The Rug in the Icebox

As he tells it, Choreographer George Balanchine likes to create a ballet by "opening the icebox door," rummaging around inside and producing random combinations that look "appetizing."' Sometimes he finds pretty strange things in the icebox. His latest discovery: a rug. Balanchine was inspired by an analysis by Orientalist Arthur Upham Pope of the formal structure of Persian carpets, in which the patterns were compared to polyphony in music and some of the figures to fertility symbols. The resulting work, a diverse, pseudo-Oriental affair titled The Figure in the Carpet, had its premiere last week with the New York City Ballet, proved to be one of the company's most engaging productions.

In the first part of the ballet. Choreographer Balanchine tells the story of how the rug was woven somewhere in the desert: a swarm of ballerinas, supported by male dancers passing for nomad tribesmen, weave an elaborate cat's cradle of streamers, their movements as intricate and precise as the shuttling of a power loom. Then the story moves on to the Persian court, and the rest of the ballet is merely a "court entertainment,'' a kind of Balanchine variety show. In a swirl of color, foreign visitors to the court strut the stage dressed in everything from the gaudily feathered headdress of West Indians to the pink and gold garb of Eastern potentates. Highlights of the evening: a fluently elegant pas de deux between Jacques d'Amboise and Melissa Hayden, and a rousing Scottish number whose stately classical movements were abruptly interrupted by the splayed gestures of a country reel.

None of it seemed to have much to do with carpets, fertility symbols, the inside of an icebox, or the accompanying score (The Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music by Handel). But as pure dance spectacle, it was top-shelf Balanchine.

Manhattan witnessed other dance premieres last week that made Balanchine's carpet look like a quiet family heirloom.

P: Jose Limon and company offered Barren Sceptre, a ballet treatise (music by Gunther Schuller) on the complicated family life of the Macbeths. The lights had scarcely come up on Macbeth, dressed entirely in black, when a pair of lavender arms sprouted from his shoulders, and presently Lady Macbeth slithered into view. For much of the rest of the piece the two swooped about the stage in convulsive frenzies, occasionally coming together like wrestlers grappling for a hold.

P: A new company headed by Aileen Passloff, one of the more highly praised avant-garde dancers, performed works that at times seemed closer to calisthenics than choreography. In At Home, the dancers brought out an ironing board and chairs, spent much of their time exuberantly thumping the floor with their heels to the taped ringing of bells, rubbing of balloons, and the off-key screech of misplayed violins. In Arena, the dancers did push-ups while an accompanist whistled Yankee Doodle. Appropriately, the series ended with a piece called Cypher, done, to the sound (electronically altered) of an audience coughing during a dance recital.

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