Music: Prima Ballerina

To judge by last year’s furore over Ballerina Alicia Markova, she was the only occupant of ballet’s top drawer. Last week the other occupant was getting some of her due. Crowds jammed Manhattan’s City Center to see Alexandra Danilova, last of Diaghilev’s prima ballerinas, as the Street Dancer in Le Beau Danube and the Queen in Swan Lake.

Her fans insist that 41-year-old Danilova is “a dancer’s dancer,” the best classical dancer today. Most balletomanes allow her ballet’s most beautiful legs (a critic once called them “flexible and . . . fast [as a] hummingbird’s wings”).

“I Try To Be Kind.” Though Danilova has settled in the U.S., her most enthusiastic public is in London, the home of sad-faced Alicia Markova (born Alice Marks), her rival queen of ballet. The two danseuses nobles profess the deepest friendship, ever since the day in 1928 when Diaghilev introduced 14-year-old Alice, a promising member of the corps de ballet, to 24-year-old Danilova, the prima ballerina. But each recollects the occasion with a fine underline of feminine malice. Markova considered Danilova as “very handsome, plump. . . .” Danilova remembers Markova as “very thin, very tiny . . . I try to be kind to her.” Queenly Danilova, who has some of the manners of a grande dame, has only scorn for the get-to-the-top-quick ambitions of U.S. girls. Danilova would like the U.S.

Government to subsidize ballet. Says she: “A bunch of foreigners have brought the ballet into the country — now I would like that it could stay and be an American institution.” Monte Carlo’s Queen. In the severe Russian tradition, Danilova started training at eight, when her aunt put her in the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg. Through nine cold and hungry years Danilova struggled to make the corps of Moscow’s famed Maryinsky Theater, the tough and thorough proving ground for Imperial School pupils. In her second year at Maryinsky, Alexandra danced the lead in Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, and from then on she was on her way. In 1924, she left the U.S.S.R. and joined Impresario Diaghilev in Paris. Her first husband was famed Choreographer Georges Balanchine (now married to Vera Zorina); her second an Italian engineer; her third and current one Dancer Kasimir Kokitch.

After Impresario Diaghilev’s death, the Ballet Russe was taken over by an ex-Cossack, Colonel Wassily de Basil, has since split into a number of pieces, each claiming to be the truest chip off the old block. Markova eventually became No. 1 ballerina of the heavily subsidized, well-promoted Ballet Theatre. Danilova has spent seven years as queen bee of a company called the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which has a ballet corps well drilled in ex-Husband Balanchine’s intricate geometric designs but is woefully short of top dancers.