One of America's leading ballet personalities was in Bermuda last week, examining students at the School of Russian Ballet, founded by her friend and colleague, Mrs. Patricia Gray.

Chicago-born Thalia Mara, who trained and worked with such ballet legends as Michael Fokine, Olga Preobrajenska and Adolph Bolm, placed Jackson, Mississippi on the world dance map when she staged the famed International Ballet Competition there in 1979. Attracting top dancers from every continent, it soon became the most successful event of its kind, the finals being televised around the world and winners going on, for the most part, to become stars in leading companies.

With competitions held every four years, Mme. Mara has now organised five of these huge competitions. Now, a grateful city which found that the surrounding publicity went far beyond the world of dance, have re-named their theatre, the `Thalia Mara Hall'.

The ideals that she has cherished all of her dancing and teaching life are enshrined in that competition which, on her insistence, is scored as much on artistry as on technique.

"Even today, they arrive in Jackson, thinking all we want to see is multiple turns! And the men in ballet today don't jump, they fly, and they don't turn, but spin like tops!'' She is, of course, one of the world's leading authorities on ballet technique and travels all over the world as an examiner.

"Patricia's school teaches the Legat method but I also examine for RAD (Royal Academy of Dancing). When I ran the Academy in New York we also ran summer schools for students as far away as Canada and Mexico, so I devised my own graded system. In the end, it doesn't matter about the method, a teacher is a teacher, and good technique is good technique!'' Now, at a time in her life when she feels she should take things "a little easy'', she expresses concern for the way in which young people are being educated in the US.

"Education is more than just facts. Education should develop culture so now I'm fighting to bring the arts back into education. When I was growing up in Chicago we all automatically got a liberal arts education, taken to the Symphony once a month and things like that. We had music classes, a dance club, an opera club. Nowadays, kids can barely read or write, but when you talk to the educators they tell you the arts are just frills!'' In her day, she says, sports were considered important at school, but mainly as a method of teaching kids to play fair and observe the rules, but "today it's just the opposite. You play to win and you play for money. Sportsmanship and fair play are out the window. Then they wonder why so many kids are delinquent. Explain to me why all these psychologists can't grasp what is going on!'' Controversial in her views on the history of American ballet and outspoken in her criticism of today's trend in dance which she feels concentrates on mechanical skills at the expense of artistry, Mme. Mara says that in her opinion, the American approach to ballet has "ruined'' it as an art form.

"Today, even in Russia, the soul of the art is gone. I think that Balanchine (Russian/American choreographer) had a lot to do with that. He had a reputation as being a musical choreographer but his idea of music was how many steps could you put to a bar of music. I have been devastated by what has happened to ballet in the US. I've seen wonderful dancers join the New York City Ballet and in a few months, all personality is wiped out.'' Warming to what she admits is, in some quarters, almost a sacrilegious view of the icon of America ballet, she goes further: "He sold the idea that very young dancers with long, long legs dancing with bent knees was contemporary and `modern'. Anyone doing that in Europe would have been laughed off the stage! But if you have a rich backer, as he did with Lincoln Kirstein, and enough publicity hype, you can eventually get the public to believe anything.

In my opinion, Balanchine was a throw-back to the days of Petipa.'' What she finds most incredible, even to this day, is that while all of this was going on, the man whom she (along with many others) believes to have been the true genius of 20th century ballet -- Michel Fokine -- was languishing, neglected in a Riverside Drive dance studio in New York.

Of the Russian dancer and choreographer who created such ballets as `Les Sylphides' (with Pavlova, Preobajenska, Karsavina and Nijinsky as his dancers!), `Scheherazade', `Petrusha', `Firebird', `Spectre de la Rose' (for Nijinsky) and `The Dying Swan' (for Pavlova), she says, "He was without a doubt, the authentic genius of his time and it was he, not Balanchine, who changed the course of ballet. His great contribution was that he brought lyricism to the ballet, freed dancers of their corsets and made dancers dance with their torsos, not just their arms and legs. He brought acting into dance, instead of just mime. He was the first choreographer to use the body as a means of expression. He was the one who revolutionised 20th century ballet.'' But, she explains, after the Russian Revolution he eventually settled in New York and taught there, in almost total obscurity for 25 years.

"His genius was allowed to wither on the vine. Then, in 1934, when I was working with him, we decided to do a concert at this huge stadium, and more than 10,000 showed up, they had to call the police to control the crowds.

After that, he formed his own company and I danced in it for a while. Then he went to work with American Ballet Theatre and went around the world reviving his works from the Diaghilev era. When the Royal Ballet came to New York for the first time and opened with `Sleeping Beauty', I sat in that audience and wept because it was a vindication of everything that I had been trying to do for America.'' Mme. Mara, who is of Russian parentage, began ballet lessons as a child.

"We had a kindergarten teacher who had been having lessons for all of three months and she decided to teach us what she knew. Then I went to someone who had been doing ballet for about three years, but someone saw me and thought I had talent and suggested that I went to study with Adolph Bolm.

"We were all in love with him,'' she smiled, remembering her years of training with the former partner of Anna Pavlova.

At 16, she went off to study in Paris with Preobajenska, the former prima ballerina of the Imperial Russian Ballet. After dancing in Europe, the US and Canada and married now to a fellow dancer, the couple decided to start their own school in New York. Later, she formed the National Academy of Dancing, run on the same lines as the famous state schools of St. Petersburg, Paris and London which embrace an all-round education from the age of about nine.

"I struggled on for 10 years but couldn't get the financial support, so I had to give it up. That was a pity, because we did some outstanding work.'' It was then that she was invited to Jackson, to build a school and professional company.

"When about 100 people turned up to greet me, I thought I was in a very civic-minded place,'' she laughed, "but I soon came to realise these were the only 100 people interested in the arts! The men wouldn't be caught dead at the ballet, so it was difficult to build a ballet without any audience.'' Her idea of a ballet competition, based on the one that had been started in Varna, Bulgaria back in the '60s, was a hard project to sell.

"It took four years, but the men in Jackson liked that word `competition', it reminded them of sport, so eventually I managed to get it going. It was a smashing success, more than I had ever dreamed. We now have 2,000 volunteers working to organise each Competition. They tell me that all the publicity has helped them with trade fairs and trade missions, so they're very happy about it all.'' Mme. Mara is also the author of 11 books on the dance, several of them on dance technique, which have become classic text books.

BALLET GENERATIONS -- Mme. Thalia Mara, founder of the International Ballet Competition, who studied and danced with the greatest stars of the Imperial Russian Ballet has been in Bermuda, examining the pupils of Mrs. Patricia Gray's School of Russian Ballet.