Pas de Deux

SPOTLIGHT

darci Kistler, New York City Ballet's reigning ballerina, first got to know Peter Martins when she was sixteen years old, the age of Princess Aurora, the heroine of The Sleeping Beauty, who pricks her finger on a spindle and falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years. At the time, Kistler had been anointed by Balanchine as a latterday baby ballerina, and danced his most important ballets until she fractured her ankle in 1982. She returned in 1985, but recovery was slow. Like Princess Aurora, the role she danced last spring in Martins's triumphant NYCB production of The Sleeping Beauty, Kistler seemed as if she were destined to languish in a netherworld.

But the spell is broken. Today, Kistler sweeps through the fabled NYCB repertory, projecting ineffable joy and mesmerizing audiences with a drop-dead glamour. And she's been luckier

than her mythical counterpart. The prelude to the kiss for Kistler lasted a mere decade. Her prince, NYCB chief Martins, fortyfive, came back into her love life last year; he married Kistler at Christmastime in Denmark. "It was a low-key ceremony," says Martins, "attended by what I call my Danish people, and my mother, who's eighty-three."

Martins is often dogged by comparisons to Balanchine, his NYCB predecessor, and his recent marriage suggests a few parallels. Balanchine said there were no mothers-in-law in ballet, but, as he well knew, there were wives. He'had four, and they were his muses. But Martins balks at the idea that his marriage has anything to do with ballet. "Work is work," he says. "You can't help but prefer some dancers over others. But I really don't say this or that person inspires me to reach new highs or"—he laughs—"new lows. Darci is Darci on her own. I've known her for ten years, but, believe me, I've had nothing to do with creating her."

LARRY KAPLAN