When classics move in new directions

Sometimes it seems that every dance season is crammed with daring new versions of war horses: male swans, gay swans, bald swans -- anything for novelty. However, new versions of old works are scarcely a recent trend in the dance world. Such repertory classics as August Bournonville’s 1836 “La Sylphide” and the 1895 Petipa-Ivanov “Swan Lake” adapted and outlived earlier ballets of the same titles, and today only dance historians know much about their sources.

The newest ballet remakes, created by a generation of mostly European choreographers, are different: They want audiences to remember the originals. Many of them prove daring about nudity and sex. Others put classically trained dancers through deliberately anti-classical moves to blur the line between ballet and modern dance. But the biggest change may be their sense of historical precedent. These ballets build on the past and acknowledge it every step of the way.

The presence of such forward- and backward-looking works on a number of American stages this season could well influence our more insular style of dance drama in the future. But, for now, they represent a kind of repudiation of the auteur theory in dance, a declaration that innovation always springs from heritage.

Know the past to remake it

Sometimes the reminders can be very simple: bits of the original 1912 Vaslav Nijinsky pantomime in emerging French choreographer Thierry Malandain’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” for instance, or the use of a classical tutu on bald, contorted male and female swans in Swedish iconoclast Mats Ek’s anything-but-classical “Swan Lake.” Sometimes it can be elaborate, as in the “Moth Maiden” 19th century parody that British eclectic Matthew Bourne inserts into his “Swan Lake.”

You can find both strategies in Angelin Preljocaj’s “Spectre de la Rose.”

Back in 1911, Mikhail Fokine’s original “Spectre” -- created for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes -- depicted a young girl dreaming that a rose had turned into a handsome fantasy cavalier. This situation grows ominous in Preljocaj’s version, and another kind of fantasy coexists with it. On one side of the stage, the controversial 45-year-old French choreographer creates a slow-motion rape duet, dominated by a strange rose-covered male. Meanwhile, on a stage within a stage, dancers in fancy dress parody antique classical conventions as if they were ballet automatons. It’s an update, all right, and it incorporates moves from Fokine, but, like much of Preljocaj’s work, the mix is intended to be unsettling.

“There is a dark part in sexuality,” he says, “and it is not usually shown in dance because of the idea of the beauty of the body and the emphasis on love stories.”

He admits that it can be dangerous to impose his own ideas about sex on a ballet from a more conservative age, especially a ballet considered a masterpiece, “but it’s also exciting. My work is really about contemporary [movement] research, but I like to show that I am the child of those who came before me. I believe you have to know what has been done before -- even to destroy it. If you don’t know, you can do nothing truly new, only accidental repeats of what you haven’t seen.”

In his “Spectre,” Preljocaj says, Fokine has been “remixed to express movement at the beginning of the new century. Like now in music you can take some samples and compose a new piece. I think the most important thing for an artist is to give the taste of a new period in the history of art.”

Preljocaj’s other remakes include “Les Noces,” “Parade” and, most recently, “The Rite of Spring” (which his company will perform at the Irvine Barclay Theater on Friday and Saturday) -- works, like “Spectre,” that allow him to pay tribute to the Ballets Russes. Preljocaj calls it “the first contemporary dance company in history. Because they worked like us. Diaghilev took young people completely unknown like Picasso and Stravinsky and today their works are considered the greatest masterpieces of the age.”

“It’s the same today, and what I want to say to the audience is, ‘Just be careful, be awake, because maybe right now there is some other new masterpiece of contemporary art being born.’ And it can be very nice to be there at that moment.”

Thierry Malandain is the new kid on the remakes block, at least to American audiences. His Ballet Biarritz has thus far appeared only in Florida and makes its New York debut next month. Malandain, 43, has not only created his own Ballets Russes tributes -- versions of “Spectre,” “Bolero,” “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Pulcinella” -- he ran a two-week Ballets Russes festival in Biarritz, France, a month ago where you could have watched four choreographers’ versions of “Spectre,” including Fokine’s.

Malandain’s “Faun” takes Nijinsky’s 1912 dance and expands on it. In the original, a flirtation with a nymph creates a longing in the faun that he transfers to a scarf she has left behind. In the ballet’s final moment, he masturbates into it, a sequence that caused a scandal at the premiere in Paris and was censored in New York. But that was then.

Today Malandain’s faun starts the ballet by licking the length of his arm, and from there the sense of self-intoxicated desire never stops. At the end, he plunges deep into a giant box of paper tissues -- the nymph’s scarf gone disposable -- as if his whole body has become one consuming ejaculation.

Malandain says he made the faun a kind of abstract portrait of young, wild Nijinsky. “It is very representative of his sensuality,” he says, “and also when he was a teenager, he was a bit autistic, and so the movement is like that.” He calls the ballet “a link to the soul of Nijinsky. It’s my own creation but it keeps the spirit of Nijinsky alive.”

Such a link is crucial, in his mind. “In France, we are very good about creating things,” he explains, “but afterward we lose them -- like ‘Giselle,’ which we lost and came back to us from Russia after a century. That’s a very French specialty: always demanding the new, the new, the new and losing the culture, the memory of history.

“So in these new versions of the classics, we can make the history of dance come alive again and not try to pretend that the art of dance begins with us.”

Inviting the viewer to see anew

To Mats Ek, remakes offer the opportunity to make audiences reconsider everything about a ballet classic. “All those old stories are dealing with hard stuff,” he says, “love and death, revenge, madness, whatever -- but maybe wrapped up in a cliche world. It’s a challenge to try to take it all seriously: to make it urgent again.”

Ek, 57, thus put mad Giselle where the insane usually belong: in an asylum. He also made Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty” into a drug addict and in his “Swan Lake,” which was danced this weekend at UCLA by Sweden’s Cullberg Ballet, decreed that the flawed, lovelorn Prince ends up with impure Odile, instead of the swan queen Odette -- contrary to traditional versions.

“The white swan Odette represents a dreamlike ideal,” he says, “and I made a conscious choice that he goes toward the black one, who in my version somehow represents the dirty reality, the only true possibility of moving forward, even if it’s mixed with problems and unease.”

However, Ek made a point of invoking classical tradition when it came to the tutus. “ ‘Swan Lake’ is so extremely attached to the image of classical ballet, and the tutu is such a fantastic piece of costume,” he says, “that I thought putting it on a bold, naked body, without toe shoes, would make the tutu look as strange as it is in fact. “

Ek insists that “each piece is, in a sense, a world of its own and is meant to work by itself even if there are intertextual connections that I cannot help being experienced.”

“I know that some of those who know the classical ‘Swan Lake’ will get refreshment from my version and others will get upset and find it grotesque. When I try to do a piece based on a classical ballet, I try to make it function as logically as possible. And I believe my ‘Swan Lake’ is as beautiful as the old one. It’s just that I have another point of view about what’s beautiful.”

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Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.