AFTER the August doldrums, autumn offers more dance performances than one person could possibly attend, with various come-ons promising the sublime at each. Yet within months — or even weeks — most fade from memory, as if they had never happened. No, dance doesn’t last, but once in a while the memories do, and they keep audiences coming back. Whether adding to the anticipation of premieres by favorite choreographers or sweetening the return of cherished works, these afterimages, as the critic Arlene Croce called them, become part of each new performance.

Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” (above, with David Hallberg and Paloma Herrera) returns for American Ballet Theater’s City Center season next month after last year’s smash run. Driven by a propulsive Philip Glass score, it would seem too relentless to produce specific recollections: a furious blur of bodies fades in and out of billowing smoke that, for once, doesn’t read as a theatrical cliché. But somehow, once this 39-minute blur slows and 13 dancers stand dripping and heaving before rapturous applause, distinct personalities have emerged — for me, most memorably in Ethan Stiefel’s fist-pumping exultation. It’s too soon to know if Mr. Stiefel, sidelined last winter with a knee injury, will dance in this grueling ballet. But we can hope.

RoseAnne Spradlin cultivates an earthier physicality, one indelibly achieved with the unprettified, desperate bodies in her 2002 “under/world.” “Survive Cycle,” in development for a November premiere at Dance Theater Workshop, will feature original video, music and a landscape of shredded clothing; unlike “under/world,” it includes no nudity, but I imagine moments of naked vulnerability to haunt the mind’s eye as that work still does.

As always in dance, you had to be there, and Barbara Milberg Fisher was. A member of Ballet Society and New York City Ballet from 1946 to 1958, she has written “In Balanchine’s Company: A Dancer’s Memoir,” coming Oct. 3 from Wesleyan University Press. In the introduction, Ms. Croce writes: “One feels that, for Barbara Milberg Fisher, nothing supersedes the memory of once having been part of a magic circle. That memory is the treasure she imparts to us now.”

IN the hallways of the School of American Ballet, overlooking Lincoln Center, aspiring young dancers clustered nervously on a Tuesday morning two weeks ago. Some stretched, using the furniture as makeshift barres. Mothers crouched at their children’s feet, pressing their palms down on the tops of the arches to increase the point or guiding their hips as they plopped down into a split. A little girl with braces and sparkly leg warmers in bubble gum pink sat with her legs splayed while her mother pinned a number to her leotard.

They were all there for the big event: the school’s annual auditions for the winter term. By tradition the tryouts are open to any child, and the selection process is as hallowed as the movement vocabulary itself.

The School of American Ballet is the closest thing that the United States has to a national dance academy. Founded in 1934 by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein as a training ground for what would become New York City Ballet, it is as rigorous as the Paris Opera Ballet School, the Royal Ballet School in London and its own most direct ancestor: the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, where Balanchine trained. Of the 304 dancers, ages 7 to 18, who auditioned this year, only 68 earned spots. Auditions are also held in the spring, as is a national audition tour.

On this particular morning, at 9:45, Elias Baseman, 11, and his mother, Diana, waited patiently in the hallway outside the audition studio with the other 11- and 12-year-olds. With a crisp new bowl cut and freckles splattered across his nose, Elias (dressed in the black tights and white T-shirt that are regulation for boys) used the wall to balance as he warmed up.

Elias came to the auditions because, he said, he was tired of being the only boy at his dance school in South Orange, N.J. He had been introduced to ballet by watching his sister’s class five years ago, and since then he had become obsessed. Home schooled, he watched videos of ballet on the Internet.

“He’s not good sitting still, though,” Ms. Baseman said. “We drove an hour and a half to get here, but it will be worth it if he gets in. In the classes at home the students are always told to look pretty, but one time a male teacher came to class and told him to look proud, and his entire posture changed.”

Siobhan Stocks-Lyons, 12, and her parents, Tim Lyons and Martha Stocks-Lyons, came because they wanted Siobhan to have more serious training than she can get in Glen Cove, N.Y.

Krystal Mackie, also 12, skipped her first day of seventh grade at Mark Twain Junior High in Coney Island, Brooklyn, because she wants to become a ballerina. Potential students generally come from all over the New York metropolitan region; this morning one made the trip from Nice, France.

What Elias and the other students were about to face has changed little since Balanchine and Kirstein first opened the school’s doors. The qualities that make a good student dancer are the same, said Kay Mazzo, a faculty co-chairwoman, who began her studies at the school at 12, joined the company in 1961 and returned to the school to teach in 1983.

It begins with the body. “We’re looking for what, eventually, a ballet company will want: proportion, long legs that can lengthen and stretch, if their feet are arched and flexible, if they can turn out from the hip,” Ms. Mazzo said. “We have to be very selective because there are not a million jobs out there, and you don’t want to take somebody and give them 10 years of training and then say, ‘Too bad.’ ”

Until 1997 Madame Antonina Tumkovsky and Madame Hélène Dudin — former soloists with the Kiev State Theater of Opera and Ballet who came to the school in 1949 and 1954, respectively — held the auditions and set the basic format. Now Elias and the other students are greeted by Ms. Mazzo, Katrina Killian, Garielle Whittle and Sheryl Ware as they enter the large audition studio with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a grand piano. The women all studied at the school, are all former City Ballet members and are now on the faculty.

The students quickly took places at the barre. The women began by inspecting each dancer’s body. They lifted the 12-year-old Fiona Koch’s left leg at a 90-degree angle and then moved it to the side. They repeated with the right, pulling and massaging her foot and calf at the same time to judge the stretch.

Ms. Ware whispered to her to turn and face the barre, and they repeated the prodding in arabesque. “Tendu to the right and to the left,” Ms. Killian said.

The women stepped back and whispered to each other while the registrar, Alexandra Schierman, a former student and personal assistant to Kirstein, took notes. The teachers moved from child to child, spending several minutes with some and giving others only a quick glance. Ms. Ware then gave the students a simple barre exercise, snapping out the counts while the other women gauged the dancers’ skill level and musicality. Could they keep the basic four-count beat?

The students’ performance made it clear how difficult basic positions can be. Stomachs hung out, spines slouched, elbows drooped, and wrists collapsed. The students cocked their heads like curious birds in every possible wrong direction. Several bodies shook as they tried to hold the pose. As Ms. Mazzo later said, “The simple act of standing correctly can take months to learn.”

The process was repeated in much the same way for each age group, with barre and center work becoming far more complicated for the 13-to-14- and 15-to-18-year-olds who must have had prior training.

“With the older students we’re looking not just at the body, but for coordination of movement, musicality, joy of dance, the whole body participating, or at least the potential to have that,” said Suki Schorer, who oversees the older students’ auditions with Ms. Mazzo and other faculty members. “But it’s hard to know what their training was before this. Sometimes they’ve had a bad teacher. So you look to see how they respond and how quickly they learn. Older kids may not know enough, and at 16 or 17 they may have taken a lot of ballet, but if they don’t have the technique, it’s too late.”Ms. Schorer and the faculty can afford to be selective. For the 2005-6 school year, which included the 10-month winter term and a five-week summer course, the school provided $1,015,000 in scholarships and subsidies.

“We are not a money-making institution,” Ms. Mazzo said. “We’re looking for any dancer in the world with the desire and attributes to become a professional.”

The $25 audition fee can be waived, and tuition costs for the term range from $1,825 to $4,215, depending on level and frequency of classes.

“The school contributes everything,” said Peter Martins, the City Ballet’s balletmaster in chief and the school’s chairman of faculty and artistic director. “To be more specific, it’s over 90 percent of New York City Ballet’s roster, which is no small feat in the world of ballet.”

FOR the youngest dancers — those 7 to 10 — the audition, which took place a week later, was brief and simple. The instructors inspected the children’s bodies and asked them to skip across the floor to music. Most of the children wore black leotards and tights, but several were in gym clothes and tennis shoes.

One little girl was wearing a stiff tutu. Saskia Pedersen, 9, was dressed in a powder blue leotard and tight bun. Her father, Tom Ertman of the Upper West Side, said he was happy to bring her here.

“I love New York City Ballet,” he explained. “Even before we had her, I had dreamed of her auditioning.” Christine Holo, also of the Upper West Side, who brought her daughter Johanna, 10, was a determined realist. “I don’t know if she’s going to be a ballerina,” she said. “I mean how can you tell when they’re 9 and 10?

The faculty believes it can. And the dancers were surprisingly varied. Some legs go straight up to the nose and ear, while others barely budge above the waist, despite careful coaxing.

Peter Boal, who retired as a principal dancer at City Ballet in 2005, vividly recalled the day in 1975 when, at the age of 9, he auditioned.

“I don’t think anyone ever forgets,” he said. He started classes three days later, continuing his studies until joining City Ballet’s corps in 1983. “I had been at performances at New York City Ballet for years, and one day I just pulled on my mom’s sleeve and said, ‘I want to do that.’

“I didn’t know what to expect at the audition. I had never done any ballet before. My only issue was, I just didn’t want to wear tights. So I wore jean short cutoffs and bare feet, and they let me in anyway.”

“The time they spent looking at me had to be about two minutes,” he added. That night his father received a call from Madame Tumkovsky. “I walked in as 9-year-old and walked out as a 17-year-old member of the New York City Ballet,” he said. “It was all because of the school.”

Not every student has such a positive experience. The discipline demanded at such an early age can take a toll on even the toughest psyches and most committed families.

“My mom and I stayed with family friends in the city during the week, and then my dad would pick us up on the weekends,” said Jennie Somogyi, a City Ballet principal who auditioned when she was 8. “It was a huge a sacrifice for them. But because I could go home on the weekends, I still went to football games and had a kind of normal life. But I saw other kids lose interest and drop out.”

Though the audition process has not changed dramatically over the years, the students have. “The older students’ technique is stronger, the extensions are higher,” Ms. Schorer said. “More students and parents are aware of S.A.B. and its relation to the New York City Ballet, and ballet has been legitimized as a profession.”

When the new students start school on Monday, the levels will be designated by leotard color: Girls III, light pink; Girls IV, hunter green. There is a 300-plus-page syllabus for the first year alone, and the students must master certain fundamentals before advancing.

They attend regular school at the same time, usually at the Professional Children’s School or the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, and out-of-towners may begin boarding at the school at 14. The students have the opportunity to perform with City Ballet in “The Nutcracker,” “Swan Lake” and “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” as well as in lecture demonstrations and workshops, all in the hope of being considered for the company.

“It’s wonderful to watch them mature from the age of 8 or 12,” Ms. Mazzo said. “They’re young little kids, and then they’re teenagers, and then all of a sudden they put on makeup, go onstage in a workshop or performance, and you can’t take your eyes off them”

Students do not have to reaudition, but “all the teachers and myself look at the kids every day, and we notice whether somebody’s improving or somebody’s not,” Ms. Mazzo said. “If somebody’s really not, we’ll call parents in. And that’s fine. You shouldn’t be there because what we do is very serious, and if they lose interest, then there’s a spot for somebody else.”

Yet even with careful guidance these students face daunting odds. “In my first class,” Mr. Boal recalled, “there were about 23 kids, and by the time I was accepted into the company, there was only one boy and myself left. All the girls had disappeared.”

Moments after auditioning, Elias Baseman was pulled aside and told he had been accepted into boys’ Level II. “The ronde de jambes were hard, but I felt confident,” he said of the audition. Elias starts class on Tuesday.

LONDON

EVER since Sylvie Guillem was a young gymnast, she has suffered from stage fright. “There’s a picture of me as a little girl,” she recalled recently, “and I’m waiting to go onstage, and I am biting the last bit of nail I have left on my finger.”

With age, she added, her fear has worsened. “Between what I know I can do and want to achieve and what the audience expects, it’s a lot of pressure, and it’s always adding up.”

Yet at 41, Ms. Guillem is reinventing herself. Having become perhaps the most celebrated ballerina of her generation, she is now becoming a contemporary dancer.

As they exit their 30’s, most dancers try to minimize risk to extend their time on the stage. But ballet’s reigning diva is embracing it. Only a handful of ballerinas make it past 40, so Ms. Guillem, bored by the classics and determined to test new forms and her own limits, is exploring her options while she still has them. And she is doing so by performing the most physically demanding movement of her career.

Striding through the Sadler’s Wells theater here, her long, steely limbs duly stretched after her morning class, Ms. Guillem looks worlds removed from the haughty Parisian ballerina who arrived in London 17 years ago favoring bowler hats and clunky black lace-up boots. Tall and relaxed, her straight red hair falling past her shoulders, her fringe of bangs accenting her green eyes and girlish demeanor, she is dressed in a camisole, a man’s shirt, loose-fitting black pants and red slip-on sneakers. Her pale skin is free of makeup.

She likes to go about her life in London, she said, “unrecognized on the street.”

She is understated in conversation as well, thoughtful and candid although, she admits, a bit shy. But when the subject turns to “Push” — an evening of works that showcases Ms. Guillem in two solos and a duet, and which receives its American premiere on Wednesday at City Center — she becomes expansive. “Yes, it’s dangerous,” she said. “It’s moving upside down, on your back, your knees — things you don’t do very often in classical ballet — and it was painful. Any new style you take on is a shock, because there are always a lot of doubts. ‘Am I going to be able to do it?’ But it’s a game, and I love to play it.”

Talk of Ms. Guillem has always centered on what her body can do. “She can take a leg to places I can’t begin to think about and make it look beautiful,” said Russell Maliphant, the “Push” choreographer, whose athletic, restrained style is culled from contact improvisation, hip-hop, capoeira and tai chi.

“She invented her body to some degree,” said the choreographer William Forsythe, who has made two works for her. “Someone else might have that body, but without Sylvie’s mind inside it, it wouldn’t be as interesting.”

Remarkably Ms. Guillem was 36 before she was sidelined by an injury. Now, “you listen to every kind of signal that your body sends you, whereas before, you didn’t,” she said. “It’s the school of life.”

But she acknowledged that her body will inevitably let her down; her keen mind can will it only so far. “I’m still exploring, opening my eyes to the fact that the journey will end,” she said bluntly. “I don’t blind myself, but I still have a few things I want to do.” There is one prerequisite: there has to be “a mystery,” as she puts it. “Doing new work, you see yourself differently. You learn what you’re afraid of.”

When she first worked with Mr. Maliphant, on his 2003 “Broken Fall,” a sensation at its premiere in London, she struggled with a step that her partners, William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, had already absorbed. “She had to go from kneeling down to standing up by throwing one leg behind her,” recalled Mr. Trevitt. “She went home and practiced it all night. She came in the next day covered in bruises, but she had cracked it.” Most dancers, he added, would have said, “ ‘I can’t do that, give me a different step.’ Sylvie has this determination not to be beaten by it.”

Ms. Guillem has shown a similar determination when it comes to her creative choices. Though a major star at the Paris Opera Ballet, where she was Rudolf Nureyev’s protégée, she defected to London’s Royal Ballet, where she was the only dancer allowed to approve partners, ballets, costumes and photographs. She now jokes about having been called “Mademoiselle Non” by the Royal’s former director Anthony Dowell, and admits that that reputation probably cost her opportunities.

“People were frightened by an image, by a reputation, and they didn’t want to try,” she recalled. “It’s a shame. Good opportunities passed. But it’s become easier. Perhaps I am more convincing now — or less frightening.”

In her 17 years at the Royal, she had been a modernizing force, pressing the company to bring in contemporary ballet choreographers. Still, no major ballet was created expressly for her. Last spring she tired of working in a company where “you’re part of a program that doesn’t belong to you.”

She saw an opportunity in Sadler’s Wells, which has become a lab for new dance and boasts some of the hottest choreographers in Britain. Its artistic director, Alistair Spalding. was prepared to make her a partner. “We’ll say, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” he explained, “and create the circumstances to make it happen.”

And so they did. With Ms. Guillem in the house, Sadler’s Wells has had an upsurge in ticket sales, media attention and interest in Mr. Maliphant’s work. “Push” had its premiere to ecstatic reviews last fall and won the 2005 Olivier Award for best new dance. Its success led Ms. Guillem to join Sadler’s Wells as artistic associate in June and to set in motion a third project with Mr. Maliphant. She will no longer be listed as principal guest artist of the Royal Ballet, as she has since 1989. “I have no relationship,” she emphasized. “None.”

“Push” gives Ms. Guillem her first star showcase in New York. City Center hopes that she will bring in both the ballet crowd and new audiences, as she did in London. The work inaugurates the partnership between City Center and Sadler’s Wells. “I think dance is suffering because you still have a lot of ghettoes,” she said. “You’re either a classical dancer, or you’re a contemporary dancer and all that goes with it. I don’t like this veneration for one technique.”

The ballet stars Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov made a similar move into modern dance. Ms. Guillem shares their rare combination of glamour, artistry and box-office clout. But she is the first star ballerina to hire her own choreographers, negotiate her own contracts and work steadily outside her own company and tradition.

In the process she may also find a new audience. She regularly sells out opera houses in Europe and Asia, but Ms. Guillem is not a household name in America. In part that is because she has refused to cultivate her celebrity offstage, or perhaps because she wants to exert more control than others are willing to cede to her. “I don’t need to be known by people who just recognize your face but don’t know what you do,” she said. “I’m not someone who does anything and everything to be known.”

She makes a demarcation between her public and private lives and counts few dance insiders among her close circle. When not on tour, she and her husband, Gilles Tapie, a fashion photographer, move between their apartment in London and their house near Nice, France, where Ms. Guillem spends much of her time gardening, studying Japanese and working on pottery. Occasionally she’ll give a peek at her private self.

Early in her career she appeared in Vogue in a series of fashion photographs by Mr. Tapie. But she said she felt the photos showed her as “a model, something I am not.” More recently, when French Vogue invited her to pose again, she suggested a series of self-portraits. This time she wanted to show “the way I am and the way I see myself,” so she photographed herself dancing in her studio, naked, without benefit of makeup or airbrushing. “I did brush my hair before,” she said, laughing.

In New York she has made highly anticipated guest appearances over the years, most recently with the Royal Ballet in 2004. Still, she divides critics, particularly in the United States. Some praise her ability to inhabit dramatic heroines from Juliet to Manon; others insist that her ear-scraping extensions and technical gifts don’t make up for her lack of emotional expression.

In the view of the London critics, however, “Push” reveals new dimensions of her dancing, her sensuality in particular. Intimately scaled, with no live music or sets, “Push” has a decidedly downtown edge. It features four works, three of which star Ms. Guillem: “Solo,” a new dance created for her; “Two,” a solo remade for her, in which she appears trapped in a cube of light; and “Push,” a duet with Mr. Maliphant that she persuaded him to make.

Though she had performed his “Broken Fall” and “Two,” they had never danced together. “He was afraid,” she said. “I put a lot of energy into asking him.” She invited him to rehearse in the studio she keeps at her home in France and even committed to help finance the work.

Their duet forces Mr. Maliphant, 44, a compact, muscular man with a shaved head and coiled intensity, to position himself in the role of partner. At the moment Ms. Guillem approached him, he was experimenting with “bonelessness, fluidity and more geometry,” he recalled, “so it was massively daunting because obviously the language that made sense on her body was going to be vastly different from the language that made sense on my body.”

In “Push” Mr. Maliphant sets Ms. Guillem’s willowy limbs hurtling and tumbling through maneuvers that play up the contrast between “my downward energy and Sylvie’s skyward energy,” he said. In one section she crouches on his shoulders and then falls backward in myriad ways, an idea inspired by a sculpture he had seen of a child perched on a man’s shoulders. Mr. Maliphant, she notes, allows her to become a more intuitive performer. “With Russell, it’s more organic,” she said. “It’s action, reaction, conversation, dialogue. I am an impatient person, and you learn that things can take a different shape by being patient.”

But even her newfound patience has its limits, and she said she doubts she’ll ever direct a dance company. “The boards, the unions, the sponsors,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You can’t spend your time trying to please different people.” As a young ballerina, she often clashed with her own director, Nureyev, though she gives him credit for triggering her drive to experiment.

“Right away I saw, ‘I need to try this,’ ” she said of the new choreographers he introduced to Paris. “Rudolf didn’t care about whether it would please the audience or not. He saw that was the only way to walk forward.” Ms. Guillem joined Nureyev on many of his “Friends” tours and admired his “passion and his will not to stay in one box.” When a gravely ill Nureyev was invited to make his American conducting debut at the Metropolitan Opera House for a performance of “Romeo and Juliet” by the American Ballet Theater, Ms. Guillem was his choice as Juliet. Reluctantly, she agreed, “to make the dream go on.”

But the farewell tours and tributes that ballet has customarily bestowed on its anointed are not for her. As she left to rehearse “Sacred Monsters,” a new work by Akram Khan that requires her to perform traditional Indian Kathak dance, she remembered that the legendary Alicia Alonso was overseeing a dress rehearsal of her Ballet Nacional de Cuba at Sadler’s Wells.

“I should go say hello,” she said, recalling that she saw Ms. Alonso dance when she was 60. “I understand that,” she said. “I think it’s going to be the most difficult thing to do, to leave the stage. But if you have no lucidity about it, it’s even worse because you don’t see the negative side of you still being onstage.” She believes, she said, in “stopping when you’re still at the top.”

Last Updated: 10:15 am | Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Beyond pure entertainment, Jerry Springer's extended stay on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" offers a valuable lesson: Almost anyone can dance.

"The whole idea of 'two left feet' - for most people, that's just in their heads," says Greg Underwood, who teaches swing, Latin and ballroom dancing in his Covington home and at community classes, such as Kenton County's "Get Up and Dance!"

For those who get cold feet when the music starts, Underwood, an instructor for 24 years, offers a beginner's guide to cutting the rug:

Easiest dance to learn: Basic foxtrot or waltz. Slower dances give you more time to think about your feet. Foxtrot is a lot like walking.

Toughest: West Coast swing. You have to have the right connections with your partner, the right tension, so you can feel your partner moving. But once people learn it, it's usually their favorite.

Difference between East Coast and West Coast swing: East Coast is kind of done all over the place - in the round. West Coast swing is done in a slot.

Most aerobic dances: Swing and salsa.

Most popular: It's a toss-up between swing and salsa. There is a huge Hispanic population in the Cincinnati area, and people are hearing the music more. Swing has always been big.

Best for older adults: A lot of my students who are in their 80s do rumba or foxtrot. Start with that as a warm-up.

Burns the most calories: Samba and swing.

Partner required for lessons: No. .

Best shoes to learn in: You don't have to wear high heels. You just need a comfortable shoe that's close to your foot and doesn't stick to the floor - not gym shoes.