John Neumeier: the who in Hamburg Ballet.

ON A SERIES OF WARM JULY EVENINGS IN ST. PETERSBURG, RENDERED EERILY THEATRICAL AND TIMELESS BY THE MIDSUMMER WHITE NIGHTS, JOHN NEUMEIER'S HAMBURG BALLET MADE A LITTLE DANCE HISTORY IN 2003. DANCING ON THE STAGE OF THE MARYINSKY THEATER, A LEGENDARY STRETCH OF WOOD FLOOR IN INTERNATIONAL BALLET. THE COMPANY NEUMEIER HAS spent the last thirty years building performed three of his full-length ballets to enthusiastic capacity audiences.

Hamburg Ballet was one of only three international ballet troupes invited to perform at the Maryinsky Theater as part of this former imperial capital's summer-long celebration of its 300th anniversary (the other two were New York City Ballet and The Royal Ballet). Hamburg Ballet's week of performances proved a pinnacle of cultural and diplomatic achievement for its director, the 61-year-old Milwaukee-born Neumeier, and the fifty-three-member German ballet company he has nurtured into international visibility.

EVEN TEN YEARS AGO IT WOULD HAVE been a stretch to think of a German ballet troupe in this exalted company, let alone a German cultural institution being celebrated in the city that the Nazis besieged for 900 days during World War II. But the soft-spoken, gray-haired, still boyish and athletic-looking Neumeier has put his unique modernist and humanist American spirit into not just the overall thrust of Hamburg's repertoire, but also the selection and training of its international roster of dancers as well as the systematic education of its audiences.

He enjoys the unofficial epithet "Germany's Cultural Ambassador" for his devoted dance diplomacy. Perhaps it's because he completed undergraduate degrees in English and Theater at Marquette University in Wisconsin before beginning his career as a dancer, or it may be due to the extensive library of archival ballet books and memorabilia he has amassed, but whatever the reasons, Neumeier is one of the most historically minded ballet choreographers working today. His ballets often function like extended visual treatises filled with quotations, citations, footnotes, and authorial asides, all told not so much through steps as through a moving landscape of relationships. These are qualities that endear him to the Germans but that have raised the ire of some American dance critics, who deride his work as pantomimic and hermetic.

Horst Koegler, a leading German dance critic who traveled with the company to St. Petersburg, confided that he was privately relieved that American dance critics have generally not embraced Neumeier's work, because it helps to ensure that Neumeier will stay in Hamburg.

SPEAKING IN THE LOBBY OF HIS HOTEL during the White Nights Festival, Neumeier reflected on the sequence of events that brought his work to the Maryinsky stage. "It was an accident that I went to Germany," he said softly, acknowledging that there was an inevitability as well as surprise in the way his life in dance has turned out. "I had this instinctive feeling that Europe would free me," he said. "So I thought I'd go to Germany for a year. When I left the U.S. in the early 1960s, it was a dry time for dance there. If that situation had been different I would have thought differently about staying or going."

During Neumeier's second season in Hamburg in 1974, he initiated the Hamburg Ballet Weeks, an annual series of invitational performances and premieres capped by the Nijinsky-Gala, a marathon evening of dancing by invited European dance stars focused around a specific dance, historical theme, or artist. This season the theme was Rudolf Nureyev, and Neumeier was the informative onstage host and narrator, introducing each dance excerpt with a few words about its connection to a different moment in Nureyev's life.

Perhaps conscious that he has chosen to make his career in a country without a long-standing ballet tradition, Neumeier also systematically addresses the issue of audience education through his Ballet Workshops, a series of public lecture-demonstrations in which he analyzes general dance themes or aspects of the company's current repertoire while his dancers demonstrate.

WHILE NEUMEIER'S PIECES DOMINATE the company's repertoire, his interest in dance history plays out in the balance of its works, which includes restagings of dances by Jose Limon, Antony Tudor, George Balanchine, and Leonid Jacobson. Jacobson's widow, Irina, the 79-year-old former protegee of Agrippina Vaganova, has been a frequent master teacher for the company since she left Russia in the mid-1980s. There are also two full-time choreologists on staff who notate and restage his ballets for the company.

Thickly illustrated program books for each of Neumeier's full-length ballets are filled with archival drawings, photographs, and lengthy critical interpretations of his dance subjects. Neumeier ruminates on scholarly mysteries surrounding historical figures in his ballets, as in Nijinsky, in which he explores Romola Nijinsky as both a sustaining and fatally destructive force in her husband's life. In The Seagull he makes Kostya a moody modernist choreographer, rather than an author, whose iconoclasm plays out in staging a little Russian constructivist romp that looks like an early Bronislava Nijinska ballet.

Two of the three works Neumeier brought to St. Petersburg were these Russian-themed modern ballets, The Seagull and Nijinsky, layered historical reflections on Anton Chekhov's play in the first instance and episodes in the life of the tragic danseur in the second. Content-wise this may have been a daring move, but stylistically it was a sure hit. Neumeier's literary approach to modern ballet, his favoring of historical characters over fictional ones, and his use of a neutral ballet vocabulary in which drama is sketched through a series of relationships have won him a huge following in his adopted city, where he is celebrated as a cultural hero. He wears with pride the honorific "Professor" given to him by the city of Hamburg in addition to numerous other distinguished cultural prizes, including the highest award that Hamburg can give, the Medal for Art and Science, which he was awarded in a surprise onstage ceremony the night before he and the company left for St. Petersburg.

Aesthetically it is not a surprise that Russian audiences, like the German, enjoy the densely literary nature of Neumeier's work, which leaves the classical vocabulary fairly intact, surrounding it instead with rings of visual, interpretive, and associative references drawn from Neumeier's own extensive study and archival pursuit of dance history. One can't uncouple the drama from the performances in ballets like The Seagull, Nijinsky, or his reflection on the September 11 attacks on the United States, Winterreise, in which the dancers' stylish charm and unhasty sensuality fill out the sober drama of the choreography.

Irina Jacobson, who has worked with leading ballet companies throughout the world, lauds Neumeier as one of the most interesting choreographers working today. "He and his work have a wonderful, rich humanity," she says admiringly.

Trained simultaneously in ballet at the Stone-Camry School in Chicago and in modern dance with the iconoclastic modern dancer and choreographer Sybil Shearer, Neumeier graduated college in 1961 and then spent a year at The Royal Ballet School in London from 1962 to 1963, where Marcia Haydee, a leading dancer with Stuttgart Ballet, and Ray Barra, a former Stuttgart principal, "discovered" him.

Upon graduation Neumeier was offered a position dancing with Stuttgart Ballet on Haydee's recommendation, he said. Working under John Cranko at Stuttgart, Neumeier became a soloist, and created his first European choreography.

In 1969, at age 27, Neumeier was appointed ballet director of Frankfurt Ballet, and his leadership of German ballet had begun. Then in 1973, at the age of 31, August Everding brought him to Hamburg to become artistic director of Hamburg Ballet.

NEUMEIER'S ACADEMIC BACKGROUND and his modern dance training made him a good fit with the German cultural climate, which has a more developed modern dance heritage than a ballet tradition. Intuitively, Neumeier seems to have responded by fashioning a ballet style that borrows from both traditions--the fairy-tale scale of ballet narrative and the contemporary psychological introspection of modern dance. The result is a company identity that has leapfrogged German ballet into the twenty-first century and given it a distinctive contemporary edge.

"For me art-making is instinctive," Neumeier said. "But you prepare yourself to be instinctive. You prepare yourself for the moment you will be called upon by the art."

How dance artists are called upon by their art is a process that apparently fascinates Neumeier. In the final moments of Winterreise, Neumeier plays the part of a mournful and slowly shuffling old man who has long since traded youth for wisdom. He tries to share some of his life experiences with an oblivious young man who ignores his offer. It's a timely metaphor for Neumeier, whose efforts at popularizing dance's history seem to reflect a similar desire to spread the wisdom ballet holds.

Janice Ross, a dance historian at Stanford University, is the author of Moving Lessons, a book about Margaret H'Doubler. She is completing a book on Anna Halprin.