A legacy leaps at the Colon Theater.

• Author: Durbin, Paula
• Position: Ballet institute, Instituto Superior de Arte, Colon Theater, Buenos Aires, Argentina

FOR DECADES ARGENTINA'S PREMIER THEATER HAS HOUSED A RESIDENT BALLET INSTITUTE THAT HAS SHAPED SOME OF THE WORLD'S MOST ACCLAIMED DANCERS

One Sunday afternoon in December 1972, Olga Ferri serenely served up a spectacular in Buenos Aires's stately Colon Theater. She was dancing Giselle, as she had many times since 1958, when Alicia Alonso, perhaps the greatest Giselle of all, declared her ripe for the part. The first Argentine ever to interpret that draining litmus test, Ferri was, as always, carefree and lightning quick in the first act, a poetic vision of flowing arabesques in the second and, this time, she carried the production. Just the year before, the upper ranks of the Ballet del Teatro Colon had been devastated when nine principals died in an air disaster; Ferri's subtle theatrics and secure technique made you forget that the new soloists were not ready to fill the slippers of those missing, that the corps was shaky. This was a Giselle you wished would never end, but just an overture to the ovation that followed. Far less reserved than opera patrons, the ballet audience let loose with cheers and showers of bouquets that went on for who-knows-how-many curtain calls.

Soon after, Ferri retired to her airy, light-bathed studio just a few blocks away. "That was my last Giselle. I had danced long enough. I gave up being a ballerina painlessly," she declared recently when reminded of the tour de force that capped a thirty-year career. Today, she still cuts an extravagant figure in her trendy chic, and she still revels in applause. The ovations hail her students these days, among them her special protegee, Paloma Herrera, whom even the New Yorker's dour Arlene Croce calls American Ballet Theater's biggest female theater box-office attraction since Gelsey Kirkland.

"The most beautiful thing to happen to me as a teacher was Paloma. I've never seen a child study with such concentration, strength, and intelligence. Sometimes I would correct her with just a look. I would just lower my eyelids, like this," Ferri explains, and the swan-maiden lids lower. "And we understood each other."

The nurturing prepared Herrera to enter the Colon's Instituto Superior de Arte and supplemented the curriculum. Ferri also showed the prodigy off to her colleagues in Paris, Moscow, and London, where a very impressed Natalia Makarova invited the young girl to take class with the English National Ballet. Herrera, in fact, turned down a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dance to follow the advice of ballet master extraordinaire Hector Zaraspe. Now at New York's Juilliard School, where he occupies the chair vacated by the late Anthony Tudor, Zaraspe left the Colon years ago for a teaching career. Having coached both the Joffrey Ballet and Dame Margot Fonteyn, he knew what might catapult a young dancer onto the international stage. He persuaded Herrera, then fifteen, to study at the School of American Ballet, where, as he might have predicted, ABT's management immediately spotted her and put her on the fast track to becoming the company's youngest ballerina.

Herrera and Ferri stand at the extremes of a piquant chapter spanning five decades in ballet history. Its prologue is spiced with turning points dating back to 1913, five years after the Colon opened its imposing doors, when Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes became the first company to dance on its vast stage. Later that year, in Buenos Aires, Diaghilev's star, muse, and lover, Vaslav Nijinsky, impulsively married and was fired. But, in 1917, Diaghilev hired him back for a return engagement, and the mad genius danced the last performance of his tragic life at the Colon.

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