Diversity, en Pointe

The stage of the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater is full of men in black suits and women with Marge Simpson-size hair. To the quiet tick of a deep-voiced drum, they strip to their skivvies. Then the four percussionists in the pit lay down a loud backbeat, and the half-clothed dancers start flying crazily through the air. They look like mall rats at a suburban prom--but their airy lifts and arabesques are straight out of Swan Lake.

Can this really be the stodgy old Washington Ballet? None other. Fluctuating Hemlines, a sharply observed portrait of a group of young people who peel off their outer garments and expose their inner selves, is the work of Septime Webre, the new artistic director. Since arriving in the nation's capital last fall, he has transformed this unadventurous company into a lively laboratory for his pop-flavored style of classical dancemaking and brought an equally unusual approach to company management, which seeks to make perhaps the whitest of art forms relevant to a racially fissured community.

If anybody can work that much needed miracle, it is Webre, 37, a gangly, verbose charmer who talks in enumerated points, flinging his arms around, marionette-style, for emphasis. "I'm a multicultural mongrel," he says, alluding to the fact that he is the son of a Cuban mother and a French-American father. Webre took his first dance lesson as an undergraduate at the University of Texas. At 29, he became head of the New Jersey-based American Repertory Ballet, turning an obscure regional troupe into a forward-looking ensemble with a reputation for unpredictability. The lackluster Washington Ballet was no less in need of new thinking, not least because it had failed to attract a racially diverse audience, an invitation to trouble in a city whose political establishment is overwhelmingly black. "Ballet as an institution has always been racist," Webre says matter-of-factly. "We have to change that. We have to make more people feel more welcome."

How to broaden the company's ethnic base without severing its traditional roots? Webre is drawing sellout crowds by cannily juxtaposing blue-chip masterpieces by George Balanchine, Paul Taylor and Antony Tudor with new works by such younger choreographers as Nacho Duato and Dwight Rhoden. And his aggressive outreach efforts include Dance D.C., an ambitious pilot program of inner-city public school dance classes, and low-priced "Beer and Ballet" previews held at the company's studios in northwest Washington.

The most significant of Webre's innovations, though, is his choreography, which crossbreeds the time-tested language of ballet with the high energy and cool irony of pop culture. The results, though sometimes too glibly "accessible," are more often bracingly individual. This season, for example, has seen company premieres of Fluctuating Hemlines, inspired by Camille Paglia's iconoclastic Sexual Personae; Carmina Burana, an unabashedly sexy dance pageant accompanied by Carl Orff's thunderous choral settings of medieval poems about love and lust; and Juanita y Alicia, a "family album" set to Buena Vista Social Club-type music performed live by Sin Miedo, a Washington-based Latino group.

Similarly heterodox notions are percolating in other cities where ethnic minorities are fast becoming demographic majorities. In New York City, Eliot Feld choreographs his edgily urban dances for a colorful troupe drawn from the classrooms of Ballet Tech, a public school devoted to dance; the equally diverse Miami City Ballet recently premiered Mambo No. 2 A.M., a collaboration between Balanchine acolyte Edward Villella and '50s mambo king Pedro ("Cuban Pete") Aguilar.

Much younger than Feld or Villella, Webre is more directly in touch with the sensibilities of the Gen-X audiences he longs to attract, yet his newly galvanized dancers look as good in Tudor's piercingly nostalgic The Leaves Are Fading as in his own up-to-the-second pieces. This is no coincidence. "I cherish the ballet vocabulary," he says. "Its formalism is a vehicle to achieve the divine within us. But I'm also an American pop-culture person--I grew up watching Charlie's Angels reruns and going to rave nightclubs five nights a week --and I think it can be put in a big martini shaker and married with classicism." That could be his motto: Classicism Rocks.