Roland Petit presents three premieres at the Paris Opera.

PARIS--Few French choreographers have been as productive and have exerted as much influence on twentieth-century French ballet as Roland Petit, who celebrated his seventieth birthday January 13. To commemorate the occasion he has created three new works for the Paris Opera Ballet (POB), which will receive their premieres during performances March 9-22.

A graduate of the POB school, Petit performed with the company for only four years (1 940-44) before leaving to dance with Janine Charrat. He founded his own Ballets des Champs-Elysees in 1945, and the Ballets de Paris in 1948, serving as the leading dancer and choreographer of both these companies and becoming known for his collaborations with important writers and designers. Among his outstanding early works were Les Forains, Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, and Le Loup.

Petit's Carmen, Cyrano de Bergerac, and La Croqueuse de Diamants toured the United States of America in 1952; he also choreographed for Hollywood. For the Paris Opera he created Notre-Dame-de-Paris (1965) and Turangalila (1968). He made Paradise Lost for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in 1967.

Since 1972 Petit has directed Ballet National de Marseille. Among his many works for this company have been Proust--Les Intermittences du Coeur Nana, La Rose Malade, and Ma Pavlova. In 1991 he choreographed Charlot Danse avec Nous, a work for a small number of dancers, which will tour the U.S.A. next season.

His principal interpreter has been his wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, with whom he purchased the Casino de Paris and staged many music-hall revues.

The first of his three new works for POB will be Passacaille, to music of Anton Webern (Five Movements for String Quarlet Op. 5, and Passacaglia) which uses sixteen dancers. This will be followed by Rythme de Valses, to music of Johann Strauss, Jr., transcribed by Arnold Schoenberg, and choreographed for six dancers.

The major work of the all-Petit evening will be Camera Obscura: L'Amour est Aveugle, based on the novel Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov. Camera uses two works by Schoenberg: Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11, composed in 1909; and Piano Concerto Op. 42, written in 1944. The two blend together perfectly to form a ballet in eight movements, the last of which expresses feelings of melancholy. Petit says that he is passionately involved in Nabokov's work, which tells the tragic story of a rich man who leaves his wife for a young woman only to be spurned. Petit says that he has spent many months trying to capture the mood of Nabokov's work. Patrick Dupond, artistic director of POB, and Marie-Claude Pietragalla will dance the leads in Camera, along with Nicolas Le Riche. Other principal roles have been assigned to Lionel Delanoe, Aurelie Dupont, and Eric Quillere. Carole Arbo will be featured in Rythme de Valses.

POB performed Petit's Le Rendez-Vous (1945) with a drop curtain by Pablo Picasso, at Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C., last spring during the center's FranceDanse festival and reprised the work last fall as part of its Picasso Evening.