OPERA INTO BALLET, PAGE BY PAGE

With her new hip, Ruth Page makes a rather fit octogenerian. The 87-year-old choreographer and former ballerina--doyenne of the American dance scene--may still need a little help getting up from a low-slung leather couch in her Lakeview apartment, but almost every day she troops out to her ballet school for a workout at the barre, wearing leotard and tights.

“It’s a very stylish operation,” she explained in good humor, but also acknowledged the mugging attack of some years back that necessitated the artificial hip. What is it made of? “I never asked,” she confessed. “Probably plastic--isn’t everything these days?”

Page herself is made of rather sturdier stuff, still savoring a more than 70-year career that spanned dancing with the legendary Anna Pavlova and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes through her most recent project, a televised version of her popular “Die Fledermaus” ballet.

This hourlong dance version of the Strauss comic opera gathers the performing talent of international ballet stars Valery Panov and Galina Panova, Marianna Tcherkassky, Danilo Radojevic and Richard Cragun. It is scheduled to be telecast over PBS on Wednesday (8 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, 9 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24).

“Opera music makes good ballet music,” Page commented, and, indeed, “Die Fledermaus” is just one of a dozen such transformations she has attempted. Her first opera-into-ballet project, in 1937, involved Bizet’s “Carmen” (retitled “Guns and Castanets”), with the plot updated to Civil War Spain--then a timely locale. Don Jose became a Loyalist soldier and Escamillo a Fascist aviator.

Page also tackled “Il Trovatore” (“Revenge”), “La Traviata” (“Camille”), “The Barber of Seville” (“Susanna and the Barber”), “Salome” (“Daughter of Herodias”), and others. “I liked the scores so much I wanted to dance to them,” she said.

Many of the productions were toured in the 1950s and ‘60s by Page’s Chicago Opera Ballet, for which she created the frothy “Die Fledermaus” in 1961. A companion success was her “Merry Widow” (first danced by Alicia Markova in London in 1955). “Widow” has also been telecast, earning a prestigious Peabody Award in 1983, and both operetta ballets, as well as Page’s “Frankie and Johnny,” have been produced by Chicago’s educational station WTTW.

Like “Guns and Castanets,” “Frankie and Johnny” was created in the 1930s for Chicago’s WPA Dance Project, described by Page as “the only ideal dance company I ever directed.” As Frankie, the saucy streetwalker driven to murder her lover by his infidelity, Page found one of her enduring roles, dancing the part for nearly 20 years, well into her 50s. “They had to tell me to stop,” she said with a smile.

Earlier she had scored success in the 1926 “The Flapper and the Quarterback,” photographs of which show her with the pencil-thin eyebrows, pursed lips, short skirt and rolled-down stockings of the Roaring ‘20s party girl.

Page also created what was perhaps the first jazz ballet (around 1928), commissioned the first dance score from Aaron Copland (for the 1934 courtroom ballet “Hear Ye! Hear Ye!”), and, in a particularly unconventional and forward-looking venture, choreographed and danced (in 1933) the Caribbean-motif “La Guiablesse,” featuring an otherwise all-black ensemble.

Page invited a black composer, William Grant Still, to compose the music, and among the dancers were discoveries Talley Beatty and Katherine Dunham, both of whom would go on to explore American black culture through dance.

Speaking of her Americana inspiration and pioneering social activism, Page is modest and almost matter-of-fact: “I just did what interested me at the time. It was all around me, and it seemed a natural thing to do.” Of “Frankie and Johnny,” set in the nitty-gritty of Chicago’s South Side, Page declared, “It was unusual for choreographers to make something out of which they lived in themselves.”

“Frankie and Johnny” featured a chorus of singing Salvation Army matrons, and, in fact, Page has frequently favored integrating words and motion. In the 1940s--when she temporarily lost her usual ballet partner Bentley Stone to wartime service--she created a solo program of poetry and dance. She recited diverse works by Sandburg, Lorca, Baudelaire, Li Po, and her favorite, e.e. cummings, while executing often virtuosic movement combinations.

She tells the story of staging the ballet “Billy Sunday” (1946) for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In the ballet, Frederic Franklin was given the title role, a populist preacher, and successfully managed an extensive oration. Page, defending the mix of media, bragged to Franklin’s partner, Alexandra Danilova (who had to dance on pointe and recite) that she--Page--could speak audibly even while accomplishing fancy pirouettes.

Danilova was unimpressed, Page recalled: “And Ruth,” Danilova said, “about what do you speak when you do pirouettes?”

“Billy Sunday” and “Frankie and Johnny” and several other Page ballets receive frequent revivals, usually on the regional ballet circuit. This “Die Fledermaus,” for instance, is in the repertory of Tulsa Ballet Theater, and Page’s “The Nutcracker” is in its 22nd season as an independent production in Chicago.

But although Page attends regular “Nutcracker” rehearsals and was on hand to oversee the “Fledermaus” taping, she relies upon longtime associates to restage the choreography. “I don’t like to remember my old ballets,” she said. “I want somebody else to do that.”

However, for the re-creation of “Fledermaus,” she was inspired to compose a new solo for Radojevic. “We just did it right away, in the studio, in an hour,” she said. “He was so good; he learns very fast.” So Page didn’t sit on the sidelines. “When you choreograph, you have to show it physically,” she insisted. “But it is difficult for me,” she allowed.

Page has accepted the wages of age gracefully, enduring--as many older people--an imperfect memory. Yet with associates and assistants to manage scheduling details, Page’s life style is hardly curtailed.

“I like to live in yesterday, today, and tomorrow--that’s it,” Page stated surely, affirming a penchant for the present tense. As she ambled through her spacious dozen-room apartment, spectacularly situated on the 13th floor over Lake Michigan, the ubiquitous artwork and memorabilia sparked tales and musings.

A long, green and white marble gallery is framed with murals displaying some of Page’s closest dance friends: German modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg (with whom she toured Europe in the 1930s), Royal prima assoluta Margot Fonteyn (a fellow shipboard vacationer among the Greek isles), and Rudolf Nureyev (whom Page was the first to present in the United States after his defection).

Everywhere, too, are bright oil paintings by her current husband, artist Andre Delfau, with whom she became acquainted during the original production of “Die Fledermaus” (his designs have been remounted and embellished for the TV production).

With marriage to Delfau--a younger man (in his 70s)--in 1983, Page resumed domestic partnership. Her first marriage, to lawyer Thomas Hart Fisher, lasted 45 years until his death in 1969.

In speaking of her life with Fisher, she described a very supportive relationship, noting fondly that she left their Monte Carlo honeymoon to join the Diaghilev company, becoming that troupe’s first American. Yet she ultimately settled in Chicago with Fisher as he refused to move to New York. “No dancer ever lived in Chicago,” Page recalled. “But I did what I had to.”

Page’s no-nonsense practicality seems to keep her going. After stopping at a counter to do a few ballet stretches, she explained, “This is my barre at home. Maybe it’s time for me to give it up.

“But I don’t know . . . I do it every day because it’s part of me.”