`BAMBI' CLASH ELICITS AN OH, DEER! FROM DANCE FANS.

When Oregon Ballet Theatre's 2000-2001 season brochure came out last spring, it announced that OBT artistic director James Canfield's new ballet, to premiere March 3, would be Bambi, to be created in collaboration with Portland composer Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, a jazz-cabaret combo. The announcement, with good mason, carefully stated that this would be a new interpretation of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: Prince of the Forest. "Forget what you know about traditional interpretations of the story," it said.

More recent publicity for the season simply calls it "The Collaboration" because the Disney Corporation, which Canfield approached for permission to use the Bambi name, owns the rights. Canfield isn't fighting it. "We decided to devote our creative energies to making a new ballet based on the original classic, as opposed to getting the rights to the title," he said.

Many alternative titles, most of them derisive, were proposed in the local press, but Canfield, who liked Not-Bambi the best, takes it all in stride and continues to work on a highly serious, very ambitious project. With sets by visual artist Malia Jensen and costumes by Storm Tharp, Not-Bambi is an evening-length work to be accompanied by an original score by Lauderdale played live.

Canfield, who in recent years has been creating short, sexy, deconstructionist ballets in order to draw a younger, hipper audience, last staged an evening-length ballet in 1993, when his elegant Nutcracker appeared. Since then, he has been looking for a scenario for a new story ballet that would appeal to all ages and all tastes.

"The inspiration for this ballet never came from the Disney film," Canfield said firmly. "It was Salten's novel, which Tom gave me for Christmas last year. It's a classic story about coming of age and a life cycle. Choreographers use stories that are familiar to audiences to create new works all the time," he added, pointing to John Cranko's The Taming of the Shrew, the various Dracula ballets and Lar Lubovitch's recent Othello. "If they are not in the public domain, you work around the system."

Not-Bambi is not going to be easy to pull off. OBT has only fifteen dancers this season, a tradeoff for the allocation of resources for its new building, and the tentative, flexible budget is under $100,000, low for a project of this magnitude. Much can be done with lights, and Jensen is charged with designing a single set that suggests the forest atmosphere. The set will include an eight-foot beaver, transporting Not-Bambi from the Black Forest to the Northwest woods.