Cullberg Ballet on the cusp: a change in rep for the Swedish company that's had Mats Ek written all over it.

CHOREOGRAPHER MATS EK CASTS A LONG AND POSSIBLY INDELIBLE SHADOW OVER THE CULLBERG BALLET AND DANCE THROUGHOUT SWEDEN--EVEN THOUGH HE LEFT THE COMPANY A DECADE AGO. Some of the members of this extraordinary ballet company, an international lot who hail from as far away as Canada and Israel, will tell you that they moved to Scandinavia because of Ek's choreography. The Cullberg's two current directors, Margareta Lidstrom and Lena Wennergren-Juras, who has been associated with the company from the beginning and sets Ek's works in Sweden and abroad, have commissioned and borrowed an impressive array of works since 1995; yet for audiences abroad, Mats Ek's are the dances and his are the probing artistic principles that leave no observer indifferent.

The United States will witness a historic moment in the company's evolution this fall. In October, when the Cullberg Ballet launches its six-city, cross-country tour of Ek's Swan Lake (1987), the troupe will be on the cusp of a major change. Next year, the gifted young Swedish dancer-choreographer Johan Inger, who has been working in The Hague with Nederlands Dans Theater since the early 1990s, will succeed Lidstrom and Wennergren-Juras. Inger has announced that although he will welcome new Ek dances, the choreographer's full-evening reinventions of the classics will be retired. The Cullberg, Inger says he feels, needs to structure an independent identity.

It is understandable. Ek and his family constitute a Swedish theatrical dynasty comparable to the Barrymores or the Fondas in this country. His mother, Birgit Cullberg, who gave the world the modern ballet classic Miss Julie in 1950, directed the company formed for her by the Swedish government in 1967, turning the leadership over to Mats Ek in 1985, though she guested with the troupe into her ninth decade. Ek's father, Anders, was an actor and his brother Niklas was a principal with the Royal Swedish Ballet. His wife, Ana Laguna, now retired, performed memorably with the Cullberg, originating the Swan Queen in Swan Lake and the protagonist in Carmen. She could be seen on the Stockholm stage in spring 2002, dancing the title role in a production of Racine's Andromaque, which was directed by her husband.

Ek is elusive. Catching him for a talk about his work can be a challenge. "Oh, Mats is not the type to have email," responded an authoritative source to an attempt to set up an interview across the Atlantic. Despite the fact that you are likely to find Ek setting dances in London or Lisbon these days, at home the choreographer, now 57, is treated like a gray eminence, even at the artists' entrance to Stockholm's Royal Opera House. Staffers lunching in the building's canteen nod respectfully at this gangling, spectacled intruder. You might never guess that Ek, in his own way, was something of a revolutionary. Rather than tossing bombs or publishing manifestos, he injected a distinctly contemporary sensibility into the nineteenth-century ballet heritage.

Deconstruction may have been the rage of the 1990s, but Ek got there first. Nearly a decade before England's Matthew Bourne jolted audiences wih his hairy-chested Swan Lake, Ek's version of the Petipa/Ivanov classic delivered bald, barefoot swans in tutus and a diabolically manipulative Queen Mother. Previously Ek had given the world a Giselle (1982) that ends in a lunatic asylum, and he rethought The Sleeping Beauty (1996) as a chamber ballet with a hopelessly drug-addicted Aurora. Sweden's ballet audience inclines to the traditional, so outrage was in the air.

However, generating a scandal wasn't the impetus; for the choreographer, questioning the status quo wasn't so much a choice as an artistic imperative.

"It is no longer really possible today to take the fairy tales right up and down, without having your own personal relationship with them," says Ek. "Yes, you can have a reconstruction of something old, and if it is well danced, it can be very beautiful. I still remember my first Giselle with Natalia Makarova and Ivan Nagy, and it was wonderful. But at the time, I was 24 and still involved in theater rather than dance. From a theater man's point of view, Giselle struck me as filled with a lot of dramatic stuff that was not used, not brought up to the surface and dealt with in a conscious way. Once I started to dance in these old pieces, I could see how well built they were and I examined what was behind the structure. It was a great thrill to break everything up, to see if I could put it all back together again, to keep the essence of these ballets and still make them useful to myself."

It was John Neumeier, director of the Hamburg Ballet, who inspired Ek to rethink the familiar. "His Swan Lake was a crucial production for me," says Ek. "It was the ballet with all the recognizable signs, but it was also intensely individual. Of course, stylistically, Neumeier and I are totally different." Two years later Ek choreographed his The House of Bernarda (1978), based on the Federico Garcia Lorca tragedy The House of Bernarda Alba, and his reputation was secured at home and abroad. In tribute to Neumeier, he premiered his Sleeping Beauty in Hamburg.

THE GENESES OF EK'S REVISIONS OF the classics were different. With Giselle, it was the possibilities inherent in the original story that intrigued him. With Sleeping Beauty, it was encountering a pale-faced young heroin addict begging for money in a Zurich street. With Swan Lake, the idea "came through the music. I went back to the order of Tchaikovsky's original score," Ek asserts, "and it gave me another entry into the piece. People in the composer's day thought some of the music was strange, so I put it back in. My problems were finding out who Rothbart really is, and discovering how to handle the third act, which is basically a divertissement. Once I found out that the prince had visited all these countries, where the people come from, the solution was there. Using folk dance seemed logical. The ballet is the drama of an adolescent becoming a man. The mother is a very powerful woman; she will decide who will marry her son, and this was an important point in entering the drama."

Would he venture to call his Swan Lake a de-romanticization? The characteristic Ek chuckle that punctuates his conversation returns. "That depends on what you mean by `romantic.' If you mean `pretty and sweet,' well, no, they're not part of it. But if you mean what `romantic' signified from the beginning--something wild and illogical, something to which you can't respond with your reason--then, absolutely, this is a romantic ballet."

EK GRAVITATED TO DANCE through his father, who suggested he take a class from Donya Feuer, a Martha Graham dancer employed as choreographer for plays at the Stockholm Dramatic Theater in the mid-1960s. He studied with her at the Stockholm Ballet Academy before moving on to the classics. "I was 17 and worked with Feuer for only three months," Ek recalls. "She was a hard teacher and very receptive to new ideas. What she taught me was imprinted on my spine."

Ek suggests that he left the Cullberg because of its place in Sweden's cultural hierarchy. The company is one component of the Riksteatern, the Swedish National Theatre Centre, the anticentralist policy of which dictated that the troupe be housed outside Stockholm (in Norsborg, a forty-minute drive from the Royal Opera House) and that it tour the country constantly. Ek intimates that he would have preferred that the Cullberg remain closer to the capital.

Still, he says he can't complain. If the Social Democratic policy has chafed occasionally, the benefits far outweigh the vexations. "I certainly prefer this situation to running about for money and being forced to please everyone in my dances. For thirty years, the Cullberg Ballet has been giving highly professional performances in small towns and rural areas. In that sense," Ek says, without chuckling, "Sweden has been well served."

The Cullberg Ballet At a Glance

The Cullberg Ballet Riksteatern 145 83 Norsborg, Sweden [phone]; [phone] fax [e-mail]; www.riksteatern.se

Artistic Directors: Lena Wennergren-Juras and Margareta Lidstrom

Founder: Birgit Cullberg

The company was founded in 1967 by Birgit Cullberg, who remained the director until 1985 when her son, Mats Ek, took over. He directed the company for eight years and became known for his contemporary reworks of full-length classic ballets. Ek continues to choreograph new works for the Cullburg Ballet and other companies. Johan Inger will take over as artistic director for the 2003-2004 season, replacing Lidstrom and Wennergren-Juras, who have directed the company since 1995.

* 20 dancers representing 9 nationalities; 8 dancers are Swedish

* Company funded by the Swedish government

* Venue: The Royal Opera House, Stockholm

* Touring: Extensive international and domestic. The company has performed in more than thirty countries. A six-city tour of the United States begins in October, the company's first U.S. tour since 1982.

* Guest choreographers have included Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Nacho Duato, Jiri Kylian, William Forsythe, Ohad Naharin, and Rui Horta.

Allan Ulrich is a freelance arts writer. He was a dance and music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner for twenty-two years.