Tristan & Julie

The ballerina and the male dancer lay side by side on the couch while the music of Wagner's Liebestod thundered out of the pit. First one rolled off the couch, then the other. Gropingly, they each raised a hand, managed to clasp them. On that grotesquely romantic note, the curtain fell last week on one of five works new to the American Ballet Theatre in its fall season at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. The ballet: Herbert Ross's Tristan.

Choreographer Ross based his work on an early (1902) Thomas Mann story, a sort of literary foothill to his later Magic Mountain. The ballet began in a stark hospital room done in astringent blues and whites. The tuberculous heroine (Ballerina Nora Kaye) beat feebly on the single closed door, panted, felt her heart, slithered onto a chair and sank to the floor in a crawling frenzy. She was joined there by the hero (Erik Bruhn). Together they clutched, held, tangled and disentangled in a series of movements that ranged from the supine to the ridiculous.

Of the other Ballet Theatre new works, Swedish Choreographer Birgit Cullberg's Miss Julie was an unqualified success. Long popular in Europe, Miss Julie sticks closely to August Strindberg's savage little drama of the same name about a neurotic, highly sexed "half-woman" who seduces her family's butler during a wild celebration of Midsummer Eve. Shamed by the images of her aristocratic ancestors, she forces him to kill her. (In the original she commits suicide.) Danced by Violette Verdy and Erik Bruhn, it successfully translated the purely psychological tensions of the original into movement that was both meaningful and boldly forceful.

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