Preljocaj meets Grendel.

Angelin Preljocaj is the latest in a growing roster of major choreographers to spread their wings in the world of opera. Although a newcomer to the American opera scene, he's loving every minute of it. "It's a fascinating process. This choreography will involve both mind and body. If it doesn't work out, I will have only myself to blame," says the French dancemaker, during a break from rehearsing for the premiere of director Julie Taymor and composer Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel at the Los Angeles Opera. The production travels to the Lincoln Center Festival, a co-producer, this month.

Preljocaj is considerably more than a mere hired hand in this project. In recent seasons, the lyric stage has engaged dance luminaries like Doug Varone, Sean Curran, and (this month in San Francisco) Joe Goode. But, whereas most of these artists have been assigned to create incidental diversions for specific places in the opera's plot (like Varone's "Dance of the Seven Veils" in the Met's Salome), Preljocaj finds himself a full partner here.

Grendel is the legendary monster in the ancient Anglo-Saxon Beowulf saga. The immediate source of Taymor's libretto is John Gardner's popular 1971 novel, Grendel, which retells the story from the viewpoint of

the fearsome antihero, who is Beowulf's physical and symbolic nemesis. Taymor's theater projects, most famously The Lion King, have always been collaborations between equals.

Grendel, which has been in the planning for two years, follows a similar trajectory. Beowulf is a pure movement role, and the performer will be no less than Desmond Richardson, one of America's most charismatic dancers and one of 20 chosen for this production through bicoastal auditions. "I needed a high technical level and powerful bodies," says Preljocaj. Rising star Samuel Roberts ("On the Rise," May 2006) is also in the cast, and so is Julie Bour, a Ballet Preljocaj veteran, who has been hanging out in Las Vegas recently. Of his most illustrious cast member, Preljocaj reports: "Desmond is very humble and sweet tempered and open to new experiences. Those qualities are important for this kind of work."

Both the lengthy, seven-week rehearsal schedule for Grendel (almost unheard of in the cash-poor American opera world) and the freedom to create in his own style intrigued Preljocaj, whose dance-theater revisions of Diaghilev-era ballets sealed his American reputation. "Right now, I am dealing with problems of space and scale. Space is for me what a blank sheet of paper is for a writer."

Ultimately, it was Preljocaj's admiration for Taymor's stage and film ventures that drew him to Grendel. "Julie's work with puppets, especially in her TV production of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, interested me very much," he says. "In my choreography, in some sequences, I am attempting to incorporate the gestures and attitudes of puppets. So some of the movement is a bit robotique. But this is a story, and the body must always tell it."

This fall Preljocaj will bring his own company, now based in Aix-en-Provence, to the United States and Canada with his setting of John Cage's Empty Words. He calls it Empty Moves, and describes himself as a "bulimic" choreographer. "I am always too full of ideas for dances," he says. "I must restrain myself."

The Lincoln Center Festival will present Grendel July 11-15 at New York State Theater. See www.lincolncenter.org.