has been out of the ABT rep for quite some time, permission revoked, I heard, because ABT performances were not up to snuff, but it was back in October 1999, part of the fall season at City Center. “Billy is about the West as it is dreamed of,” the critic Edwin Denby wrote in 1943, “as it is imagined by boys playing in empty lots in the suburbs of our cities.” The make-believe of kids playing is on a continuum with the make-believe of ballet.

Little Billy sustains big performances because he’s like Don Giovanni—the one with the energy, the one you root for. But the energy has to stay sharply inside the stylized lines, resonating (the dandy costumes are eye-popping black-and-white stripes, then little-kid stars). Corella tends to be more rapt than concentrated. He’s riveted to the stage world around him, hearing, seeing, and as Billy he kicked into the role with his little black boots, his big brown eyes innocent of his own brutality. It was a jangly portrayal, as if Corella’s spurs were loose (his cowboy hat really was loose, slipping down over those puppy eyes), but held together by charisma. In this ballet, though, charisma doesn’t beat concentration. Stiefel sank into Billy as if it were a character role, affecting a bow-legged walk and a bitter grimace. His Billy was a conscious killer, heavy with hate—a risky path on Stiefel’s part, a fine line between character and cartoon, but it was the right line, his portrayal having the impacted power of Philip Guston’s one-eyed wedges. And then there was the tenderness he brought to the dance in the desert, when Billy is thinking of his sweetheart (who is an echo of his mother). Billy is alone, imagining, so Stiefel performs the entire duet looking always beyond his partner, and suddenly Billy is weightless, as if he’s dancing with the stars in the backdrop. It’s a glimpse behind the mask, unbearably sad. Harsh strokes and exquisite calibration—Stiefel’s was the best Billy I’ve ever seen.

The fascinating thing about Stiefel and Corella is that their side-by-side ascent has galvanized them at a time when other ABT principals are looking undirected, lost, or “lite.” Vladimir Malakhov, gifted, vivid in his first years with the company, has somehow marginalized himself, giving performances of empty elegance, his phosphorescence on the fritz. His gala night performance of the Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, the Balanchine show-stopper, set the tone. He danced it bouncing like a baby, as if it were Bournonville, as wrong as wrong can be. Where is his coach? Does he have one? Julie Kent, once a dancer of delicacy and moonlight, has gotten grande dame-ish, exerting a Margot Fonteyn-like pretty-pretty reign over the repertory, and giving herself airs by dancing roles she has no business putting a foot in, like the season’s first week Theme and Variations. Kent was a shambles—slow, blurred, hoisted around by her poor partner, not strong or sharp enough to cut the crystal. Mid-season she practically walked through Lilac Garden, once one of her most glowing roles. And by the final week’s Manon pas de deux with Julio Bocca, she was cheating with a lot of head and neck action, lascivious glances flashed at the audience. Manon is slippery and Kent is square, a dancer boxed-in by her correctness and pleased to be in that box, getting boxier with every year. She needs to trade her airs for oxygen.

And Ashley Tuttle. This dancer has been slow to blossom, so slow she always strikes me as older than she is. She has the older dancer’s love of adagio, and in the slow spells of La Bayadère or Giselle or Theme and Variations she’s like a white goldfish drifting, lilting, alone in a glass globe. Her soul bubble is wonderful, and then suddenly it’s not, she’s too far away. It doesn’t help that she’s pinched through the hips, especially on the right side, and so lacks freedom, swing, getting her legs up and around. She’s too young to be so circumscribed. Is it an injury, bad training? Tuttle has a ballerina’s wayward sense of invention, but her technical problems tamp down her impact, holding her to a middling scale, more soloist than star.

As for Stiefel and Corella this spring, Stiefel—wearing a feather and turquoise harem pants as Ali, the slave in Le Corsaire —graced the billboards out front of the Met, but he was out for the entire season with mononucleosis. And Corella—I’m not surprised—was lackluster. It began on the first night, the gala, when he danced the Corsaire pas de deux and finished his phrases with that hard hand-snap of dispatch. That snap is running rampant through ABT, a coarse punctuation that may feel necessary in the cavernous Met space (it’s not), and is also a covering tactic for dancers tired or just plain weak (it covers nothing). Feet flap, fouettés falter, pirouettes go “pfffft,” but the dancers meet the end of the phrase like snapping banners—“I did it!”—even though they didn’t. It was disconcerting to see Corella selling Corsaire, but in every Corella performance I saw this season—as James in La Sylphide, as Solor in La Baya- dère, even as the Lover in Lilac Garden— he put a weird whippy finish on his phrases. It’s hard not to feel that Stiefel’s sterling sensibility holds Corella to a higher standard of refinement, just as Corella’s bliss in virtuosity is a spur for Stiefel. It has always been said that ABT dancers have to do it themselves. It is lately said, as well, that a lot of ABT coaching is now done “by compliment,” meaning the principals get more coddling than criticism. We all know where that leads. It leads to Julie Kent making mash of Theme (or even being in Theme), to Paloma Herrera dancing the Corsaire pas de deux as if she were in a circus, center ring. It leads to dancing that doesn’t look like a product of anything, or in the plaintive words of a fellow critic, “They have no kinetic depth.”

The new Swan Lake that the artistic director Kevin McKenzie staged and premiered this season, a 1.5 million-dollar baby, is certainly attractive with its Roseville colors, its Rookwood trees. It’s also up- to-date, with borrowings from Matthew Bourne’s Broadway version of Swan Lake, including Bourne’s stress on sexual thralldom (in McKenzie’s act III, von Rothbart openly seduces the visiting princesses). And I liked the shock-lit Frankenstein landscape of act IV, a minute of originality. Otherwise, this Swan Lake is all set and no sensibility, with nothing palpably ABT about it. And something palpable is exactly the point. Swan Lake, perhaps more than any other ballet, is about kinetic logic, which is the life-force of a ballet company, a systemic poetic force coursing through all its shapes and forms. Unlike the Kirov or the Royal or the Bolshoi (which even at extremely low ebb, as the company was in its visit this summer, still works as one with that turned-in, high-hearted push); unlike NYCB where the issue of kinetic logic—how a dancer moves, how the company dances—is one of the crucial aesthetic issues of our time; unlike these great companies, ABT does not have a school feeding into the corps and is therefore not coherent from the ground up. Company class, coaches, and critically-attuned choreography must face these aesthetic differences, must forge, at least, an ethic, a standard.

In a long career, George Balanchine never stopped commenting on the innate laziness of the human body, how with dancers you had to “start pushing them and scream at them to make them more alive.” It was high praise to be “not bad.” Antony Tudor, the choreographer who made masterpieces for ABT during his long association with the company, whose ballets sound the deepest chords in ABT history, was notoriously blunt and manipulative with dancers, his mind games the stuff of lore. He did not choreograph or coach by compliment. What would Tudor say if he saw this season’s performances of his ballet Jardin aux Lilas (Lilac Garden)? ABT used to be definitive in Tudor.

Jardin aux Lilas was choreographed and premiered in England in 1936, and in 1940 was acquired by ABT (then called Ballet Theatre) for the company’s first season. The ballet takes place in a garden, at a farewell party where a young woman, Caroline, will see her Lover one last time before she enters into a marriage of convenience. Her future husband and his former mistress are also at the party. So simple a plot, and yet Jardin aux Lilas is one of the most complex ballets ever choreographed—a pas de quatre inside a panorama.

The pictorial plane of Tudor’s stage is like no one else’s and reflects his turn-of-the-century sensibility, his roots in Edwardian England, when life still seemed to flow by horizontally (it was flowing toward a trench). Like Alfred Tennyson, an earlier A. T., Tudor is a poet of loss—lost love, lost idealism, sometimes lost life—and he uses his corps like lines in a slow rolling ballad, sending them across the stage in unison, their port de bras a curving rhyme of alignment. And he sends them across in waves, so they suggest the sweep, the passage, of time. (From Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “Our little systems have their day;/ They have their day and cease to be:/ They are but broken lights of thee,/ And thou, O Lord, art more than they.”)

Against this pictorial flow, four fates rise and fall in high relief: Tudor moves the four leads upstage and down, perpendicular to the panorama, releasing them into another dimension. He also gives them intimacy, immediacy, by stopping them in tableaux— an embrace, a reach, a rest—a frieze of emotion. This is melodrama, not unlike the party in Now, Voyager (1942) when Bette Davis and Paul Henreid are webbed across the room by glances only. The four dancers must project this kind of drama, but with their bodies, their backs. Tudor helps them by keeping their port de bras low. Battement, jeté, sissonne—these explosive moves are performed with arms down at the sides, hands below shoulders and often below waists. Tudor suggests the straitlaced decorum of the time, the stillness and quiet eloquence of bust, shoulders, head. “He didn’t want the arms to distract,” the ballerina Melissa Hayden, who learned the ballet from Tudor, told me after one performance this season. If the arms are down, the dancers must lift and lead with their hearts, which takes a pliant spine, and strength, push, through the pelvis.

Tudor cannot be tossed off. In this way he is different from Balanchine, who liked to see dancers fly, shooting from the hip. As Hayden said, “Tudor is like a painting.” She meant the lines had to be where Tudor put them, the dancers in sync musically and spatially, rehearsed to the nth degree. At the same time—like Balanchine—Tudor wanted large-scale performance from his dancers, bodies passionate in space, covering ground. “You have to dance Tudor full out,” his former assistant Airi Hynninen told Ballet Review in 1995. “When an arabesque droops, so does the spirit.”

I saw three of the season’s performances of Jardin, one in the first week, one mid-season, and a matinée at season’s end. It was as if ABT was rehearsing the ballet onstage. The first performance was shocking for its lack of cohesion, its droopiness and dropped details (Caroline’s distinct goodbye to each guest, for instance). The second performance was better—clearer but still wan. By the last performance, the lines were holding, it was Jardin aux Lilas, taut and teeming with details, the stillnesses more powerful, the music, Chausson’s Poème, sounding new-minted (Tudor’s sensory genius is such that his compositional clarity seems to crystallize the music, don’t ask me how). This last was the performance Melissa Hayden saw, and she judged it a dishonor to Tudor: it was still too messy, and the dancing—and consequently the emotions— too small. But I was thankful for the improvement, moved by the “little system” that did come through, the twilight, and more than ever baffled as to how ABT could treat this heart-stopping ballet—sixty years in its repertory!—like second-hand goods.