Tough love: Mihailo Djuric is taking Festival Ballet Providence to center stage.

"What is the problem?" the small, reddish-haired man with the horn-rims balancing precariously on his nose wanted to know. Springing into the middle of a half-dozen rehearsing dancers, he added, "You look very uncomfortable. Why? Why?"

The speaker was Mihailo ("Misha") Djuric, artistic director of Festival Ballet Providence. Born to Croatian-Serbian parents, his pronunciation turns "Why? Why?" into "Vhy? Vhy?"

Hesitantly, one of the dancers offers an answer: "There's a lot of steps."

"Ahh!" Djuric says. "Lot of steps. OK. Vell, go ahead and try it again. If ve don't like it, I change it."

The dancers, rehearsing as toreadors in Festival Ballet's version of Don Quixote, have been treated, if that's the word, to just a little of the carrot and stick technique that has allowed Djuric--and a hard-working board of directors--to transform a once moribund company into one approaching national status. In his eight years in Providence, Djuric, driven, sweet, hard-working, and focused, has turned Festival Ballet, once mostly classical with many story ballets, into a company where you are likely to see quicksilver segues from classical movement to Latino street styles. The dancers these days are thrown across the floor and leap to their feet--something that never would have happened before Djuric's arrival.

Sprinkled with performers from all over--from Russia to Venezuela--Festival Ballet's dancing can be precise or hard-edged, but is more emotional, more driven than ever. Festival Ballet Providence today is a reflection of its leader: single-minded, tough, and determined to get better. Since Djuric's arrival, the company has gone from a budget of about $350,000 to $1.7 million. Student enrollment in the school, which has relocated to Providence's tony east side, has risen from 100 to more than 500.

Festival Ballet's improvement can be said to have begun with the break-up of the old Yugoslavia. After a career as a first soloist with National Opera and Ballet of Belgrade, Djuric spent time in the United States to see how dance differed here. He had fully intended to return to Belgrade, but when war broke out in his homeland, his parents and other family members urged him to stay away. Although he was a veteran of the Yugoslavian army, he knew he might be drafted again. In addition, he preferred the united nation in which he had grown up. "I really felt Yugoslavian, not Serb or Croat. It was the most confusing and depressing time of my life," he says. "Now, I call Providence, and the United States, my home." He took over Ballet New England, a small company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1991. His success there put him on Festival Ballet's candidate list after the death of the company's co-founder (with her ex-husband Winthrop Corey) Christine Hennessy in 1998.

Djuric came to Providence and loved it. "The energy of the board and the city impressed," he says. The board liked him, too. "When we checked references," says Debbie Leach, then chairwoman of the board, "he was the only guy I heard called a 'genius' by more than one person." Djuric moved to Providence, bought a house, and began to transform Festival Ballet into a fully professional company.

He is also, board members point out, a man unafraid to share the spotlight. Recent strong dances have come from two choreographers associated with Boston Ballet: Viktor Plotnikov and Gianni Di Marco. Both brought Festival something new. Plotnikov's premiere Loof and Let Dime was a hard-edged ballet featuring women and men in cohesion and collision. Di Marco's Azucar, to the music of Latina great Celia Cruz, had boys and girls light and flirty, young and strong. The contrast between the two new dances showed the wide range of the new Festival Ballet.

Di Marco is an unabashed fan of Djuric: "He is a risk-taker. We have had problems, sure. We are artists. But we have always been able to work them out. He's brave."

Jennifer Ricci is the last pre-Djuric dancer at Festival Ballet. A principal, she is small, olive-eyed, and quicksilver on the dance floor. Ricci says that Djuric takes her to another level. "Misha can be tough, but he brings out the best in you. He's heightened this company tremendously."

Another veteran dancer in the company has a different reaction to that tough guy quality. "Sometimes I think he's too strong," the dancer says. "He can yell at you to a point where you are frustrated. It may make some people improve. But some give up. I think it would be better with more positive reinforcement."

Asked about this, Djuric says, "There is a part of me that is always unhappy. I say, 'I can do that better. They can do that better.' I always think, 'How can I benefit someone? How can I push someone?' You've got to challenge. I am still trying to explain myself to the dancers. If I give a bad comment it's not that I don't like them, that I don't love them. But I need to be honest. Every little mistake on the stage shows. It is you in your bare skin."

Djuric is speaking from his cluttered desk, from which he can see the main rehearsal studio. The view is a reminder that the dancers are never far away. Leaning forward, he says that these days he can take the technical competence of professional dancers pretty much for granted; it's emotion and ideas he's looking for.

"I prefer dancers who think and dancers who offer ideas. The dancer who needs to be spoon-fed ..." He lets the thought hang, shrugging his shoulders. He wants a company not much bigger than the current troupe of 19 and 3 apprentices--20 to 24 dancers max. The Providence metro area has about 1.1 million people and probably can't afford anything more. "The point now," he says, "is to get better."

As for Djuric himself, "I'm always a dancer," he says. "I've finished that phase of my life, except for a little character dancing. But my passion is to move. I must do it. You can tell a story that way. The heart is stronger than the brain."

In the rehearsal of the toreadors, after informing his dancers that he might change the choreography, Djuric joined the dancing. Making the music himself ("la de, dah, dah, dah-DAH"), he led them through the movement. He beamed when it ended. It seemed his happiest moment in the non-stop three-hour-plus rehearsal.

"You need to be subtle, guys, much more subtle," he said. "Give just a hint of hip-swinging. Try to be every woman's dream," he said with a small, satisfied smile.

LETICIA GUERRERO HEATING UP THE STAGE

It was a typically gusty New England spring afternoon when Leticia Guerrero was called from the class she was teaching at the Sally Gould Dance Center in Billerica, MA. The man on the other end of the line didn't waste any time.

"Can you learn ballet in one hour?" he demanded.

"Who is this?" Guerrero asked.

"What you care who is this?" the caller said. "Can you learn in one hour!?"

"I thought, 'Ahh, this must be Misha,' "the diminutive, Venezuela-born Guerrero says. Today she can laugh about the April 2003 call. But that evening she raced the 50 miles from her home in Boston to a Providence theater, arriving at 9 p.m. just in time to solve a crisis. She learned the part of Billie Holiday in Djuric's new dance toDAY in the lobby as the rest of the cast was rehearsing onstage. A leading dancer for Festival Ballet Providence had departed unceremoniously the day before opening night. Artistic director Misha Djuric immediately called Guerrero, and the rest is local legend.

"Misha messed up my hair," Guerrero says, "threw a huge red dress on me, and pushed me onstage. He said, 'If you don't remember, improvise.' "

A dancer who exudes emotion and passion, Leticia Guerrero has always been a hard worker. As she herself says, she's not the prototypical ballerina, being short and lacking great extension and having feet that are "not so developed." But onstage she moves with darting intensity. She projects a sexuality and dynamism that change with each role. Her big brown eyes reach to the people in their seats, imploring them not to miss her flavor.

Guerrero, 36, left Caracas in 1986 to attend summer school at Boston Ballet. She spoke no English but could rely on an aunt living in Boston. From then on, it was a gypsy-like life, dancing with Massachusetts' North Atlantic Ballet, Michigan Ballet, and Minnesota Dance Theatre ("I don't know what happened-I kept going from cold to colder"), and then Charleston Ballet Theatre in South Carolina. She returned to Caracas for five years with Ballet Nuevo Mundo until the ascent of the populist president Hugo Chavez, whose regime supports the working classes at the cost of the arts. "We stopped getting paid; I had no apartment," says Guerrero, who now speaks fluent English.

Returning to Boston, she danced with Jose Mateo's Ballet Theatre of Boston and then Colleen Cavanaugh's Cadence Dance Project in Providence. Now she dances many lead roles at Festival Ballet.

Guerrero talks about the moment when the curtain rises. "The feeling it gives you, I can't explain it. You've done all the hard work and then it starts and you get to show what you've done."

Guerrero's husband heads Boston's aquatic programs, and they have a 4-year-old daughter, Gabriana. Has motherhood changed things? "It does make a big difference," she says. "There is more responsibility. Obviously, Gabriana is my life so I want to take care of myself even more. I don't know if I dance differently, but the emotions are different. I don't inhibit myself from expressing anything. Now, I really know what life is"--B.G.

Former dance and theatre critic of the Providence Journal, Bill Gale writes for various publications and publishes theaternewengland.com.