BY PRISCILLA GREEAR

Staff Writer

NORCROSS--In a diamond tiara and flowing white gown, Erin McHugh rescued her true love in the lead role of “Giselle” in the Rotaru International Ballet School’s performance of the romantic French ballet June 5.

McHugh, 18, a member of the Church of St. Benedict in Duluth, performed the dance at Atlanta’s Rialto Center for the Performing Arts. A Rotaru student for four years, she has also performed solo variations from “Napoli” and from “Sleeping Beauty.”

She is now using those pieces in competition against 24 Americans and 103 other dancers worldwide at the USA International Ballet Competition June 13-28 in Jackson, Miss. The yearly competition, considered the Olympics of ballet with a $10,000 prize, is held in successive years in the U.S., Moscow, Finland and Bulgaria.

The slender, 5-foot 8-inch ballerina with dark curls and alabaster skin is dancing six classical and contemporary variations at the competition, including one abstract piece to the sound of bells, saws and wood. She will then go to New York to dance for five weeks with the American Ballet Theatre.

“I’d really love to dance professionally if I could, but I just have to see what happens,” said McHugh, garbed in a red leotard and pink tights at the studio June 8. “I’d really love to join the American Ballet Theatre. If I do well at the competitions, there’s lots of possibilities.”

The daughter of Nancy McHugh of Alpharetta, McHugh also excels academically. She recently graduated from Chattahoochee High School where she studied advanced placement chemistry, calculus and Spanish and earned a 4.3 grade point average. She plans to major in math at Georgia Tech in the fall while continuing to dance at Rotaru.

A student since she was 3, McHugh said she began to pursue dance seriously at 14 with the study of classical and contemporary ballet on pointe under Romanian director Pavel Rotaru. She also studies music, drama, jazz and Russian folk dancing. The school teaches in the style of the Vaganova Institute in Russia and offers students personal attention to develop their talents.

In music classes, the dancer has studied composers and learned to coordinate her movements with music, to listen for changing beats and to hear the feelings the instruments create. To dance royal roles in classical ballets, she has worked to develop more refined arm and wrist motions and to walk gracefully without moving her head.

McHugh has danced in summer programs with the Boston and San Francisco Ballets and was in the corps de ballet in Atlanta for a benefit performance of “Carmen” for the Save the Children Federation. She danced the Sugar Plum Fairy last year in Rotaru’s “Nutcracker.”

McHugh said she expresses herself most completely through dance.

“It’s very direct expression. It goes straight from you,” she said. “Talking, you have to communicate with these words. I feel like there’s always something lost in the translation.”

Dance “is a universal language,” McHugh said, combining drama, athletics, movement and music.

“It’s given me a discipline and focus. It’s helped me to give my all, put my (whole) self into things.”

She said she expresses herself and her characters in ballet and that she particularly identified with the role of Giselle because, although she died young, the village girl lived fully and loved passionately.

Dance complements her study of math, she added, which pursues problems with exact answers.

“We do so much artistic work with the dancing...There’s not always an easy answer to find. It’s a little gray. Math’s so concrete. It’s nice to have that balance,” she said.

Her Christian faith has given her a sense of peace, comfort and direction while she attends high school and also dances six to seven days and up to 40 hours a week during rehearsals. She has taught ballet at Fleetwood Dance Studio in Alpharetta for two years and has baby-sat and volunteered occasionally in the nursery for three years at St. Benedict. She has taught Sunday school to 4-year-olds at the parish since last fall.

McHugh is grateful to her mother, who drove car pools to her dance classes for two years, taught her independence and brought her many dinners at the studio.

McHugh says that her instructor, Rotaru, “really inspires everybody. You go in there and feel like, I might not be able to do it today, but someday I can. He just makes you want to be better and better and you know that you can do it.”

To aspiring ballerinas and others, McHugh offers this advice: “To be the best of yourself is the most important...I’m a firm believer that anyone can do whatever they try.”