Patricia McBride, passing on Balanchine’s torch with joy at Charlotte Ballet

The happiest ballet studio in the world may be the one just down the street from Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery in Charlotte, inside a bright purple building bearing the words “Patricia McBride/Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance.”

Here on North Tryon Street uptown, rows of young women and a few young men are being coaxed and praised and sweet-talked into swirling across the floor with luxurious abandon.

“Good, good! Almost! Just breathe a little more with the arms,” urges Patricia McBride, the former ballerina. She stands at the front of the room, but she can’t resist the urge to move with the music. Her hands and arms weave through the air, her eyes widen on the downbeats.

Keeping still just isn’t her strong suit.

It never has been. In the 1970s, as a leggy, tireless powerhouse, McBride so dominated the repertoire of the New York City Ballet and epitomized its style that she was called “the flag-bearer” of the company.

Twenty-five years after she retired from the stage, McBride is still an embodiment of the sheer fun of dancing.

“Soften your arms,” McBride calls out cheerily to these students of the Charlotte Ballet Academy, the training arm of the Charlotte Ballet. McBride is a master teacher at the academy and directs the company with her husband, Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, who like McBride is a former City Ballet principal dancer.

“Breathe through your movements.” McBride demonstrates, stretching her leg forward and tossing an arm high over her head. As she does this, with a broad smile and merry eyes, she makes a little “ah!” sound, a singing, high-pitched inhalation, as if that expansive move from fingers to toes gives her a tickle.

Dancing, even in the gentle way that McBride, 72, does it these days, still flushes her with joy.

But then, what doesn’t? McBride’s emotional dial seems consistently set at cheerful. She is delighted, of course, to receive the 2014 Kennedy Center Honor, which will be bestowed in a gala on Sunday. But long before this award, she was known for her dauntless high spirits.

She was the muse

It was her easy, ready-for-anything nature that inspired George Balanchine, founder of New York City Ballet, and Jerome Robbins, the late associate artistic director of the company, to create some of their most enduring works for McBride’s body. She was unusually versatile. Not only was she up for anything, she could do just about anything.

This wasn’t so much a gift as an ethic – the payoff, as she’ll tell you, for hard work, though it simply looked like pleasure. Her roles swung from pert soubrettes to artless innocents, from sauce pots to glamour queens and a chilly dominatrix or two. The consistent thread was how she made dancing look like the most delicious experience on Earth.

“She brought something onstage that we can’t even see on videos; that’s what’s sad for me,” Bonnefoux says. “That joy and that need to dance. That pulse. A nonstop commitment to the choreography and the steps. She was in it.”

McBride was Balanchine’s first Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; she was the teasing Columbine in his “Harlequinade.” She created the authoritative, pure-hearted Swanilda in his full-length “Coppelia.”

Quiet, patient and endlessly inventive, Balanchine was the idol of so many dancers who knew him. “I just wanted to please him and copy him,” says McBride. “He was so beautiful to watch in motion.”

She was the rare ballerina who handled Balanchine’s intricate musicality and Robbins’ character-driven mini-dramas with equal ease. She inspired Robbins’ most famous ballets, including his 1969 masterwork on love and youth, “Dances at a Gathering.”

Happiness is powerful. McBride could jolly up the high-strung Robbins, defusing his famously explosive temper.

“She just disarmed him,” says Helgi Tomasson, artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, who was McBride’s frequent partner at New York City Ballet. “If something went wrong in a rehearsal, she would laugh it off. She’d say, ‘Oh my gosh, I did that? How silly!’ And Jerry would just break into a smile.”

Passing the torch

Three hours whiz by. McBride teaches her students a bright, springy excerpt from Balanchine’s “Raymonda Variations,” which she learned from the ballerina Patricia Wilde, for whom Balanchine created the leading role.

So the torch passes; from one body to another. In the ballet world, where the low-tech means of transmitting steps from teacher to student is revered, old dancers never die. They echo in the muscles of the young.

“Glissades can be really exciting!” McBride calls out in her high, soft voice, showing the dancers the beauty of a basic gliding step. It’s a bit like saying the word “and” is really exciting, but McBride makes you believe it.

“They are the link to everything you do.”

In the afternoon, McBride turns to her company duties, overseeing “Nutcracker” rehearsals. So it goes, day after day, whether she’s readying the chamber-size, 18-dancer company for the holiday production or for one of its other programs throughout the year, perhaps featuring one of the Balanchine ballets so dear to her.

She and Bonnefoux work year-round. During the summer, they take their dancers to Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York, where the couple run a dance school they founded 25 years ago.

“Are we crazy?” McBride says, leaning on the table over lunch, with her face in her hand. Her deep-set green eyes and broad cheekbones were perfect for the stage, visible from the upper balconies, expressive.

With her dark brown hair in a smooth, chic bob, she still has dramatic looks. Her gaze turns dreamy when she’s asked why she keeps working.

“I don’t know. It’s a love, I guess. To show what you’ve got to pass on. … I don’t think I’d like to lie around. What would I do?”

In New York

McBride takes her pleasure seriously. She’s been drawing a paycheck from dance since 1959, when she joined the New York City Ballet. She was 16.

At 18, she became the youngest principal dancer in company history. In her 30-year career, she danced more than 100 different roles. Among her favorites: the zesty “Tarantella” duet; Robbins’ “The Cage” – she was still a teenager when she took on the part of a murderous sexual predator, which embarrassed her, until she grew to love the powerful rush of it. And especially “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet,” romantic and lush, full of overhead lifts.

After her lavish sendoff from City Ballet in 1989 at age 46 – she was showered with roses, meticulously de-thorned – she jumped into teaching, joining Bonnefoux at Indiana University.

In 1996, the couple was offered the job in Charlotte, running North Carolina Dance Theatre. The name changed to Charlotte Ballet this year. The ballet has seen a corresponding spike in interest; since 2010, its ticket sales are up 75 percent and donor gifts have tripled.

The couple’s son and daughter both live in Charlotte; McBride and Bonnefoux have three young grandchildren who join them at the ballet school on weekends.

‘Joyous experience’

Sara Mearns, a New York City Ballet principal, trained with McBride as a teenager, making the one-hour commute from Columbia, S.C., six days a week. Without McBride’s teaching, “I wouldn’t be the ballerina I am today,” Mearns says, describing “the joy she had every day. It was such a joyous experience.”

What McBride emphasizes “is really showing your spirit onstage,” says Alessandra Ball-James, a leading dancer of the Charlotte Ballet. “She wants to see you living onstage.”

Back at the studio, McBride is rehearsing four Sugar Plum Fairies in Bonnefoux’s swift, sweeping “Nutcracker” choreography.

“Soft arms,” she says to Ball-James. “I just felt they were a little stiff.” She flutters her wrists, and it’s like a breeze lifting leaves. “Just so they move a little.”

Ball-James dances again, rippling her arms lightly. It makes all the difference.

“Beautiful!” McBride exclaims. “Good!”

And because it’s true, and also because it’s her nature, she showers pleasure on everyone in the room: “You’re all so good.”