The Essential Instant

Choreographer George Balanchine conceived his ballet, the Prodigal Son, as a poem of bitter passions, a lantern carried into the darkness to light an anguished face. Balanchine responded to Prokofiev's music by composing a gymnastic grotesquerie, free of all the gestures of classical ballet. The only dancer to perform the title role since Prodigal Son was revived by Balanchine's New York City Ballet four years ago has been Edward Villella, whose athletic command of the part was soon being praised as a great dance portrayal. Last week, to open the new season, Prodigal Son was danced again, and with a new dramatic artistry to match his manly dancing, Villella gave his best performance yet.

Villella dances through the wanderings of the Biblical Ulysses with the clear knowledge that the painful odyssey is mainly in the heart. He shows the boy's confusion of bravery and mere curiosity with great, amazing leaps that lead him nowhere; in his dance with the Siren, he makes twins of terror and desire. Betrayed by his lust, he struggles home, and in a slow, gentle movement that is a touching confession of sin and folly, he lifts himself into the curl of his father's arms.

The promise of a serious actor in Villella suggests a rich future for him and for the dance. At 27, Villella already has five years as a soloist behind him. His small stature (5 ft. 8 in.) rules him out of the romantic repertoire, but in the range of roles left open to him, he is incomparably exciting.

His spectacular leaps leave him suspended in air an impossible, essential instant too long--he has even perfected a leap in which he turns half circle while airborne and disappears into the wings flying backward.

Villella was a boxer and baseball player at the New York State Maritime College before he made dancing his career, and his presence on a ballet stage is deeply reassuring. With Villella and Principal Dancers Jacques d'Amboise, Erik Bruhn and Conrad Ludlow, Balanchine's company is now notable for the strength of its male dancers--a happy change.

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