Not too many years ago, one of Alicia Alonso’s ballerinas ran a school in the Gables. For decades, right up to the time Martha Mahr died, young girls would swarm out of her studio every weekday afternoon on the hour, their mothers and maids and boyfriends clogging Giralda Avenue to whisk the dancers away. I was in this last category, a species much maligned because of the adverse effect we could have on a dancer’s diet and focus.

Every one of those girls at some point in her time with Miss Mahr dreamed of dancing for Miami City. The company’s been here for thirty years, and remains charged with the Sisyphean task of selling the still, sad poetry of their style of dance to crowds usually more in tune with the raucous prose of their own.

I say that because the Miami audience is a curious beast. People who were not otherwise reared by wolves usually look on in bewilderment when they visit and observe us in the wild, as it were. When a gentleman in white crocodile loafers strolls in 45 minutes late, followed soon by a lady wearing a dress cut for her preteen daughter, you know you’ve crossed into Dade County. You thought this was the point the girls would come out for the danse des petits cygnes, but actually a separate show has begun: your head has been wedged precariously between the back of the chair and our fair damsel’s rather generous endowments because she wouldn’t wait for you to stand to let her pass; her chevalier servant, if he has yet managed to remove his Versace sunglasses (don’t hold your breath), is looking about in anger and genuine shock that a full cast of dancers, a crew in the dozens and an audience in the hundreds didn’t hold the show to accommodate his obviously busy schedule.

It is to that crowd the Miami City Ballet must perform.

And they do – and beautifully. The company grew and flourished for many years under the care of its artistic director Villella, himself a dancer of international renown. I only met him a couple of times, though now several years later still remember those encounters. There is something so sincere and warm about that man that stays with you long after he’s walked away. Alas, Mr. Villella ran afoul of the moneymen, and that, of course, was that. The man who built the company, the man the dancers loved and admired, was cast away with neither fealty nor ceremony by calculators, œconomists, and sophisters.

Lourdes Lopez accepted the job, and shows signs of admirable energy and focus. Like Villella before her, Ms. Lopez was once a storied dancer, elevated early in her teens and dancing under Balanchine. Some say she danced for a time with Miss Mahr; I like to think it’s true. Ms. Lopez had to believe in the company to accept the position. More importantly, she had to believe in what the company represents, because, you see, in a town yoked to the vagaries of fashion (yes, Art Basel, I’m looking at you), the Miami City Ballet still dares to dance in the old style. They dance the old ballets. The best of their new work still draws on old figures. Their respect for the High Romantic tradition is perhaps the greatest of their many gifts to us, and sadly the one for which they receive the least acclaim.

The old forms communicate a paradox we cannot escape: at once the beauty and the frailty of human life and erotic love. It starts with the ballerina herself. She is by definition lovely. To have gone that far is to have forged an already blessed inheritance through years of trial into a lady without peer. The techniques show her beauty, and show it through the feminine virtues of grace, delicacy, and modesty. But they do more than that; they mean also to show her peril: she dances as if on the edge of a knife. To dance in the old style is to occupy technical figures so well known and so strictly defined that to deviate an inch is to fail. And so the traditional ballet not only glories in the dancer, but also reminds us of her fragility, and by consequence of ours.

The last time I saw prima assoluta Alicia Alonso, she was limping up the stairs of a Paris amphitheater, blind and bent and holding on to a danseur just to make it to the stage. The techniques themselves embody this story. The techniques themselves help the dancer show us in a way no other artist can that if something so vital, so alive is impermanent, then surely we are, too.

We ought to admire a ballerina’s valiant heart because she knows our tragedy better than we: it is the truth at the bottom her dance. She knows our tragedy because through her dance she lives it; she knows that whatever her beauty, whatever her skill, whatever her elegance and timeless grace, whatever her labor at her craft, whatever her love of her art, a lady can only hold an arabesque so long.

It takes courage to dance that tragic vision. It takes courage to make it your career. It takes perhaps still more courage to fall in love, and the pas de deux is the expression of that valor – at once the locus of the ballet’s tragedy and the true summit of the dancers’ art. As the two dancers come together, the desire for the beloved and the longing for transcendence find their sad voice.

Miami audiences usually pick these adagio moments to fidget in their seats and with their programs; I suppose by this time we’ve been sitting a good while, and have gone entire minutes without checking to see if our bestie tweeted another picture of his dessert.

But there may be something deeper to our discomfort, as if we sense somehow that the pas de deux stands in judgment – stark and needed judgment – of us. The two lovers in their tender duet cry out against what we lately threaten to let ourselves become, a wan and cynical people sleepwalking through a gray and loveless culture, where easy ironies and lukewarm love affairs and knowing sneers pass for sophistication, where flip and mirthless laughter hides a calloused heart.

Only the ballet can speak so forcefully against our barren landscape because only the ballerina, rare and vulnerable and strong and dancing fearless with the one from whom she knows she must be parted, can show with such visceral force the primal immediacy, the latent tragedy, and the improbable hope in love. So the two will dance, and their dance, their heartbreak, is their apotheosis. One boy, one girl, dancing together against the dark. They dance in the face of the outrage of their parting; they dance in the shadow of the outrage of death. They dance knowing their fate, and dance because they would not be diminished by it.

2016 – 2017 Season:

This season, Gershwin’s on the menu – always a treat. The Ratmansky name tends to cause a stir. Giselle needs no introduction. A word or two, then, about the Serenade and Carousel, where the ballet can be at its unique and native strength.

Balanchine set a kind of embodied poem to Tchaikovsky’s deservedly popular Serenade for Strings. As music alone, Serenade has remained popular for a hundred years; the waltz, especially, is a favorite – often featured as an early track on those weird ‘classical compilation’ CDs that are presumably meant for 45-year-old divorcées to play on their third date with Tim from Accounting. The choreography tells no obvious story; it is more a series of images – some tender, others heartrending – of desire, loss, and the tragic foreboding at the heart of our erôs.

Serenade fits, then, with Carousel, which tells the life of a young man who works as a barker at a traveling fair. He’s known for a sharp tongue, a strong body, a manly pride, and the conquests to show for it.

One summer, he meets a young girl who makes him want to be a better man. So he marries the girl, jumping in with the same reckless vitality he brings to all his life; it is what makes him so beautiful, and what makes him so bad.

He shocks himself when he finds he knows how to fall in love – for him, it turns out to be easy enough, as hidden within what he thought was just fleeting lust he found immortal things; he found that the philosopher was right and the materialists wrong; he found that erôs was indeed divine.

But in time he discovers still more about love. He learns that his passion is a good thing, but nonetheless incomplete. He hasn’t anything like wisdom, and so is utterly without resource when his desire for his wife begins to cool – when routine and ennui do their customary worst.

Soon, his wife tells him she’s pregnant. He becomes desperate. He sees that he’s not much of a husband, and would in time prove a worse father. He is in no position to provide a decent life for his child, and in a misguided try to better his situation, attempts a mugging. He fails, and kills himself rather than face prison.

Carousel is brutally if not viciously realistic about what attracts us to one another, and not particularly sanguine about the ultimate fate of our romances – no matter how lovely they may be when they begin. We have never been far from tragedy: it is our nature. But when Carousel first debuted in the Majestic Theatre, just months before the god-emperor Shōwa abdicated his divinity, we were nonetheless a different people. Since then, our mythmakers – mostly in the interest of venality, but partly in obeisance to their ugly and solipsistic philosophy – continue to estrange us from one another. Carousel is more our tragedy now than it ever was. We can only hope that its ultimate message, that Grace can heal our broken hearts, prove true.