BUJONES LOOKS TO A CAREER REDEFINED

The swanky modern apartment building stretches skyward along the East River. Its heavy glass doors are attended by two liveried guards. Marble columns, kentia palms and walls of rosewood surround the sweeping lobby.

On the 25th floor, with a spectacular city view, Fernando Bujones has a late-morning breakfast served to him by a Spanish-speaking housekeeper. His 3-year-old daughter is in escuela . His wife--whose father is the former president of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek--works at her office on 43rd Street promoting Brazilian tourism.

Bujones, unlike most other dancers without a company, enjoys the life style of a star.

“I live according to who I am,” he states politely, cracking open a four-minute egg. “Others may not be so fortunate in their achievement. But my wife has money, I have always had business interests and we know how to manage our resources.”

It has been a year since Bujones’ headline-making dispute with American Ballet Theatre that led to his departure. (An already strained situation ruptured when he asked director Mikhail Baryshnikov to commission a ballet for him and was refused.) But his place in the international galaxy has not slipped. He dances with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and the Stuttgart, the Paris, Vienna and La Scala Opera Ballets--and with the Joffrey for gala performances.

On Friday and Saturday, Hollywood Bowl hosts “Bujones and Friends,” the kind of starry package popularized by such personalities as Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev.

“I am re-defining my career as a free-lance,” he says with earnest concentration. “This is where my future lies: as dancer-choreographer- regisseur .”

Going his separate way and asserting his eminence apart from Ballet Theatre has been an ongoing proposition for Bujones from 1974. It was then, at 19, that he won the Varna International Ballet Competition in Bulgaria. It was then that he decided to capitalize on his extraordinary gifts away from the company (on a part-time basis), while watching his stock rise within.

But things soon changed for him. Over a decade dominated by Baryshnikov--who had absolute artistic eminence internationally as a dramatic dancer and, in addition, rose to power as director of Ballet Theatre--the Florida native has had to fight for his place on the marquee.

The battles over opening-night privileges or rights, how many performances he could get in a given season, and with what partners, were never-ending, he says. In the last few years, those negotiated decisions had, in his words, “become problematic.”

The most significant issue, however, and the one that brought Bujones’ final conflict with Baryshnikov to center stage, was Ballet Theatre’s failure to commission a work specifically for him. Passed over by choreographers from Antony Tudor to Kenneth MacMillan when it came to casting their new ballets--and seeing plum roles go to others--he asked the company for his due: a Maurice Bejart opus.

The answer was no.

“Two days before the Met opening last summer,” Bujones recounts in his slight Cuban accent (a legacy from childhood years spent in Havana), “I received a call from (executive director) Charles Dillingham, offering me a reduced number of performances and confirming that my request for a Bejart ballet had been finally rejected. The whole thing was pretty unacceptable. And then Misha (Baryshnikov) sent me a letter saying goodby. It cited what he called an ‘unharmonious relationship.’ ”

Bujones, looking slight and even more boyish offstage than on, slips out of the living room and returns with the letter. His manner is quietly gracious, his words more philosophic than rancorous. Nowhere to be heard are the self-congratulatory remarks Bujones used to make to the press. Gone is the braggadocio that prompted critic Marcia B. Siegel to write: “He is all impeccable technique and insufferable conceit.”

But he offers this partial explanation of how his relationship with Baryshnikov soured:

“Everyone on the administrative staff is afraid of Misha. So they do his bidding and never ask questions. They act as communicators. Meanwhile he remains inaccessible. I had not had a direct conversation with him in years.

“What I see, though, behind that mask of Zorro is a sensitive being, even a profound one. I harbor no personal hatred. And that’s because my world is completely open. If Ballet Theatre asked me, I would dance as a guest artist--the same as I would for any other company making an attractive offer.”

Baryshnikov was unavailable for comment on Bujones’ statements, but, in an interview last December, he told The Times that, prior to leaving Ballet Theatre, “Bujones was making demands and threats and he was denying his commitment to dance for us. ‘Commission a ballet for me,’ he said, ‘right away, or else.’ . . . .

“Bujones’ behavior is a terrible example to the young dancers. It goes against theater ethics and human ethics,” Baryshnikov said “. . . It is ridiculous for him, or anyone, to think that I am trying to destroy his career.”

The offers continue to pour in. If Bujones has not made his mark as a dramatic dancer, he does stand as a supreme technician--the kind who brings to classical roles an effortless bravura. Regional companies--most recently the Milwaukee Ballet with “Swan Lake”--invite him to dance. Often, he is even asked to stage the 19th-Century classics.

But Bujones says he wants to expand his artistic horizons and that he would not be content to peddle his virtuosity in the form of decorative pas de deux, the sort comprising his Bowl program.

“How many hundreds of times can I do these bonbons?” he asks. “After all, I’m not just earning my bread and butter. There must be artistic growth in order to have satisfaction.” Nor would he choose a diet made exclusively of “Raymonda” and “The Sleeping Beauty.”

“In fact, I wouldn’t feel cheated exchanging the impact of triple air turns for something of great theatrical power,” says the dancer who made a career from smiling entrechats six and light-footed leaps. “Los Angeles audiences will see for themselves my new persona in the Bejart (solo from “Seven Greek Dances”).”

Indeed, some may already have done so. Last month, Bujones danced the excerpt before President and Mrs. Reagan and network TV cameras as part of his invitational appearance at Washington’s Ford Theatre. He also performed the solo in New York last season, receiving considerably less than a rave review in the New York Times for his bare-chested macho impersonation.

Since Bejart and his ideal of sensual, lion-haired men is at odds with that of the elegant danseur , how does Bujones think the choreographer might enhance his artistic future?

“It’s something I feel right about,” he answers. “If Bejart could work on a mutually gratifying basis with Nureyev--as he did in ‘Songs of a Wayfarer’--then so can he with me.”

Next March in Paris comes the premiere of “Alexander the Great,” an hour-long Bejart ballet created for Bujones. And while the free-lance dancer says he will avoid singular commitments, he thinks that Bejart can figure importantly in helping him discover “untapped aspects of myself as a dancer. “If I thought he could not incorporate my ballet virtuosity into his virile style, none of this would interest me. But I find him so charming, so wise. And he does have that electrifying presence. It’s hard to resist.”

Bujones says he has plenty else on his plate. “In the past season I’ve had more ballets staged for me than in my entire 15 years with Ballet Theatre--’La Sylphide’ with (Carla) Fracci at La Scala, ‘Raymonda” in Vienna, ‘Jazz Calendar’ with (Antoinette) Sibley at the Royal, a premiere of a work about Liszt in Canada.

“And now (Frederick) Ashton wants to revive ‘Rhapsody’--which Misha originated--for me. As a result of all this, I’ve gone beyond that secluded atmosphere at Ballet Theatre. Far enough beyond to know that it was a hardship situation. Far enough beyond to no longer feel hurt and degraded.”

So far the man without a company says that he’s been able to dance as often as twice a week and hopes to continue his good fortune. Meanwhile there is daily class to attend--either at Stanley Williams’ or David Howard’s--a regimen that has not changed with his leaving Ballet Theater.

Neither has Bujones’ perspective of the ballet world. “I see a distorted picture,” he says, “one in which the individual dancer is not valued by artistic directors. Take Misha or Rudi (Nureyev), for example. They bring great appeal as stars themselves, but they do not want others to trade on that same power. How do you explain the contradiction?”

In the middle of this rhetoric the housekeeper and tiny, dark-haired Alejandra enter. Quickly, Bujones grabs the child up in his arms. “This,” he says, ‘is why I feel no personal turmoil about what happened. When one has a family there is so much to look forward to with them. Things have a way of staying in perspective.”