The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 39

Monday, Oct. 13, 1986 The Philadelphia Inquirer 3-D Picturing ballet through dancer's eyes 1 til By Leonard W. Boasbcrg Inquirer Stuff Writer teven Caras is standing about eight rows back from the stage in the Shu-bert Theater, Nikon in hand, watch- Ling and listening. It's Wednesday afternoon, and the Pennsylvania Ballet is running through its last dress exceptions, he said. "The career of the average corps de ballet member is 15 to 20 years, max," he said.

"Your body just doesn't have the buoyancy. Gravity starts to take over. You become an old dancer, but you're a young person." Interested in photography since his childhood, but strictly as an amateur, Caras bought a used Olympus OMI and, when he was not dancing, started taking pictures of the New York City Ballet. "My photographic career happened fast," he said. "Within a year, I found myself in Cuba on assignment for Doubleday photographing Alicia Alonso for a book by Walter Terry, the dance critic." Balanchine, he said, was extremely supportive.

"He was happy one of his dancers had something going for him. There was one less 'child' he had to be concerned with." Caras' fifth book was on the man he ranks with Picasso and Stravinsky as one of the three 20th-century geniuses in the arts. It is entitled Balanchine: Photo Alburn and Memoir. About a year ago, he began doing portrait work in his Upper West Side studio in New York. "It's a new direction I've been going in," he said.

Although photography is his career now, he still thinks of himself as a dancer, and he still practices every day. "The illusion we dancers strive to create on stage is effortless effortless beauty, that's ballet," he said. That, he added, is what he strives to create in his photography. interview last week. "It's a very special field.

Not everybody can photograph dancers in action and catch the right position, but he also captures the emotion behind the ballet." Debra Austin, one of the principals dancing the role of Swanilda in the current production of Coppelia and a dancer whom Caras frequently has photographed, echoed that. "Steve captures the essence of the dance. He's the best," she said. Photographing ballet is not like photographing anything else in which movements are fast, said Caras. What's acceptable, even desirable, in football or boxing, for example the awkward pose, the feet askew, the eye closed, the grimace, the sweat, the pain is not acceptable in ballet.

"In ballet, awkward is verboten," he said. "Dancers strive for perfection of line, and dance is about movement. My job is to stop that movement in a photograph and at the same time bring it to life." Born in Oradell, N.J., Caras did not start dancing until he was 15, but within a year and a half he had a scholarship to the New York City Ballet's School of Ballet. When Caras was 18, Balanchine, put him in the company. He was in his mid-20s, he recalled, when he heard Balanchine musing about "seeing some new faces in one of my parts.

That's when I started to think ahead." He thought about the brevity of the ballet dancer's career. Some superstars, such as Margot Fonteyn, make it into their 50s, or even, like Alicia Alonso, into their 60s, but they are the rehearsal of Coppelia before opening the Delibes classic that evening for its 2Vi-week engagement. Caras is there at the invitation of the company, to record the event for publicity and posterity. Snap, snap-snap-snap he catches one dancer as she strikes the perfect pose, another at the precise top of his leap. It's as though Caras is on the stage, dancing himself, knowing to the millisecond when to capture the movements.

He does know, because he was on the stage for 14 years, dancing all over the world with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine, its founder and director. Now, at 35, he is one of the small number of professional photographers who specialize in ballet, and the only one so far known to have been a ballet dancer. Six books of his have been published; the latest, which came out this month, is Peter Martins: Prince of the Dance, about the man who shares artistic responsibilities at the New York City Ballet with Jerome Robbins and who is artistic adviser to the Pennsylvania Ballet. "In my opinion, he's the best dance photographer in the country," Robert Weiss, the Pennsylvania Ballet's artistic director, said of Caras in an The Philadelphia Inquirer JOHN SLEEZER Ex-dancer Caras photographing the Pennsylvania Ballet. Film: Sci-fi, horror in 'Deadly Friend1 Review DEADLY FRIEND Produced by Robert M.

Sherman, directed by Wes Craven, written by Bruce Joel Rubin, photography by Philip Lathrop, music by Charles Bernstein, distributed by Warner Brothers. Running time: 1 hour, 29 mins. Paul Conway Matthew Laborteaux Samantha Kristy Swanson Jeanne Conway Anne Twomey Tom Michael Sharrett Parent's guide: (violence) Showing: At area theaters ate school. Craven's film is a modest pleasantry until he remembers who he is. His movie promptly turns into I Was a Teenage Brain Surgeon with a clinically specific operation that brought a nauseated groan from many in the audience.

Restoring a dead girl to life in this league merely entails shoving what looks like a cheap digital watch into her cranium and sewing up the scalp. Beneath all this is a rather shrewd fantasy for teenage boys about taking absolute control of a girl's body. Developments thereafter are predictable and of the sort the customers expect from a director who clearly doesn't wish to depart too drastically from his Craven image. By Desmond Ryan Inquirer Movie Critic Among the many pleasures afforded by Francis Coppola's Peggy Sue dot Married is the way in which a naster director takes battered old cViches and time-travel formulas and turns them into something refreshingly original and surprisingly deep. Wes Craven's muddled Deadly Friend reminds us that such feats of filmmaking are rare indeed.

Craven has amassed a considerable following among horror fans, beginning with the repulsive cult favorite The Hills Have Eyes and culminating with the hit A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven, a veteran of the gore wars that have seen the genre degenerate into a competition to create ever more gruesome death scenes, In the event, he chose to graft a variation on the Frankenstein theme and some standard horror ingredients onto a tried formula from another field bright kids versus the scientists and authority and an experiment gone wrong. The idea has yielded movies as entertaining and provocative as WarGames and The Manhattan Project pictures that worked because they were about some pressing technological issue. The first part of Deadly Friend plays like a halfhearted reprise of Short Circuit with Matthew Laborteaux as a super-bright 15-year-old who is fascinated with artificial intelligence. He has developed his own robot, and his precocity has won him a place beyond his years in a gradu- clearly did some thinking before he chose to make Deadly Friend.

That, in itself, is a highly unusual departure for a director in the field. Matthew Laborteaux and Kristy Swanson in Wes Craven's film. mm mMssmwsgm New Carter Presidential Center is work place with a view his You have met a few of the thousands of Philadelphians who have survived cancer. When the doctors told Louise Binswanger that she had breast cancer, she thought her life was over. But her case was caught early by a routine mammogram.

After six weeks of radiation therapy at Fox Chase Cancer Center, she was free of cancer. And she didn't lose her breast. lilt, II a tltPii John DeVos learned that he had cancer of the esophagus, and was told that he might die in six months. But after four months of chemotherapy and radiation therapy at Fox Chase, the cancer was gone. He didn't lose his esophagus and he can swallow normally.

Jim Higgins was staggered by the news that he had colon cancer. After surgery at Fox Chase, he was cancer free. He went back to work as a Philadelphia firefighter and hasn't lost a day of work since then. He even bikes 100 miles a week. scholars and the public.

What makes this different from other presidential libraries is the rest of the center, which is made up of the Carter-Menil Human Rights Foundation, a private foundation promoting worldwide human rights; Global 2000 an organization set up to address international health and environmental issues that currently is engaged in developing food self-sufficiency programs in the Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and Ghana, and the Carter Center of Emory University, which brings together world leaders, scholars and policymakers for "consultations." Thus far, Carter has sponsored consultations on the Middle East, healthcare policy in the United States, arms control, global health and the Latin American debt crisis. Next month, the Carter Center is holding another consultation, titled "Reinforcing Democracy in the Americas." It will be co-chaired by Carter and former President Ford. Among those scheduled to participate are Daniel Oduber, former president of Costa Rica; George Price, former president of Belize; Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs; Fernando Belaunde, former president of Peru; Raul Alfonsin, president of Argentina; Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. James Wright, majority leader of the U.S.

House. Only a former president can bring together such heavyweights on a regular basis and then have the power and influence to persuade policymakers in Washington and foreign capitals to implement ideas formulated at the consultations. Schira said the center was not just another think tank. "We really want to avoid that talking thing. The thing that turned off President Carter as he went around the country and looked at what other think tanks were doing was that millions of dollars were being spent on studies that were sitting on shelves.

So he has an activist kind of agenda in mind." Betore each consultation. Carter visits the countries involved. When he returns, he briefs administration and congressional leaders on what he has found. Schira said it was difficult to measure the power of a former president when it comes to influencing policy in other countries. "The reason it is hard to measure is because you really can't talk about it in this way because it is not beneficial to talk about it," he said.

"We wouldn't want the president of a country abroad to have a perception that his policy is being made here. It's not true that his policy is being made here. But you can't print a brochure that said: 'President Carter spoke to President Alfonsin about economic reforms and he adopted those But the influence is there and so is the respect they have for him." What is the goal of the Carter Center, then? "President Carter is looking at it in very broad, humanitarian terms at this point," Schira said. "He is not going to get down into policy dis- CARTER, from I didn't get active again in public life until after his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, died. 'Carter didn't want to follow the Hoover plan for ex-presidents.

"I was convinced that we didn't have to wait for Reagan to be out of office because there was plenty to be done and done in a way that would be beneficial to this administration," said George C. Schira, executive director of the Carter Center. He said Carter and other ex-presidents are a "peculiar" national resource that has historically been wasted. theme was echoed by Warren Christopher, who was deputy secretary of state in the Carter administration, in a speech at the Carter Center dedication: ''One comes away from even a cursory review of the lives of ex-presidents with a chilling sense of a wasted resource. On the whole, their experience was undervalued and their advice little sought.

''An important reason for this omis-sipn, history reveals, is partisan zeal. New administrations of both parties have sought to distinguish themselves from their predecessors on each and every front. This ensures a discontinuity which baffles our allies and produces galloping inefficiencies in our system. The irony is that, like a son about his father, a nw administration often decides in its waning years that the old man was not so dumb after all." What this center is, then, is a vehicle for Carter to ride the rest of his life. Walk through the library exhibits, though, and you also a sense of what Jimmy Carter the man is like and how he viewed the presidency ajld viewed himself as a president.

the library exhibits bring into feeds even more clearly how different Carter is from Reagan. Reagan makes the presidency seem like such an easy job, while Carter always seemed to be struggling with the complex-ides and burdens of the office. And iij the exhibits, which are designed to be educational not only on the subject of Jimmy Carter, but on the office as well you get the feeling that Carter is still trying to convince visitors of how difficult the job really is. There is a video display on terrorism. Carter appears on a television screen and lays out the basics of the situation, then asks you to choose a solution; negotiate or confront.

When you make your choice, Carter reappears laying out all the global and political ramifications of your decision. Phew, it's a tough job being president, so many things to think about. if he library was consciously designed to be educational," Schira said In a recent interview. "And the president felt that the people needed to see the United States from the peYSpective of the presidency. And very often history is not written that way.

And it's important to see it that way because very often the viewpoint that others have of this country is' through the presidency." In addition to the public exhibits, there are 27 million documents stored in the library, all available to i These are only a few of the many thousands of cancer survivors in the Philadelphia area who today are living active, productive lives. And there are five million other survivors living in the United States. Unfortunately, too few of us understand the great progress that has been Jimmy Carter as midshipman He developed photo oj his wife (above) putes and speak from a Southern White House or something of that sort. He doesn't have any further political ambitions. His influence, if it grows, would be as a statesman, as an international statesman.

"He is a centrist. And very often these policy centers or think tanks in the United States seem to be either left or right. If this became anything, with regard to policy, it would be a center for centrists, kind of reflecting President Carter's own priorities. And that would be fiscal conservatism, a strong defense, an internationalist attitude that believes negotiation and diplomacy are the tools of power, rather than resorting to arms, and concerns for social justice and human rights." Schira said the center could also be used for domestic-conflict resolutions, such as getting the tobacco industry and anti-smoking organizations together to discuss public policy. And he said the center could be used for "private summits" for world leaders, politicians or even private industry.

All of this seems to have made Jimmy Carter a happy man. Now he has a place to got to work and continue to work on the agenda he outlined when he lived at the White House. He seemed relaxed and comfortable during the days preceding the dedication. "Somebody asked me: Do you think Carter is said Schira, a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary. "I said, 'Well, redemption is the wrong word because redemption assumes I'd rather call it transfiguration; the exchange of one form of glory for another.

It's another way of bringing power and power, in this sense, is the power of good ideas. After all, ideas do create history." made in cancer detection and diagnosis, treatment and research. Too often, fear of the disease keeps people from having annual checkups which can help save their lives. The fact is that, caught early, cancer frequently can be beaten and the patient can resume his or her normal working and family life. At Fox Chase we know about the patient's struggle with cancer.

Fox Chase is one of the verv few comprehensive cancer centers in this region of the country designated by the National Cancer Institute. That means that we blend the newest research with compassionate care to help save 4 and to give cancer patients i new hope for the future. Mwl oLsJ v. Fox Chase Cancer Center John K. Durant.

President, Vox Chase Cancer Center; Immediate Past President, American Society o( Clinical Oncologists: member. National Cancer Advisory Board. 7701 Burholme Avenue Philadelphia. PA 19111 Telephone: (213) 728-3000 mm mm.