Dancing Diana.

It was inevitable that the story of Diana, ill-fated Princess of Wales, would one day become the subject of a motion picture or even a musical. Few people would have guessed that there would also be a ballet, but Danish audiences are currently enjoying the antics of Diana, Dodi Al-Fayed, and the members of the House of Windsor in a new full-length ballet by Peter Schaufuss. Negotiations are underway to take the glamorous pointe-work tragedy to London for an extended run in a West End theater.

"Creating Diana--The Princess was as big a challenge to me as an artist as anything else I've ever done," says Schaufuss about his work, which he realizes "is a very sensitive subject" and which he would characterize as a modern ballet. "I would never have faced this tremendous challenge had I not known the person behind Princess Diana to the extent that I did, and I am proud that the ballet has become such a success and generated international attention."

Schaufuss, 54, first met Princess Diana in 1986 and, as artistic director of English National Ballet, later came to work with her when she became that company's patron. Since the 1970s and '80s, when he electrified audiences in Europe and the United States with his virtuoso dancing, considerable charm, and traditional Danish knack for dramatic interpretation, Schaufuss has proven himself an enterprising person with many unexpected talents. After hosting a four-part BBC documentary series about male dancing called Dancer in 1984, Schaufuss became something of a popular celebrity in the United Kingdom; in turn he directed the English National Ballet, the Ballet of the DeutscheOper in Berlin, and finally his alma mater, the Royal Danish Ballet. He has created controversial versions of La Sylphide, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker.

In 1997 he formed his own company, the Peter Schaufuss Ballet, which is based in the small town of Holstebro in one of Denmark's northern provinces and which tours the country extensively. He describes its genesis as a turning point. "I had had enough of running state companies. I was excited by the job when I was first with English National Ballet but later came to suffer from the limitations of working in opera house institutions. I enjoy the creative freedom I have now and my interaction with the dancers, and I am proud of what we have accomplished so far, establishing a school and a company and building a real audience for ballet where there was none." The Peter Schaufuss Ballet is funded not only by the borough of Holstebro and the county of Ringkjobing but by the state of Denmark, and gives more than 100 performances a year with total audiences numbering more than 100,000.

Remarkably, those attendance figures are very close to those of the Royal Danish Ballet, based in Copenhagen, but Schaufuss feels that audiences for the two companies are probably not identical. Schaufuss has created thirteen full-length ballets for his twenty-member company in the past five years and has developed a particular type of ballet he has dubbed "dancicals," based on popular icons, films, or ballet classics. Schaufuss has put Elvis Presley (The King), The Beatles, the movie Midnight Express, and Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet onstage, and told stories of isolation and loneliness and the price of fame.

Schaufuss's plans for the future include a centenary tribute to Sir Frederick Ashton in 2004: "Something special, something a little out of the ordinary, just like our school is now doing Nursery Suite," he promises. "It's a masterpiece, but it's not seen anywhere else any more and that's a great shame. Ashton meant a lot to me as a person and I appreciate his work."