Guillem climbs a world stage

“GLOBALLY” is the word that best describes how Sylvie Guillem is living her life these days. The Paris-born ballerina may call London home, but there are not many moments when she gets a chance to putter around in her garden.

“I flew back to London yesterday,” she says in her dressing room at Sadler’s Wells Theatre just hours before the opening night of a weeklong, sold-out revival of “Sacred Monsters,” her collaboration with British dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, which premiered here in September. “The garden was a disaster waiting for some little bits of water, and next week we’ll be in Los Angeles, then San Francisco and then Vancouver.”

With her hennaed hair flowing around her shoulders, and wearing jeans that signal some designer charged $1,000 for them, she is a perfect fashion plate for the French notion of chic -- they do it better. The jeans might well have come from Kmart and cost $29, but they sure don’t look it. Whether onstage or off, Guillem always comes across like a million bucks.

“Fashion?” she says with a sly smile meant to convey indifference. “I wear what I wear.”

Guillem has performed several times in Orange County, appearing with the Royal Ballet, the Teatro Alla Scala Ballet of Milan and American Ballet Theatre, but “Sacred Monsters,” which is scheduled for its U.S. premiere at Royce Hall on Wednesday and Thursday, is about as far from “Giselle” or “Romeo and Juliet” as you can get.

Here, Guillem shares the stage with the London-born Bangladeshi Khan plus a small group of singers and musicians. Mixing her innate classical elegance with Khan’s razor-sharp skills in the percussive Indian dance style known as kathak, they head off on a journey in search of a new hybrid vision of dance theater.

“I am excited about doing new things,” says Guillem. “I’ve proved, I think, that each time I go onstage I try my best to explore, to improve. The classical world is not enough. I need something else to enrich me.”

The title “Sacred Monsters” is a play on “monstre sacree” -- the label traditionally given to such grand, larger-than-life divas as Sarah Bernhardt, Maria Callas and Guillem herself.

“I am difficult with myself,” she says, “so I have the right to be difficult with others.”

Her own way

HER hunger for new territory, to be on the cutting edge, is remarkable. She could easily have spent the last two decades ensconced as the Paris Opera Ballet’s prima ballerina. But she proved to be too curious and too independent to indulge in that sort of safe luxury.

“I make choice in my life. I go my own road.”

Originally a child gymnast (as her mother had been), Guillem entered the Paris Opera Ballet’s school just before her 12th birthday. It was intended to be a bit of polishing for a future Olympic hopeful, but Guillem quickly switched potential careers. She was invited to join the company in 1981.

When Rudolf Nureyev was appointed its artistic director in 1983, he took Guillem under his wing. She became his special protegee. He promoted her to the top rank of etoile -- star -- in 1984 after her first performance of “Swan Lake.” Still just 19, she had become the youngest etoile in the company’s 400-year history.

Already at the pinnacle of her profession, she would go on to give dazzling performances in the major 19th century classics as well as create, among many others, the title role in Nureyev’s hugely popular 1986 staging of “Cinderella.” Set in the heyday of Hollywood, it featured a pumpkin that turned into a solid gold Cadillac and a glittering entrance to the ball lighted by thousands of popping paparazzi flashbulbs.

In 1988, to celebrate Nureyev’s 50th birthday, Covent Garden invited him to appear in a performance of his own choice. He not only chose “Giselle” but brought along his protegee. It was a bit like a proud father showing off his exceptional young daughter. This glamorous introduction to London laid the seeds for the rest of Guillem’s career.

Her relationship with Nureyev was proving stormy, however. She eventually broke with him and the Paris Opera Ballet over disputes about casting and her frustrated desires to perform with other companies and work with other choreographers.

Her departure caused a public scandal and front-page headlines. Le Monde called her exit a national catastrophe. Questions were even asked in the French legislature. Imagine Rep. Howard L. Berman voicing concern about an American dancer joining the National Ballet of Canada.

Guillem went on to establish a special relationship with the Royal Ballet, where she became the company’s principal guest artist, a title she refused to share with any other dancer. She agreed to give approximately 25 performances a season but only with full approval of her partners, her costumes and even the roles themselves -- exactly what she felt had been denied in Paris.

As her London career progressed, Guillem matured into an exceptional actress. In Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet” and “Manon” and Frederick Ashton’s “A Month in the Country” and “Marguerite and Armand,” she reached stunning heights. She became the first ballerina other than Margot Fonteyn to dance the role of Marguerite, the tragic courtesan previously embodied by Greta Garbo in “Camille” and untold sopranos in “La Traviata.”

At the time, this generated much controversy -- nothing new to Guillem, of course. But the outcome turned out to be a triumph.

Glimpses of Guillem

IN 2003, she took “Marguerite and Armand” on tour to Japan -- the ballet-mad Japanese are gaga for Guillem. During that tour, a DVD was made. Guillem has permitted few records of her performances, so this is a specially cherished document.

Two years later came a mammoth 430-page coffee-table book, “Invitation -- Sylvie Guillem.” It’s a collection of photographs, a few by Guillem herself but most by her longtime partner, Gilles Tapie, with a text printed in French, English and Japanese. This personal album is as close as we are ever likely to get to an autobiography. Off the stage, she is an intensely private person. She even claims that she is essentially shy, which is her explanation for why she didn’t eat with her fellow dancers in the Covent Garden canteen during her first years in London.

She justified this at the time with a sarcastic wisecrack about the English obsession with the weather: “If I want to know whether or not it is raining, I can look out the window.” Her ironic comment, which sounded antisocial, caused consternation among those who already regarded her as a pushy outsider.

Now she’s an independent artist touring not only with Khan but also with British choreographer Russell Maliphant in another duet production called “Push.” Both are booked for the next year and a half.

Wheeling her forefingers in loopy circles, she starts to rattle off her upcoming itinerary: “Switzerland, Amsterdam, Singapore, Luxemburg, Barcelona, Athens. That’s to the end of June. Then we go to Italy. Very busy, but very pleasant. I don’t complain, far from it.

“No,” she interrupts herself, “I do have one thing to complain about: the American visa. I waited an hour on the spot outside the embassy, it was cold and it was windy, and there were women with little kids in the line. Then, when they let us inside, there was another three hours of waiting. It’s unbelievable.

“America invites you to come, and then it’s like you have to go begging. Incredible. It’s an attitude that is very strange. You feel like a little pupil that is afraid of the teacher, expecting to be told off. I think this kind of humiliation is completely unnecessary. Why? You don’t need to behave like that.

“They should know who we are. It’s not that we are famous -- it’s that those huge computers have all that information. Since 11, I am dancing. I’m not doing something else, not doing political things.

“I don’t know if that is what they would like to hear. It’s not a very nice thing to say. But it’s true.

“The next time I am invited to dance in America, I will remember this and think if I am not welcome there, then I don’t go. It’s as simple as that.”

Guillem will be heading to Helsinki, Finland, later this year to oversee a revival of “Giselle” that she staged first for the Finnish National Ballet in 1998 and later in Milan. She’s also working on another production for London.

“No, you’re right,” she coos. “I am not going to tell you anything about it.”

Had she stayed with the Paris Opera Ballet, she would now have reached the company’s mandatory retirement age of 42. She shrugs off this notion with disdain. “Older is better. You have maturity, you have experiences, and you want to live all the minutes.

“Soon I am going to have to stop. I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. But I want to make the most of every second that is left.”

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‘Sacred Monsters’

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

and Thursday

Price: $42 to $68

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.uclalive.org