New York, NY - “THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAN BALLET is on the same order as the Muscovite Imperial Ballet back in the days when the czar racket was a paying proposition.” So begins an unpublished 1933 draft for a news release for the School of American Ballet’s foundation recently found in its archives; the author, it is assumed, was Lincoln Kirstein. A later news release, dated Nov. 27, 1933, begins: “The School of the American Ballet under the direction of Georges Balanchine, maître de ballet for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the Monte Carlo Ballet and Les Ballets 1933, will inaugurate its first season early in December at 637 Madison Avenue. The purpose of the school is the development of a national ballet, corresponding to the famous Russian Ballet, but essentially American in character, enlisting the talents of American artists, dealing with typically American themes, creating an American tradition.”

The School of American Ballet (the “the” before “American” fell by the wayside) opened on Jan. 1, 1934, with George (no longer Georges) Balanchine and Kirstein in charge. A few months later Kirstein (or so he later claimed) noticed Balanchine starting to give his students some dramatic gestures, comparable to those that had characterized some of his finest European choreography; and so Balanchine began to choreograph “Serenade,” the first ballet he created on American soil. Fourteen years later Balanchine and Kirstein founded New York City Ballet, which takes the vast majority of its dancers from the school and includes its students in many of its productions (“The Nutcracker,” “Coppelia,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet,” to name just some on view in 2009).

Though Balanchine went on to make many more ballets, dozens of which have become classics, none is more beloved than “Serenade.” (Last year it was danced by companies from St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Salt Lake City and New York.)

The school has danced “Serenade” several times in its annual workshop performances and is now preparing to dance it in the performances celebrating its 75th anniversary, beginning on Saturday. Just as “Serenade” has become one of the central works of the world’s ballet repertory, so has the School of American Ballet become one of the world’s central institutions of ballet teaching. It became America’s foremost ballet school almost at its inception; it has been recognized for many decades as one of the world’s six (or fewer) pre-eminent ballet schools. When students graduate from this school, we can expect them to exemplify such basic Balanchinean virtues as speed, stretch, off-balance naturalness and complex musicality in ways that graduates of European schools will be unlikely to match.

As with every major ballet school today there are aspects of controversy about School of American Ballet. Some of the great Russian teachers of yesteryear — above all, Felia Doubrovska and Antonina Tumkovsky — are said by some to have left a gap that was never filled. The predominance of sheerly Balanchine technique (that is, ballet technique as he developed it from the Russian style he shared with those teachers) has been called a flaw.

The school’s students come in three main stages: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Beginners used to start at 7; now they start at 6. (Some of the “Nutcracker” children are very small and very young these days.) Like many outsiders I used to entertain the notion that most of City Ballet’s dancers were among the school’s beginners, going onstage in the annual “Nutcracker.” I love the 1978 photograph that shows Peter Boal as a 13-year-old Nutcracker Prince beside Kay Mazzo’s Sugar Plum Fairy.

In fact the story isn’t often so neat. Many of the school’s students, often from other parts of America, join only at the advanced level. I have heard the complaint that the school falls into two main parts (with intermediate, the smallest, falling between the two). Beginners, it is claimed, are the cash machine that feeds the company with “Nutcracker” children, who perform unpaid and whose families flock to see them. Meanwhile the advanced level, it’s said, is really just a finishing school for students who have come from all over.

Watching a quick succession of students aged 8, 9, 11 and 12, I see the emergence of those qualities of dance intelligence that characterize the best Balanchine dancers. Children who may not prove bright in other respects are picking up complicated phrases and sophisticated corrections that would confuse many adults. Their teachers draw them in by speaking in quiet voices. Dancing is made to appear as something not just of repetition and display but of internal contrasts and musical intricacy. Thanks to the teaching of Jock Soto (himself an extraordinarily able partner from his earliest days with City Ballet in the 1980s), both girls and boys are learning aspects of partnering that their predecessors learned only in their professional careers.

I spent more than two hours watching Suki Schorer coach students in “Serenade.” A former Balanchine dancer at City Ballet long since based at the school, she has become the world’s most celebrated teacher of Balanchine technique.

In the second, they point the right foot, sending a charge of energy down the newly stretched leg. (This step, battement tendu, became the one Balanchine valued most as the open-sesame to good dancing. “You know, dear, if only you would learn to do battement tendu properly, you wouldn’t have to learn anything else,” he said around 1944 to the young dancer who soon became his third wife, Maria Tallchief.) In the third, they fold that leg back directly behind the other, one heel beside the other toe and vice versa, in ballet’s fifth position: the basic tight-closed position on which Balanchine insisted, the ultimate contrast to the main wide-stretched positions in which his choreography abounds.

One (who in the second cast also dances the Dark Angel) is Lauren Lovette, from North Carolina, now finishing her third year of full-time training at the school. (Her first experiences of the school’s teaching were in summer programs in 2005 and 2006.) The other (who in the first cast will dance the most technically exacting role in the “Russian” dance) is Shoshana Rosenfield, a Manhattanite who began life at the school as a beginner, at 12. After two hours of watching them I found myself loving “Serenade” more than ever.

As “Billy Elliot” reminds us, even third-rate provincial ballet schools can prompt profound self-discovery. The School of American Ballet must have witnessed many such moments of epiphany. That unpublished press release was right: the School of American Ballet is neither a gag nor a come-on for suckers. Who could fail to wish it well for its next quarter century?  . . . By Alastair Macaulay