In his New York apartment, George Balanchine had an Audubon print of a bald eagle. It was in his living room; you can see it in the famous photographs of Balanchine playing with his cat Mourka. In these photos the cat is in the air, fully stretched yet twisting in the middle, utterly rapt yet strangely relaxed—not unlike Fred Astaire snapped between steps. Balanchine is often crouched lower than the cat, urging it on, as if coaching a dancer in a complicated jeté en tournant. Behind them, perched in profile, is the eagle. It is a wonderful trio—cat, raptor, choreographer—all three evolved in the same direction, with the same physiological assets: sharp eyes that miss nothing, trap-like claws for catching life, and senses attuned to sound, smell, movement, gesture. For these three creatures seeing and hearing are kinetic acts, a wiring beneath and beyond thought.

Balanchine died in 1983, but even when he was alive it seemed unfair to measure other choreographers against him. Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor were great artists (the influence of Tudor’s early Lilac Garden on Balanchine’s late Davidsbündlertänze is a fascinating bit of shadow play, a nod of homage better late than never). But in the sheer breadth and amplitude of Balanchine’s gifts, even these geniuses were brought down a notch. To hold Balanchine as a point of comparison for today’s choreographers is still more and rather wildly unfair. Gen X, Y, and Z have loads (or maybe I should say, downloads) of information, but no experience of the wide world their predecessors knew (Kerouac’s “road” is now Microsoft’s “highway”). And yet, what can we do? There is no escaping Balanchine as a standard. The deep and palpable dimensionality of his ballets, that sense of invisible architecture popping up before our eyes, of landscapes teeming with growing, breathing things—in short, his glorious, continuous exploration of what a ballet can be and do—all this seems lost on youngsters making their first, second, and third works for New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. In the last few years, ballets premiered at these companies have been so flat and faceless and monotonal and dimensionless that the word “premiere” has begun to seem more punishment than promise.

The late critic David Daniel, when he could be dragged to the theater to see something new (or was told over the phone about a recent dubious effort), loved to purr ominously, “it’s the end of civilization as we know it.” Pushed for analysis, he fixed on the television screen as the great reductive force in American culture. There it was, shaped like a stage—a box—but without any depth or life, in fact, a vacuum. It was insanely quixotic, commercial breaks every five minutes. And most damaging, instead of being larger than life, scaled for wonder, it was very much smaller. To the teat of television, we can add the quick addictions of the computer—video games, the internet, virtual this and that. The “extreme sports” that a tiny minority of Americans engage in (and the rest watch on TV) are the antidotal flip side to the extreme slouch of the couch potato and the computer junkie, sedentary sensibilities happy to gaze (or glaze) upon a depthless screen making synthetic sounds. As my best friend with two sons says, “it’s a battle to keep your kids in three dimensions.” The same with ballet.

Case in point. In January, NYCB presented a new work by company corps member Melissa Barak. It was a piece called Telemann Overture Suite in E Minor, and Barak made it for the School of American Ballet’s 2001 workshop performance. The ballet impressed NYCB director Peter Martins, and he asked Barak to set it on the company. But what was it that impressed him? Barak’s work possesses a youthful bounciness that no doubt looks good on the students at SAB, and she keeps the bodies moving. But keeping the bodies moving isn’t enough. It isn’t even the point. What about relationships, flirtations, competitions, quests? Barak’s dancers are like smiling members of a commune, so equal they flat-line in friendliness. What about Telemann? The atmosphere of the baroque, the theater of his day, the dance forms of his time? A reference to any of these might have opened out, or dramatically enlarged, the ballet. Instead, it all takes place on one level, ground level, as if the stage were an empty lot before the building goes up. For the twenty minutes of Telemann, amid rows of romps and kicks, nothing happens.

It was pretty hard on Barak that her ballet shared the program with two little Balanchines, Monumentum Pro Gesualdo (1960) and Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1963). They’re both short and spare, so short they’ve been teamed up in the repertory. Even together they can seem slight, nothing really. And yet, everything. Monumentum is set to madrigals by Don Carlo Gesualdo, which Stravinsky recomposed for orchestra; Movements, also by Stravinsky, uses serial technique. So both scores are planted in a time. Balanchine uses that. His Monumentum is grave and lyric, with a recurring pattern of narrow diagonals like long corridors. There’s a cathedral feeling of vaults and stained-glass windows. And the tender pawing motion of the women’s legs, well, they might be unicorns wrought, pictured, in those windows. The ballet’s famous series of tosses—ballerina in arabesque, thrown high into the arms of partners—feels like white doves loosed at the alter. Movements, which follows after a pause, has none of the old-stone reverberation of Monumentum. Its silences and stillnesses are aggressive, the abyss that lives in every laboratory. Stravinsky described the women in Movements as “a hexachord of those bee-like little girls who seem to be bred to the eminent choreographer’s specifications.” They do look bred in test tubes. They could be dangerous.

These Balanchine “nothings”—so rich in natural phenomena, the imagery of the spire and the scientist, and so plainly invoking two types of faith—to see them next to the latest offerings is to be struck by how denatured most new ballets are, how empty they are of beating hearts (other than the aerobic kind) and various levels of movement. But then, there’s no nature in a computer screen. No outdoors or weather, ditches and rises, the sudden flush of other life. And even if young choreographers aren’t on-line, do they understand they have to let go of the barre and see the world? Even if it’s only watching pigeons in Central Park?

I remember the late 1980s, when Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham were carrying the day, growing greater as they would have anyway, but in the context of Balanchine’s death their power doubly profound. Look, their new work seemed to say, there is still genius here. I remember a conversation between a balletomane, another critic, and me. The ’mane referred to Merce Cunningham’s dances as “ballets.” The critic took issue with that. Cunningham was postmodern; his whole ethos was a reaction against the expectations of classical dance; to call his dances ballets was a contradiction in terms, willfully naive. The conversation made an impression, because both were right. Still, I couldn’t help siding with the ’mane. Cunningham may have made philosophical choices that had aesthetic ramifications, but he was born to a world saturated with classicism and came of age during “civilization as we knew it”—the old taxonomies intact.

In recent years, when Cunningham became too physically impaired to move around the studio, he began using a computer program called Lifeforms, mapping his dances with a click and slide. And yet his work never lost its creaturely feel, its prickly skin and warm-bloodedness. In a recent American Masters documentary on Cunningham, one of the surprises was his morning ritual. Cunningham sketches daily—pictures of birds, mostly shorebirds, and with an acute eye for the character of a species as revealed through posture and grouping. Again, like Balanchine, the predator’s eye for life and form. From these delightful and true sketches, the camera cut to a tape of Cunningham’s Beach Birds from 1991. We’re not supposed to say that Cunningham’s dances are “about” anything, but given the title, and the dancers wearing unitards halved in black and white, an evocation of laughing gulls was clearly at hand. The dance plays with the seemingly empty patience with which these birds stand on the beach, the sort of I Ching toss of their groupings, the random landings and liftoffs. As only the cry of a gull in the air can do, the dance questions the meaning of life, the transience, the wind. It is nothing and everything, beneath and beyond, gulls there but not there. Look at a work like Beach Birds and you begin to understand that the absence of dimension in our new ballets is an absence of metaphor and simile, the time-honored tools of the poet. Great choreography is poetry, and where would poetry be without its nightingales and glow-worms and long-legged flies and fleas, without the leaps and flights they bring the artist. Wallace Stevens: “I know noble accents/ And lucid, inescapable rhythms;/ But I know, too,/ That the blackbird is involved/ In what I know.”

Classical ballet of the nineteenth century is a Noah’s arc of nature and a primer in the job of making metaphors and similes. One need only look to that cornerstone of dance classicism, The Sleeping Beauty, to see a garlanded hierarchy of court creatures: mice, rats, cats, birds, wolves, and the implied horses and hounds of the Hunt Scene. Even in the Act III wedding, when God’s in his heaven and the natural and supernatural worlds are joined, creatures run true to form. In the Bluebird pas de deux, for instance, scholars have puzzled over Princess Florine’s signature gesture—hand to ear, almost as if hearing a whisper. Was this movement merely coquettish or did it mean something? I’ve never forgotten the answer of an aging ballerina on a dance panel: Florine is a bird, the woman said, she’s listening and wary because she hears Puss in Boots, a cat, in the wings.

Trained at Russia’s Maryinsky Theatre, Balanchine learned all its lessons. The swan queens and white cats and bluebirds live on in his ballets as echoes, intonations, and sighs, leitmotivs that sing to the music, transmuting space into place (when the port de bras of Odette is worked into the ballerina role in “Diamonds,” you feel the water of the lakeside has frozen into an ice-crystal palace). But Balanchine didn’t limit himself to what he inherited from Petipa, Ivanov, and the rest. His ballets brim with his own observations, things animal, vegetable, and mineral, beginning with the Siren in The Prodigal Son: she’s a black widow spider in a red hourglass chiton. Think of the chambered nautilus in Concerto Barocco —an inner ear hearing Bach hearing God creating life. The Four Temperaments, choreographed and premiered on the shallow stage of the High School of Needle Trades, is full of shape-shifting, morphing form—stinging insects and stony sphinxes and even a small cyclone. As if to show how imaginative energy can implode and open even the flattest strip of space, in 4Ts Balanchine turns a sidewalk of stage into a Nile of the mind (this is why Balanchine never needed elaborate sets—“place” was created in the floor pattern and the steps). And then there’s the greenery winding through the entire repertoire, daisy chains and garlands and girls with weeping willow hair, all climbing and stemming from one root, the tree with the apple that opened our eyes.

The clearest, and dearest, example of what I’m talking about is in Apollo. Made in 1928, it is Balanchine’s coming-of-age ballet, and young Apollo, learning how to use his power, is very much the young choreographer himself. Apollo has three muses whom he puts through their paces and learns from in return. The four are playmates, but the idyll cannot last. Late in the ballet, the muses seat themselves on the floor, each with a leg extended forward so their three points touch and their legs are like three rays of light, a small bonfire. As Apollo walks around them they follow him with their eyes, and when he’s behind them they keep him in view by dropping their heads back, the way cats do, in a gaze that follows full circle. It’s a kind of limbic attention outside human nature; anyone who has lived with cats has seen them do this, follow the same movement in unblinking synchronicity, spellbound. It is earthly too, three kittens on a hearth, and elemental, the turn of the earth around the sun. Pulling from his system what he’d seen of cats, Balanchine gives us a phenomenon, the muses’ silent understanding that Apollo has changed, he’s ready to be a god. When Balanchine told friends, as reported in Bernard Taper’s biography, that he wanted to present Mourka in a public program titled “The Evolution of Ballet: From Petipa to Petipaw,” he was, in a way, describing what he’d been doing all along.

Last year, New York City Ballet created a new position, Resident Choreographer, for Christopher Wheeldon. A City Ballet dancer, formerly of London’s Royal Ballet, Wheeldon had been making ballets since his teens and he was ready to make them full time. So he stopped dancing, which was a loss; his presence onstage was 110 percent. To see him as the happy lover in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, picking imaginary flowers oh so preciously (like an eager decorator matching swatches), was to glimpse the John Gielguds and Benny Hills in every Englishman’s background. Still, Wheeldon brings his 110 percent to his own ballets. It’s clear he adores the art—which is more than you can say for a lot of a classical choreographers these days.

You can see that Wheeldon wants to make ballets that are places in time and space. He wants those deep dimensions, those golden keys to other realms. He has easy musicality and a big natural gift for making lovely and unexpected enchainement (the linking of steps into a phrase). And yet in ballet after promising ballet, Wheeldon seems to hit up against his ambitions, as if the lock won’t turn. In his collaborations with the set designer Ian Falconer, Wheeldon has actually imposed dimension upon the ballets through odd angles and extreme strategies of staging. Because of this—and I admire his reach—the ballets tend to begin better than they end. Wheeldon’s enchainements are so immediately disarming that it takes some time to see he hasn’t animated the ballet from the inside—he’s not working metaphorically. Scènes de Ballet, a piece Wheeldon first did for SAB and later set on NYCB, opens breathtakingly, the stage split with a barre slanting down the middle. The students on one side are reality. The students on the other side are the mirror reflection—another dimension! What a wonderful point of departure. But as this classroom ballet progresses from barre to center to a pas de deux for an older boy and girl, it loses that twilight zone strangeness, that displacement unique to dancers—so much of their lives lived in a mirror. The fantasy doesn’t climax or burst or dissolve interestingly. It just sort of goes away. Lord knows I can’t tell Wheeldon what he should have done. Jerome Robbins saw this dancer-and-mirror duality as an atmospheric intoxication. He turned his dancers into dream creatures, the faun and nymph of Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune set to music by Debussy. This gave him a whole other order of movement from which to pull—feral sensuality, animal languor. Other orders of movement, this is what Wheeldon must learn to use.

He comes closer in his hit from last season, Polyphonia. Set to ten piano pieces—oddball, exploratory, droll—by Gyorgy Ligeti, the ballet is a distillation of several choreographic voices (Balanchine, Robbins, Martins). It is precise and witty, an accomplished pastiche, and it contains a tender shoot of metaphor, the second duet, which is danced by Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto. Mysterious, amphibious, she’s like a deep-sea creature, opening and closing, floating up and around Soto. This duet feels like the heart of the ballet, but it comes too early to act as a culmination or as the answer to some question. Indeed, Whelan’s rarely-touching-the-ground sinuousness is in whispering dialogue with Allegra Kent’s floating phantom in Balanchine’s Ivesia- na, “The Unanswered Question” section. Wheeldon has created his own unanswered question: Where are we, what is she? Even though the music is Ligeti, I kept thinking of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals—“Aquarium.” When Whelan and Soto come back in part IX, they bring their enclosed flow with them and the audience leans in. They’ve seen something happening. The ballet ends as it began, with the dancers’ machine-age shadows cast huge upon the cyclorama. Polyphonia is a little too slick to be satisfying, but the little pocket of life inside stays with you.

Variations Sérieuses is both a step back, to something more concrete, and a step forward; it brims. It is a comic ballet about a ballet company, set literally onstage. Falconer’s clever set puts the audience in the wings, stage left. Talk about dimension! It’s a view on a ballet I’ve never seen before. With charm and economy, Wheeldon brings on the characters—the ballerina, the premier danseur, the young girl, the ballet master, the corps, etc.—and tells his backstage story, which is basically All About Eve in toe shoes. Because Wheeldon is so focused on getting this world right and doing it in a way that gives pleasure, he reaches in all the right directions. When the diva ballerina gets angry she paws the ground like a snorting bull. Corps girls flutter and peck like hens. There’s a barnyard brio to company life, and the young girl in her white leotard is like something just emerged, translucent, from the chrysalis in the eaves. She’s the connection between backstage and onstage, for the ballet she understudies is about sylphs—the tutus have little wings.

The pragmatism required by such storytelling is liberating for Wheeldon. (I have long felt that Martins could help out his young choreographers if he gave them stiffer assignments, or pointed exercises, like the kinds one used to get in acting classes—pretend you’re a lettuce in love; make a pas de deux for porcupines.) Wheeldon lays in all kinds of details and observations, making references (there’s an Astaire-inspired dance for four stagehands with brooms) and allusions: the young girl’s opening solo is full of turns in attitude, the pose of Mercury and a forecast of her mercurial rise. The ballet is booming with life.

When Variations Serieuses was premiered last spring, the ending was weak (to be honest, I can’t remember how it ended). But Wheeldon has fixed the ending. Now, as in Polyphonia, he brings the ballet round full circle. His next choreographic challenge is to make an ending that doesn’t circle back, that is instead a surprise even to himself. Here, however, the ending works. The young girl—a diva now, flouncing and pouting like the first one did—watches another spidery corps girl tiptoe onto the empty stage, just as she once had, hungry for stardom. It’s the eternal Eve Harrington—there’s always one in the wings—and a nice nip of an ending, a sting of recognition. Paradise and predators, feathers and claws. What is ballet but two genres in one body? Metaphysical poetry and melodrama.