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We've all been wondering for some time now what the Harkness Ballet would be like. We've read about Renaissance patroness Rebecca Harkness refurbishing a little palace for it in New York, summering it in Watch Hill, opening it in Cannes, touring it around the world, weeding, pruning, and watering it. Parenthetically, I wish more people with money to spare would follow Mrs. H's example.

The company ended its first New York engagement at the Broadway Theatre on November 19. I've seen the pieces that were formerly in the repertory of the Joffrey company and some of the new pieces, and I have a few first impressions of what the Harkness is all about. To begin with, it's a big company. None of this business about alphabetical listing and everyone getting his chance to shine. There's a corps, and then there are soloists.

It's a lavish company: any dance that needs costumes and scenery gets them - sometimes to the point of almost wanton luxury. The repertory seems unnecessarily huge and hence is bound to be of uneven caliber. Despite its limber, clean-limbed, American-trained dancers, the Harkness comes on like a European company. It's hard to pin down the reason. The overall rhythms, pacing, spatial design, the way the ensemble is used are oddly old-fashioned. Some of the choreographers seem modern only in that they are willing to make use of distorted design and loveless sex. Many of the themes are neo- Romantic - maybe as opposed to Balanchine-classic - and the movement fits these themes: it is movement that directly expresses emotion, rather than movement as a metaphor for feeling. Monument for a Dead Boy, by Dutch choreographer Rudi van Dantzig, generated quite a lot of excitement despite its dated, almost Wedekind-like Sturm und Drang. In an atmosphere suffused with passion, a boy (Lawrence Rhodes) and his younger self (Warren Conover) relive the ordeal of his passage from adolescent heterosexuality to homosexuality to despair and spiritual death. Van Dantzig worked out his theme in movement of wracking intensity; the characters literally haul and tear at each other. This is especially true of the boy's parentshateful puppets in '40s garb, grimacing out a lust ugly enough to turn the most stalwart adolescent against women. Except for a sloppy and gratuitous chorus of fright-wigged ladies, billed as Darkness, this dance is all of a piece. It has the sincere force of autobiographical expiation.

Some of the most beautiful moments that I saw during the run occurred in John Butler's A Season in Hell, inspired by Rimbaud's work of that name. I couldn't follow the exact relevance of the three principal dancers' actions to the Rimbaud-Verlaine relationship (implied in the program) but it didn't matter. The dance began with a fine solo for Lawrence Rhodes as the poet protagonist, against a starry backdrop and under some gleaming metal rods that Rouben Ter-Arutunian designed. Then Rhodes and Brunilda Ruiz performed a duct that is Butler at his best-twining around each other in a remorseless lust to discover and experience everything. Very Rimbaldien. Sated, I wanted the dance to end much sooner than it did.

This genius of Butler's for sculptural dance becomes a liability when he applies it to the corps de ballet. In his Landscape for Lovers he had six couples in unison repeating almost exactly the very personal erotic movement that the principal couple had just performed. He used the same device in Season, where it has more motivation, but is still odd. All of a sudden, a lesson in gang-banging. And in such passages, Butler doesn't like to use space; it's as if he has a "camera eye" hang-up from doing so much TV and has to plunk each dancer or couple into a square yard of stage and keep them there.

Every ballet company, it seems, must have its quota of formal pas de deux and pas de trois. No matter what gimmick a choreographer gives them, their purpose is to show off the dancing, to provoke gasps and roars. At best, such a dance becomes a kind of metaphor for a I9th century relationship. All that courtly handling. I saw a sensitive, young, romantic one by Richard Wagner called Youth that kept its fancywork subdued and Brian MacDonald's flashy Canto Indio. MacDonald evidently knows that be it "à la turque" or “à la espagnol," a pas de deux is always ballet. His dance made its bow to Mexico with a Carlos Chavez score, costumes of Imperial Russian Inca, and a few quaint folk steps and flexed feet scattered among the arabesques. The steps were hard as hell and fun-looking, and Elisabeth Carroll and Helgi Tomasson made brilliant whoopee out of it all. From the way she looks at the audience, you can tell that she knows what a pas de deux is all about too.

A pas de trois is a pas de deux with complications. Someone always has to wait his turn. And an element of polite rivalry is added: one boy has nice buttery turns, but look at the way the other twiddles his feet in the air! Brian MacDonald's Zealous Variations is an inventive exercise in this form. It makes you wonder, though, about dance audiences. If a painter today painted in the style of Corot or a musician composed echoes of Schumann, he'd never survive, but it seems de rigeur for a ballet company to lard its repertory with clever new variations on I9th century motifs. This is bad enough when the work in question is good, but when it's like MacDonald's massive, vulgar, jewelencrusted Tchaikovsky, one really longs for a contemporary point of view. (The program note for this monster says, "if Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky had been entertained at Newport just before the turn of the century, it might have been at a gala such as this." What an infuriating "if"! What was good enough for the Tsar is quite good enough for us.)

This dance was probably designed to show off the dancers. They shine in spite of it, and in fact one of the strongest impressions made by the Harkness Ballet is that it has a remarkably fine group of principal dancers. Lawrence Rhodes and Brunilda Ruiz are especially sensitive and dramatic; they seem able to bring off everything with distinction. Elisabeth Carroll is a technical whiz. Helgi Tomasson and Finis Jhung are both fine, smooth dancers with great presence. Lone Isaksen is lovely in a cool fragile way, and although I saw Annette and Paul only once, I thought her strong and charming.

Mercifully, I haven't talked about all I saw, and I haven't begun to see all of the Harkness's big shiny repertory. Maybe now the company will make a practice of dropping in on New York from time to time.

This article was written about the original Harkness Ballet, or the just-ex-Joffrey ballet. This was the first appearance of the company in New York, after Rebekah Harkness elected to withdraw her financial support from the Robert Joffrey Ballet and branch out on her own. Not knowing the full story - or perhaps knowing too many sides of the same story - I was prepared to give this latter-day Renaissance princess the benefit of a doubt. Especially since many of the dancers had been with the Joffrey.