A Passionate Theorist

In the police state where French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has re-imagined the world’s most often told love story, a black-leather-clad guard stalks along a catwalk, with a guard dog by his side. Homeless men in rags tumble and spin; their ruling-class counterparts march stiffly, with an air of menace. And when poor Juliet inevitably awakens to find her lifeless Romeo, she does not weep: She draws his thumbs into her mouth. She drags him from their bed, sits him upright in a chair, and jumps repeatedly, futilely into his lap, only to fall off and roll across the stage. She throws his limp arms around her shoulders. Then she slits her wrists.

Called “a thinking person’s choreographer” by one critic, Preljocaj is often cited as France’s hottest dance maker, whether he is devising repertory for Ballet Preljocaj, the Aix-en-Provence-based company he founded in 1984, or completing commissions for companies such as the Paris Opera and New York City ballets. His “Romeo and Juliet,” originally created for Lyon Opera Ballet in 1990 and updated for his company in 1996, will have its Southern California premiere at UCLA’s Royce Hall next week, and a sampling of other Preljocaj repertory will be performed Oct. 6 and 7 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

An ethnic Albanian born in France, Preljocaj (pronounced Prel-zho-cazh) possesses the Frenchman’s love of ideas, but he arrives at his style of dance--a hybrid of classical and contemporary movement, marked by its technical, disciplined, high-speed intensity--by relying on an instinctiveness he attributes to his Albanian heritage. His work often involves dual themes: the blurred line between past and present, fantasy and reality, instinct and intelligence, love and violence.

Preljocaj cites novelists, photographers, musicians and film directors such as David Lynch and his friend Roman Polanski before other choreographers as his muses. The unlikely inspiration for his “Romeo and Juliet” was George Orwell’s “1984.”

“For me, the last freedom is to love somebody,” says the 41-year-old choreographer, on a hot summer afternoon in the ancient Roman city where his company is based. “In the Orwell story, there is a couple who can’t be lovers, because of Big Brother watching every detail of the life of everybody. Imagine a political regime that says to each person who he has to love.

“In the Shakespeare story the impossibility of love comes from the fight between two families of an equal social level, and in the end it’s just a story of rich people,” says the small, darkly handsome choreographer, moving between French and thickly accented English.

For his version, Preljocaj turned the upper-class family feud into clear-cut class conflict. Against the bleak backdrop of an Eastern European Communist-era regime, Romeo is penniless, homeless; Juliet is spoiled rich. Belgrade-born comic-strip artist Enki Bilal designed the sets and costumes, creating a futuristic mood with metal and leather. Eerie electronic musical interludes, composed by Yugoslavian composer Goran Vejvoda, fill in some of the blank spaces in Preljocaj’s edited Prokofiev score.

Preljocaj’s angle on the story line sounds like a pitch for a Benetton ad campaign: “It’s a political problem in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ” says the choreographer. “If you take a Palestinian man with an Israeli girl, a Serbian guy with a Bosnian girl, a Catholic girl with a Protestant man in Ireland, you know, it’s the story of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ”

The son of immigrants who fled the Communist takeover of Albania just weeks before he was born, Preljocaj comes by his attraction to duality naturally. At home, he maintained the language and customs of his parents’ native country; at school, he was French. He found his way to the guitar and drums, and practiced judo and rowing. At about the age of 12, before he had ever seen a live ballet, a friend gave him a book about dance. A photograph of Nureyev caught his eye. The caption read: “Rudolf Nureyev, transfigured by dance.”

“He was so beautiful in this photograph, so luminous,” says the choreographer, “and there was something so beautiful and emotional in his face. I said, ‘Wow! What is this art that can make somebody so beautiful?’ But inside, not outside.”

Ballet training followed and, after that, modern dance lessons from German Expressionist Karin Waehner, a former disciple of Mary Wigman in Paris. In 1980, Preljocaj studied briefly with Merce Cunningham in New York, and with Cunningham’s onetime partner, Viola Farber, after his return to Paris. “Cunningham opened the doors,” he says, “which is the most important thing: You are free, you can do almost what you want. There is only one rule--that there are no rules.”

In 1984, he founded his own company, becoming one of the leading players in France’s nouvelle danse wave that includes such contemporaries as Lyon-based choreographer Maguy Marin. Since then, he has become a treasured commodity in France, receiving government support for his work. However, when the arch-conservative National Front party came to power in Toulon, the city where his company had been based since 1993, Preljocaj was targeted by anti-immigrant sentiment and faced with the uncomfortable position of having to accept money from right-wing politicians.

In 1996, Preljocaj relocated to Aix with his wife of 10 years and two young daughters. His company is happily installed in a match factory that the government is renovating to his specifications.

He remains philosophical about his trans-cultural identity. “Everything I know about culture comes from France, everything I know about instinct, passion comes from Albania. There are these two things moving in me. There is something mathematical in my dance which comes from France--something Cartesian. And there is something from Albania, it’s the part that’s more emotional, more obscure, more mysterious.”

Since he choreographed his first dance at 27, Preljocaj has explored those opposing elements in some 20 works. In his dance series “Hommage aux Ballets Russes”--which the company will perform in part at the Irvine Barclay Theatre--he designed a tribute to the avant-garde spirit that inspired Diaghilev’s radical works, which are now the sole property of traditional ballet companies. In his 1989 Balkan retelling of “Les Noces,” one of his most acclaimed dances, the peasant wedding rituals that inspired Stravinsky’s music and the Ballets Russes’ choreography, appear as somber as a funeral, laced with overtones of sexual coercion and misogyny. “Le Spectre de la Rose” (1993) deals with the consequences of suppressed desire by blurring fantasy and reality, using two sets of dancers on a split stage.

In another work on the Orange County program, “Annonciation” (1995), Preljocaj uses the angel’s visit to Mary to explore the nature of creation.

In a 1997 review, the New York Times’ Anna Kisselgoff noted that Preljocaj “is concerned with inner feelings, especially those that people cannot acknowledge to themselves. But at 41, he has . . . still not developed a codified movement idiom. Instead, he continues, with considerable success, to generate new movement to serve his artistic purpose in each piece.

“Above all,” she wrote, “he is not a bore.”

On a recent afternoon, at work experimenting with a new piece--inspired, he says, by the concept of a Japanese garden--Preljocaj leans forward in a chair in his studio and watches his dancers execute phrases he has taught them the day before. He sits very still, observes intently, eyes darting back and forth, legs crossed, one hand resting on his face, or fingering a short strand of his coarse beard. When the dancers finish, he turns off the music and his gaze alights on some distant point for what seems like a very long time. The dancers eye him, then relax, adjust their workout clothes and catch their breath. Suddenly, he refocuses, says something along the lines of “good, thank you,” and asks them to try it again, to switch partners, to pick up the tempo.

When asked later what he was aiming for, he sighs. “Oh, it’s hard to say,” he begins, not atypically, before taking several silent moments to collect his thoughts. “You know in a Japanese garden, you don’t see the end of the garden and the beginning of nature . . . but you see really like a landscape, very organic. You don’t see the barrier or wall between them. I’m trying to work on this, but in dance.”

And how might that work? He asks the dancers to improvise movement around chairs and other ordinary props, “to try to find in which moment they start to dance. But it’s very strange,” he says, with a slow-spreading smile, “it is very strange work.”

When choreographing “Romeo and Juliet” for the Lyon Opera Ballet, Preljocaj says he spent a year carrying the Prokofiev score in his pocket, analyzing the story, listening to the music, making lots of notes. He ultimately trimmed the score by about a third, and he devised different movement schemes to distinguish the two warring worlds he imagined: “freedom and fluidity” for the oppressed world of Romeo, and “something very sharp and structural” for Juliet’s more stifled social universe. “When Romeo and Juliet dance together, because of the contact with Romeo, Juliet starts to move differently; and Romeo also starts to move with different energy.”

He did most of the composition alone, in the mornings, teaching the Lyon dancers the steps in the afternoons. This method suits the style of most ballet companies, where improvisation and experimentation is not a part of the culture. “When I don’t know the company, I usually work traditionally,” he says. “I’m the choreographer, I propose the steps, they learn the steps and it’s finished--voila.”

Preljocaj stopped dancing two years ago to focus purely on choreography; when his company is on tour, he often stays behind to work on new dances for the company or on commission. In 1996, his “Le Parc,” created for the Paris Opera Ballet, caught American critics’ attention when the company played the Met in New York. By then, New York City Ballet artistic director Peter Martins had already tapped Preljocaj to guest-choreograph “La Stravaganza,” which premiered in 1997, again mostly to critical praise. At the moment, he is entertaining an offer from conductor Daniel Barenboim to choreograph Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.”

But he prefers choreographing for his own company, working closely with hand-picked dancers in a relationship that has become, in his words, “more direct, more spontaneous, more free.”

“With my company there is more exchange,” he explains. “We have a period of improvisation [where] I take time to really look at what they do. . . . I start moving with the dancers behind me, and they follow me and they try to catch what I do, and then I ask them, ‘Did you understand?’ And sometimes they understand very different things. The dancer helps me to understand, because I see a lot of things and I say, ‘No, no this doesn’t interest me.’

“What interests me is to go deep into the thing, not to [go with] the first idea.” Then he watches them, until he can say, “ ‘Yes, this is what I mean.’ ”

Two things, he says, differentiate the Lyon and Ballet Preljocaj versions of “Romeo and Juliet.” “My dancers . . . do it faster. Also there is a spirit of my company which has more affinity with my work. They are not the dancers of [Lyon Opera Ballet], which is another universe. When they dance, you see dancers; but when my dancers come on stage, you see people.”

Preljocaj says that in addition to classical training, many of his dancers--a quirky mix of personalities and body types--also have gymnastics or sports backgrounds. “I don’t like purity in a dancer. I don’t want to see a dancer on stage; I want to see people who dance very well,” he says. “When you see a movie, you don’t want to see the actor, you want to see the character.”

To him, the role of a dancer is to simply dance. “I don’t say, ‘You want to be sad.’ I say you must just do the steps, and the succession of movements will [create] the feeling. They just have to let this emotion grow.”

Says company member Sylvain Groud, 29, who dances the role of Romeo and has been with Ballet Preljocaj for seven years: “He doesn’t like to talk a lot. He doesn’t explain which emotions he wants. But never, never does he disagree with your interpretation, never.”

Claudia De Smet, 26--Juliet--agrees: “He’s quite precise in his movements, the counts are very clear musically. But once he sets a piece he has a lot of confidence in his dancers, in how they will do the movements. All the dancers are quite different, and so the choreography will change because of that, and I think he quite likes that.”

Ballet Preljocaj in recent years has added many new dancers fresh out of school. “I think Angelin’s work has changed, but the spirit of the company has changed too,” says Groud, now a senior dancer. “The vocabulary is exactly the same--after seven years you see the same movements--but the atmosphere is so different. He talks more about instinct, to translate an idea. And the dance I think comes after.” Adds De Smet: “He’s still trying to look for new things. He’s really searching.”

While Preljocaj resists defining his work or progress, he does admit that he feels he is at a turning point, without necessarily knowing where he is going. “I have a strange feeling for the last year that actually I have finished learning something, like now I can start. What, I don’t know. This is my big problem,” he says. “Everything I thought for the last 10 years I still believe--but I’m open to believe other things.”

He cites an example, the occasional incorporation of speech into his work, something he flirted with in 1997’s “Paysage apres la bataille” (Scene After the Battle).

“For 10 years I’ve thought a dancer has just to move, not to speak; for me, it was written in stone. [But] when a dancer speaks or screams, the body changes; if they don’t scream, the movement is not exactly what I want, which is why I ask them to scream. Just to extend the movement. If a dancer talks in my work, it’s like a punctuation of the movement, or an extension of the movement, not acting, not theater.”

Preljocaj might spend a long time thinking about a piece but, he says, “when I start working, what happens is more instinctive for me. I am just interested in choreographic problems--like speed, energy, space--not philosophical problems. I almost forget the theme of the piece, I am just interested in the dance, which means the dance is strong enough for me to be just dance with no story. The dance starts to be like an abstract work for me.”

In an era when the line between dance and theater is increasingly blurred, Preljocaj remains confident in the pure power of dance itself. “Dance can speak to everybody, every body finally. When a dancer is moving, I think inside you feel something which is deeply connected to your own body, and that you develop a special emotion which is really particularly connected to dance, even if it’s completely unconscious. Even if you’ve never been a dancer, because your body has a story, because you move.”

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“Romeo and Juliet,” Royce Hall, UCLA. Sept. 17-19, 8 p.m. $20-$35. (310) 825-2101. Also, “Hommage aux Ballets Russes” and “Annonciation,” Oct. 6-7, 8 p.m., Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $24-$27. (714) 854-4646.