Dance: Homage to Igor

STRAVINSKY: How much music will you want for the three dancers' first variation?

BALANCHINE: Thirty-one seconds, I would think.

STRAVINSKY: Could you settle for thirty-two?

They were not joking. One reason the late Composer Igor Stravinsky and Choreographer George Balanchine got on so well was that they both worried about craft at a time when everyone else was worrying about art. If art was the result of their labors, so much the better, but they did not agonize about it. "When I know how long a piece must take, then it excites me," Stravinsky said in explaining the importance of the discipline of limits. To him as to Balanchine, mastery of the work at hand was what counted, not the creation of so-called masterworks. As Balanchine once put it: "If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?"

To Agon. That masterpieces resulted anyway was amply proved last week as the New York City Ballet staged one of the cultural, or craftsmanlike, events of the decade. Billed as a Stravinsky Festival, the weeklong affair was nominally in honor of what would have been Stravinsky's 90th birthday. But the festival—featuring 3 1 ballets, of which 21 were world premières, set to Stravinsky's music—was also a celebration of the greatest single creative partnership in the history of ballet. It had its start when the two Russian émigrés were brought together in 1925 by the great Impresario Serge Diaghilev. It continued for four decades, during which Balanchine and Stravinsky created two dozen ballets from the romantic Tchaikovsky-esque The Fairy's Kiss to the stark, quasi-dodecaphonic "IBM-ballet," Agon.

In stirring his world-famed company into action for the festival, Balanchine made it clear that he wanted not a lugubrious memorial, but a joyous, entertaining celebration of Stravinsky's art and spirit. "In Russia we don't cry when a person dies," said Balanchine. "We are happy. We go home to an enormous table with vodka and blini, and we drink to the health of the guy that died."

Indeed, the only question was whether Balanchine's own spirits rose to the occasion or the occasion rose to Balanchine's spirits. At 68, four times divorced, czar of his own school of ballet and highly disciplined troupe, Balanchine has long been known for his total dedication to his work. But in the last six weeks, he doubled his efforts and enthusiasm, overseeing every detail of the festival and choreographing nine completely new ballets. He was at his happiest in his shirt sleeves at rehearsals, positioning his dancers and instructing them by singing out "Slow-slow-slow-one-two-three" and stepping through each part himself.

New Kiss. The opening night's Violin Concerto turned out to be Balanchine's finest work since his 1967 Jewels. Stravinsky's music is less assertive, less obviously heroic than most violin concertos. Instead, it offers a rich conversation with the soloist as a sort of Socratic anchorman. Balanchine's two principal dancing couples follow this dialogue, and sometimes invoke the unexpected by concentrating on minor or secondary themes. All to the point of producing a ballet that is mod, sexy and elegant—vintage Balanchine.