Boundless Ballerina.

• Author: Durbin, Paula

Leaping beyond traditional parameters, this young star of the American Ballet Theatre is at home on stages throughout the hemisphere

SHOWERS SOAKED BUENOS AIRES on the last Saturday in September, but they didn't dampen the enthusiasm of the portenos crowding the entrance to the Teatro Colon. The resident company was about to welcome spring with its season premiere of Don Quixote, ballet as Buenos Aires loves it spectacular and star studded. Of the seven performances, none was more anticipated than the first two, featuring as guest artists American Ballet Theatre's Paloma Herrera and La Scala's Maximiliano Guerra, both graduates of the Teatro's Instituto Superior de Arte. Patrons jammed the great hall, some paying $90 for standing room, to hail the debut of their favorite ballerina in a brand-new partnership with the noble danseur.

Now 130 years old, Don Quixote, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg and Moscow's Bolshoi, is one of classical ballet's venerable war horses. Tied only incidentally to Cervantes's lumbering Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, the work is really an excuse for some two hours of tours de force and split-second teamwork by the romantic leads, Kitri and Basilio, as they thwart a conspiracy to keep them from marrying.

Contemporary versions abound; Mikhail Baryshnikov staged a Don Q and, before him, the late Rudolf Nureyev. Roughly the same vintage, Croatian choreographer Zarko Prebil's take on the Russian classic has been a Colon repertoire staple since 1980. Prebil calls his rendition "Kitri's ballet," and it certainly belongs to Herrera. "I've grown up with the role," she maintains, "and I never get tired of it."

You could even say Herrera cut her teeth on the whole ballet. Little girls from the Instituto always appear in the production as cupids, but in 1987, Herrera, just twelve, was sent out on stage as their queen, a role usually danced by an adult. With her precocious petit allegro, she all but stole the show from ABT guest artists Julio Bocca and Cheryl Yaeger. Four years later, for her ABT debut, director Kevin MacKenzie cast Herrera in the same part, then in the other variations, and finally in the show-stopping grand pas de deux. When at last she danced Kitri in the full-length ballet, as fate would have it, her first partner was Bocca.

For millions of magazine readers, Herrera's Kitri is the ruffled figure caught mid-air in a diagonal split so elegantly precise it advertises fine watches. On stage, she fearlessly trades on those flying leaps as well as laser turns and tantalizing retards into what Dance Magazine's Rose Anne Thom calls "record-setting balances." No wonder the encores just keep coming. Her Kitri has graced Moscow's Kremlin Palace and Alicia Alonso's Havana dance festival, where Jose Manuel Carreno, a Cuban now with ABT, was Basilio. Just a year ago, Herrera and...