DANCE : Is He the Future of Ballet? : New York City Ballet’s latest Danish import, Nikolaj Hubbe, has plenty of star quality and the ambition to match. And if that doesn’t persuade you, Baryshnikov says he ‘jumps just like a fish in the water.’

The dancers who became the biggest stars in recent years were all defectors from Communist countries. But that era is history. So what does a major dancer have to do these days to open career doors and become a household name?

Mere dancing has to turn the trick.

In the case of Nikolaj Hubbe, 27, formerly of the Royal Danish Ballet and a principal dancer with New York City Ballet since 1992, dance audiences have always responded avidly.

Hubbe rose to star status when he essentially dominated the Second Bournonville Festival held in 1992 in his native Copenhagen, especially as his nearest competitor--another young Danish firebrand, Alexander Koelpin--was sidelined because of an injury.

Later that year, when the Danes danced at the Orange County Performing Arts Center just weeks before Hubbe made his move to the New York company, Times dance critic Martin Bernheimer singled him out as “the most exciting discovery of the season.”

Even ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov has given Hubbe a rare endorsement, saying in a 1993 interview: “He was quite wonderful: He jumps just like a fish in the water and is a great asset for City Ballet.”

Hubbe himself regards the fame issue with even-handed equanimity. “What do you want to be well known for--defecting or dancing?” he said in a recent phone interview from New York. “What’s your ambition--to dance or to have fame? I’m happy with where my career is.”

His career is taking him and another NYCB principal dancer, Darci Kistler, on a six-city recital tour that ends today at 4 p.m. at the Wadsworth Theater in Westwood. Kistler and Hubbe dance Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant” played by violinist Young Uck Kim and pianist Staffan Scheja. Kim and Scheja also play another Stravinsky score--”Suite Italienne”--as well as two violin-piano works by Ravel on the program.

For Hubbe, the tour is a great way to spend some off-season time. “I had never done ‘Duo Concertant’ before,” he said, “but I had seen it and always loved it. This was a chance to learn it and do it and travel and make some money. We are on layoff anyway, so actually it’s a wonderful opportunity to keep in shape and dance and not to get too far away from the stage.”

NYCB doesn’t promote partnerships, but he and Kistler have been appearing together a lot recently. “It’s not really a partnership, but I like her serenity and her childlike belief,” Hubbe said.

“Duo Concertant,” however, was the real draw. Hubbe characterized the ballet as “a very minor piece--not choreographically--just in the sense of the people involved. It’s a very little, intimate, small piece, a little first-rate gem, rarely seen on tour.”

Throughout the work, the two musicians share the stage with the dancers. For the first movement, the dancers just stand by the piano “listening, sort of letting the music start the whole dance.”

While tempos are worked out in rehearsal, there is always room for surprise, as happened recently in one section of the work during the tour. “During one solo,” Hubbe recalled, “a little Russian character solo I do, Young Uck suddenly got into it and became very animated. He sped it up, looking at me as if to say, ‘Now take this, boy.’ ” Hubbe rose to the occasion. “ ‘You give me that, well, I’ll show you.’

“It was wonderful. Afterward we laughed. He said, ‘But you took the challenge.’ It was really wonderful.”

It seems to be Hubbe’s ambition to seek all the challenges he can. Like coming to NYCB from Denmark. It was “a dream come true . . . an artistic ambition that was and is fulfilled,” he said. “I always wanted to be in the New York City Ballet. That’s what I wanted, that’s where I ended up.”

Living in New York has been an easy transition for Hubbe. He made his first trip there when he was 14. “I like America,” he said. “It’s a fun country. It’s a young country. . . . I find Americans, compared to certain Europeans and certain European countries . . . I don’t know . . . not as disillusioned. But that’s maybe also why America seems a little naive sometimes.”

Hubbe acknowledged that he would have been “probably unhappy” if he had remained in his native country. “I needed a change. I needed something else, to see how much my wings would take. I needed more room, more air.

“Not that it was less satisfying in Denmark. There were fewer performances in Denmark than here. The repertory here is huge, so vast compared to what we had in Denmark. . . . In Denmark, you would perform once or twice a week. Here you’re on four or five times in different ballets all the time.”

He also easily made the transition from the Royal Danish style, dominated by the 19th-Century choreography of August Bournonville to NYCB’s modern Balanchine repertory. “My mind was so set, so prepared, in a way that the transition was very quick,” he said. “I wouldn’t say now I am the epitome of a Balanchine dancer. It (isn’t) that. It was hard, but it wasn’t unexpectedly hard.”

Nor was there friction or tension in his coming into the company as a principal dancer instead of rising through the ranks, the more normal procedure. “I was not the first,” Hubbe said. “Peter Martins, Ib Andersen, Erik Bruhn--there were a lot of people before me.” (Martins is now ballet master in chief of NYCB.)

In fact, those Danish dancers had been his role models while he was dreaming of his future in New York. “It was almost like, whenever a dancer left, he was by definition a role model. ‘Oh my God, he’s a star now’--Peter Martins, Peter Schaufuss and very much Ib.

“Balanchine always loved Danish ballet dancers,” he added. “When he choreographed for a man, he always used what we call petite and middle allegro (intricate footwork at constant high speed). He would of course use his background--the big Russian jump--but the middle and the petite allegro were very important to him. It had more shadings musically, and he thought it was more challenging to choreograph in this way. It was very fleet-footed and swift, which I was brought up on with Bournonville.”

The Bournonville repertory also allowed him to create vivid characters. So what has he made of the plotless Balanchine ballets?

“You don’t create specific characters, but you create an atmosphere, you create a mood,” he said. “It’s not as tangible as doing a role. It is more that you . . . lose yourself to this. You lend yourself to this ballet. You lose yourself in this movement, and therefore it has an interpretation or a personality.”

Since arriving at City Ballet, his repertory has steadily expanded.

“I’ve got so many roles, and there are still so many to go,” he said. “This rep is so big. There are still ballets I look on and think, oh my God, I would love to try this.”

Martins singled him out in “Jazz (Six Syncopated Movements),” “Symphonic Dances” and “Zakouski,” and three other choreographers created ballets for him last year as part of the company’s ongoing Diamond Project to commission new work from young choreographers both inside and outside NYCB.

“I like doing new work,” Hubbe said. “It’s like being in a laboratory, like doing research. You take this from the green glass and this from the red glass and you inject it into the white mouse. Sometimes the white mouse just drops dead.”

But what Hubbe especially likes at NYCB is the freedom to learn that the company gives him. “Everything is more up to you,” he said. “You learn the ballet and you go rehearse it and of course there are people you are going to ask for help. But it’s very much up to you and what you make out of it. They throw you the ball, and you make what you can of it. . . . It’s risky, yeah, but it teaches you in another way than if someone were there and told you everything.”

He ran into someone telling him everything last summer when he returned to dance with the Royal Danish Ballet as a guest. “I did ‘La Sylphide,’ which was wonderful because it’s a role I’ve done so much and each time, it changes a little bit,” he said. “You’re surprised. You are in a new place and you are different so therefore it must change. It’s bound to change.”

Last summer, the changes were extreme. Schaufuss, who recently had been appointed company director, lengthened the work by adding his own choreography. He also imposed a particular interpretation--how he had danced the role--of James, the hapless hero. (The Danes will dance this version of “La Sylphide” during their May 22-28 engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.) But Hubbe danced it his own way at the premiere, which reportedly caused bad feeling between him and the new director.

“That’s accurate,” Hubbe said of the report. “James is a role that I’ve danced since I was 19. . . . I’ve been all kinds of places with it, and you can only do what you can do. It’s you out there. It’s not Peter out there. This is saying nothing against him. The only way I can defend my interpretation of James in ‘La Sylphide’ is to do it my way, to do it artistically.”

Dancing the lead in John Cranko’s “Onegin” for Schaufuss proved even more disappointing. “I found I was tied a bit down and confined in this role. And that was--it was a little bit . . . pointless.”

The result? “I’m a New York City Ballet dancer (now), definitely,” he said.

* New York City Ballet principal dancers Nikolaj Hubbe and Darci Kistler will dance on a recital program by violinist Young Uck Kim and pianist Staffan Scheja today at 4 p.m. at the Wadsworth Theater on the Veterans Administration grounds in Westwood. $27 and $30. (310) 825-2101 or (213) 365-3500 (Ticketmaster).