Ashton is beloved by dancers and audiences for many things, but this is perhaps the heart of their affection: that he provides opportunities for dancers to give the best of themselves as classical artists: strength, speed, stamina, finesse, elongated physical proportions, amplitude in the movements of the back and carriage of the arms, impeccable turn-out of the legs and precision in the execution and phrasing of steps, and, sustaining all of this, the imaginative possibility that the dance as an excerpt from a grand story, which they imply without actually telling. In the case of the "Awakening" pas de deux, of course, the dance is certainly such an excerpt. When Bolle's large, deferential, fully classical Prince takes center stage for a solo that includes different kinds of revolutions and grands tours that change orientation slightly, one can look at it gladly as just a virtuoso variation, although, if one cares to see it as a monologue in pure dance of how the Prince had to travel halfway across the earth to find Aurora, it works that way, too. Bussell is a protégée of Kenneth MacMillan's, a more literal choreographer than Ashton and one with a dramatically different idea of what contemporary ballet can and should do. Yet her account of the title role in Ashton's "Cinderella," when the Royal was last at the Met, rivals memories of Fonteyn and Sibley in the part: she is one of those dancers who seems to give a performance everything she has, pouring her interior into her action; regardless of her work for MacMillan, who sees psychic complexity as a universal given, there is no suggestion in Bussell's Ashton (or Petipa) heroines of any secret dark sides. What she presents directly is what they are. For this pas de deux, which takes place just following the moment that Prince Désiré has discovered the sleeping Aurora and, with a kiss, awakened her from her 100 years of slumber, Bussell draws one into Aurora's evolving consciousness as a character through whole-hearted and full-bodied commitment to the particulars of the way Ashton has drawn that evolution in dance terms. We saw a crystallizing image of this in one of the charming "halfway-there" passages early on: the Prince carefully, with his fingertips, revolves Aurora in place as she poses in an arabesque allongée - that is, a slanting arabesque, tipping the ballerina's body halfway between the fundamental, upright kind and the full plunge of an arabesque penchée - while the foot of her supporting leg is raised to high demi-point, that is, halfway between the full sole of the basic walking steps with which the pas de deux begins and the full point she assumes in the climactic passages of partnering (and leaping). This moment, which accents intermediate poses, represents how Ashton shaped the "ing' of the Awakening. Bussell's unassailable arabesque, held from a place deep in her lower back; the childlike dignity of her large, beautiful head; and the voluptuous line of the arched foot that served as her base of support coalesced into a ballerina picture that set a standard for the entire evening - indeed, for ballerinas who perform year-round in Lincoln Center. She was not attempting to please the audience directly: no one in The Royal Ballet these days sets out to do that, if, in fact, they ever did. She was pleasing the dance and the music, and that's what drove the audience wild.