Ballet's Classical History, the Kirov Edition.

The best way to learn dance history is in the theater. And the three-week Kirov Ballet season that opened at City Center on Tuesday night looks on paper like a major course in the history of ballet classicism. You could know nothing about dance and learn from this season much about the forms of ballet and how they have changed. Audiences perusing the lineups will assume the season's focus will be on choreography. It has started with the first of two Petipa anthologies and will include a Fokine, a Balanchine and a Forsythe program. The three late-19th-century ballets presented on opening night, all Kirov home repertory, are core texts of the ballet classicism perfected in St. Petersburg by Marius Petipa. Act III of ''Raymonda'' (1898) is a nonpareil demonstration of how Petipa could take folk dances as thematic material on which he then concocted exuberant classical variations. The Grand Pas from ''Paquita'' (1881) is a bright classicization of Spanish dance style that stops to include a series of solo variations. And in the Shades scene from ''La Bayadere'' (1877) an Orphic journey into the realm of the dead is shown as a Romantic vision but arranged in intensely and hierarchical classical-ballet terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]