The Great Leap Forward

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Nymph on a Gambol. Unlike Balanchine, who drills his girls until they look like so many identical windup dolls, Joffrey encourages his dancers to express their own personalities. Feathery Lisa Bradley, 20, is a fragilely beautiful study in symmetry; fiery Luis Fuente, 20, is built like a blockbuster and has the same impact; sinuous Trinette Singleton, 19, dances like a sensuous nymph out for a gambol; and then there is airborne Robert Blankshine, 19, who has mastered the neat little trick of sailing into the wings as he kicks the back of his head. They all help give the Joffrey Ballet its hallmark: go power plus grow power.

In spirit if not in style, the Joffrey troupe owes an intellectual debt to the work of Balanchine. At least four other companies have been created by former Martha Graham dancers, who nonetheless reject as much as they borrow from the grand guru of gyration. Not that she minds. "I am particularly pleased," she says, "that there are no replicas of me in the field. Everyone should be doing something else, meeting their own challenge." In other words, echoing the hippie maxim, do your own thing. That they have—and their disparate styles might well be summed up as Tuned-in, Turned-On, Dropped-Out and Flipped-Out.

>PAUL TAYLOR, 38, is a tall, block-shouldered Tuned-in from Pittsburgh who spans the gap between classical and modern like a colossus. He had his fling at the far-out, once stood stark still onstage for four minutes (Dance Observer responded by running a review that consisted of four inches of blank space). But today he also has a bit of Mr. B. in his,bonnet. Aureole is a freshly pressed version of a washed-out, frilly "white ballet," in which his dancers interweave flurries of mincing steps with great swooping glides without a seam showing. In Orbs, a kind of astronaughty tour of life and love on the planets, he injects moments of broad, bawdy humor, into a probing of the epic theme of God, man and nature. Cosmic it may be, but he gets through.

>ALVIN AILEY, 37, is a Turned-On with a streak of the revivalist in him.

"Look!" he tells his Negro brethren. "Look what you've made. Look how beautiful it is. You made it out of adversity. Be proud of it!" He is talking about their cultural heritage, and when he celebrates it in dance, it is something to be proud of. In Revelations, a searingly personal statement based on Negro spirituals, his dancers evoke all the yearning, despair, anger and, finally, bright hope of a people who will overcome. Ailey already has; such powerful, nonethnic dances as his Feast of Ashes and Ariadne mark him as one of the most richly gifted talents in dance. And he has the receipts to prove it. Two years ago his twelve-member troupe grossed $29,000; this year it will top $250,000.