Marius Petipa’s ballet “La Bayadère,” first performed in St. Petersburg in 1877 and revived Tuesday night by American Ballet Theatre, features a temple dancer heroine, Nikiya, and on this night we saw once more that she is one of the greatest characters in ballet.

Her behavior reflects the ambivalence of her vocation, which traditionally could combine sexual as well as devotional obligation. Nikiya proudly refuses the advances of the High Brahmin, claiming that her loyalty is only to the godhead, yet she is having an affair with the warrior Solor and is preparing to elope with him. When Solor betrays her with the princess Gamzatti, Nikiya falls prey to a snakebite orchestrated by her royal rival, but then returns from the netherworld to wreck their wedding and lead him back off to the skies, where we are given every indication that she will be calling the shots from then on.

ABT’s “La Bayadère” was staged in 1980 by Natalia Makarova, who had first staged the “Shades” scene for ABT in 1974. Ms. Makarova’s full-length staging reproduced an edited and streamlined replication of the 1941 Kirov revival, which the company continues to perform today. Ms. Makarova’s most important creative decision was her attempt to restore the final act — Nikiya’s destruction of the temple — which was lost in Russia after the Revolution (since then, Russian versions of “Bayadère” end with the Kingdom of the Shades scene, where Solor’s opium-induced hallucination allows him to visit Nikiya’s Nirvana). The music for the last act was, however, embargoed in the Soviet Union, so in 1980 John Lanchbery composed an entirely new last act more suggestive of Delibes or Massenet than Minkus, the ballet’s actual composer. Ms. Makarova’s choreography here is neo-classical in the manner of Tudor or Grigorovich, and thus not at all authentic, but entirely successful nevertheless.

Dancing Nikiya Tuesday night, Paloma Herrera had repaired the disjunction between upper and lower body that sometimes plagues her performances when she is not in top form. The role is almost equally divided between classical vocabulary and pseudo-Indian plastique, and in both styles the two halves of her body were integrated, creating believable shapes and statements. She unfolded many beautiful extensions, and soared weightlessly in jumps. In the Kingdom of the Shades scene, she was classically upright, yet there remained an occasional undulatory recollection of the temple dancer she had been in earthly incarnation. The character of Nikiya’s Shades apparition can be portrayed many different ways: Ms. Herrera was a remorseful rather than reproachful or ecstatic or inexorably remote specter.

In Angel Corella’s previous performances as Solor, his most outstanding characteristic has been his determination to punch himself up to warrior status, and he frequently seemed overstuffed. But last night, he seemed to approach the role more from within and one really saw an organic, seemingly spontaneous interplay between the wrinkles of the plot and his response to them. He and Ms. Herrera danced together intimately, and in his solos he only allowed his zeal for effect to impair his articulation in the manège of assemblé jumps in the Shades coda.

As Gamzatti, Gillian Murphy imprinted infallibly etched images of pride, love, and ruthless will. She has studied the role so thoroughly and respectfully that even when she brings her own time and culture to Gamzatti’s rarified reactions and body language, they don’t coarsen her performance, but rather add to its vitality. Ms. Murphy has refined her natural facility for turning, so that her multiple fouettés in the Pas d’Action coda were smooth as silk, and her pirouettes in her last act solo, followed by an echoing spiral into the upper body, were mesmerizing.

Tuesday night Ms. Makarova’s production, with sumptuous sets by Pier-Luigi Samaritani, showed that its status is secure as one of the three reference versions, alongside the 1941 Soviet production and the 2002 Kirov restoration, of “Bayadère” in the international repertory. It remains an unsurpassed treat for the senses.

Until May 21 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).