FLEMMING FLINDT'S DARK VISION.

PHAEDRA'S TALE OF INCEST AND DEATH MAKES DRAMATIC BALLET FARE

Dennis Nahat hadn't planned to present Danish choreographer Flemming Flindt's Phaedra in California this year. But then, neither had he planned to pick up his company and move it lock, stock, and barrel to San Jose, California, from Cleveland, Ohio, last fall. So when he quickly had to re-program the season for his now thirty-member Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley, he knew with what he wanted to pair Massine's joyously infectious Gaite Parisienne: Flindt's tortuous take on one of the great myths of Western literature, Phaedra. "We had been talking about it for a while," Nahat explains, "and this was the perfect opportunity."

During the 1950s, Flindt was one of the top male dancers of the Royal Danish Ballet, which, when he was on leave dancing with the Paris Opera Ballet and the English National Ballet, appointed him to the rank of principal without his ever having been in the corps. Thirty years later, English critic John Percival still waxed poetic when he remembered Flindt in Harald Lander's Etudes as "perfect in style and virtuosity."

In the 1960s, as the Royal's artistic director, Flindt shook up the venerable institution--to the admiration of some and the dismay of others--when he programmed a lot of his definitely non-sedate choreography, as well as that of modern dancers like Paul Taylor. He still laughs at the public outrage caused by the dancers having to perform in bare feet a piece he considers quite balletic, Taylor's Aureole. There was a good reason to do what he did, he explains over lunch after his first run-through of Phaedra in San Jose.

"At that time, the company needed badly to be in touch with the intellectual people working in dance. Most of those, the brilliant thinkers, were in modern dance. Yes, there was Balanchine, but there were very few in ballet. The ideas came from modern dance."

Since those turbulent years, Flindt has spent his life doing what he knows and loves, working in the theater--in drama, opera, and, of course, dance. Crossing genres is almost a birthright for him. "I grew up in a theater [the Royal Danish school] in which opera, drama, and ballet were all together," he says "From the age of 8, you are onstage all the time, maybe as a page in an opera or in a play. So you get a perspective as a child that this is the way you want to express yourself."

The years have painted gray into his hair and added a few pounds to his compact dancer's physique, but they have not dampened his enthusiasm for all things stage-worthy, particularly the theatrically pungent. In the years since Dallas Ballet, of which he was the last artistic director, closed its doors in 1989, he has been traveling around the world, staging his own and other Danish ballets, as well as operas (Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges at City Center Opera, the precursor to New York City Opera) and plays (Metamorphosis, based on the Franz Kafka story, at the Royal Danish Opera). In contrast to the sunny Bournonville he grew up with, Flindt's choreography often explores dark themes with sexual undercurrents. What he has kept from his heritage is a predilection for narrative: "Even as a dancer, I much preferred being a character than, let's say, just being one of the dancers in Symphony in C."

He also has not been afraid of taking on literary works that stand on their own. "Dance can add a sensuous quality that words simply don't have," he explains. His first and still best-known piece, the savage The Lesson, is based on an Ionesco play (as is his vituperative 1971 The Triumph of Death), whose author became a lifelong friend. For the most part, Flindt's is not a pretty world. In addition to the incest of Euripides's Phaedra (in which Phaedra, the wife of the mythical hero Theseus, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus), there is the anguish of an old man in The Overcoat by Gogol and the creeping decrepitude of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, both made for Rudolf Nureyev shortly before the dancer's death in 1993. Most recently, he has created tragedies on Danish subjects: Caroline Mathilde (1991) about a Danish queen's love affair with her husband's physician, who gets executed while she is banished; and Legs of Fire (1998), about the suicide of Danish ballerina Elna Lassen at the pinnacle of her career.

"I do think that life is a pretty tragic journey," he responds when questioned about what looks like a penchant for the gloomy. "Very much so. Thank God for the wonderful moments we do have. But these stories are what life is, and what happens all the time. Phaedra is about people being the playthings of the gods. Legs of Fire is about the ultimate price you pay when you go up on that stage. It could be about Marilyn Monroe or Maria Callas or Nureyev, who was 54 when he died, or Erik Bruhn, who didn't even live till 60. Maybe not when you are young, but later on, life is difficult. It takes tremendous strength to pull yourself up because you can so easily be overwhelmed by the sadness of all the people going away."

Neither is Flindt particularly sanguine about the future of ballet. Looking at the field from his forty-year perspective leads him to muse on what he calls "the lack of vision." Ballet today, he says, "is not creative enough. There is [James] Kudelka in Canada and [Jean-Christophe] Maillot in Monte Carlo. They are trying things, but who else is there?"

And when he looks at his home company, the Royal Danish Ballet, he just shrugs his shoulders. "They have a ballet master [i.e., artistic director] who has been chosen by the dancers,"--as if that said all.

Still, this sturdy Dane keeps on trucking. After the close of Phaedra's current incarnation (the ballet was created for Dallas Ballet in 1987 and last performed by Indianapolis's Ballet Internationale in 1999), Flindt is headed back for Copenhagen, where he will direct The Three Musketeers, not his 1966 ballet, but a dramatic version. The prospect of working with floppy hats and glinting swords elicits a chuckle and sends a twinkle into his Nordic eyes.

There is also another, quite cheerful ballet lurking somewhere in the back of Flindt's mind. "It would be based on The Love of Three Oranges and another of Carlo Gozzi's stories, The Green Bird, which is the continuation of The Love of Three Oranges. It's a beautiful, funny love story about how to get rid of evil things in the world. And there will be Rossini, lots and lots of Rossini."

Rita Felciano is dance critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and a California critic for Dance Magazine.