A ballerina's modern conversion

Ever since Sylvie Guillem was a young gymnast, she has suffered from stage fright. "There's a picture of me as a little girl," she recalled recently, "and I'm waiting to go onstage, and I am biting the last bit of nail I have left on my finger." With age, she added, her fear has worsened. "Between what I know I can do and want to achieve and what the audience expects, it's a lot of pressure, and it's always adding up." Yet at 41, Guillem is reinventing herself. Having become perhaps the most celebrated ballerina of her generation, she is now becoming a contemporary dancer.

As they exit their 30s, most dancers try to minimize risk to extend their time on the stage. But ballet's reigning diva is embracing it. Only a handful of ballerinas make it past 40, so Guillem, bored by the classics and determined to test new forms and her own limits, is exploring her options while she still has them. And she is doing so by performing the most physically demanding movement of her career.

Striding through the Sadler's Wells theater here, her long, steely limbs duly stretched after her morning class, Guillem looks worlds removed from the haughty Parisian ballerina who arrived in London 17 years ago favoring bowler hats and clunky black lace-up boots. Tall and relaxed, her straight red hair falling past her shoulders, her fringe of bangs accenting her green eyes and girlish demeanor, she is dressed in a camisole, a man's shirt, loose- fitting black pants and red slip-on sneakers. Her pale skin is free of makeup.

She likes to go about her life in London, she said, "unrecognized on the street."

She is understated in conversation as well, thoughtful and candid although, she admits, a bit shy. But when the subject turns to "Push" an evening of works that showcases Guillem in two solos and a duet, and which receives its American premiere on Wednesday at New York's City Center she becomes expansive. "Yes, it's dangerous," she said. "It's moving upside down, on your back, your knees things you don't do very often in classical ballet and it was painful. Any new style you take on is a shock, because there are always a lot of doubts. 'Am I going to be able to do it?' But it's a game, and I love to play it."

Talk of Guillem has always centered on what her body can do. "She can take a leg to places I can't begin to think about and make it look beautiful," said Russell Maliphant, the "Push" choreographer, whose athletic, restrained style is culled from contact improvisation, hip-hop, capoeira and tai chi.

"She invented her body to some degree," said the choreographer William Forsythe, who has made two works for her. "Someone else might have that body, but without Sylvie's mind inside it, it wouldn't be as interesting." Remarkably Guillem was 36 before she was sidelined by an injury. But she acknowledged that her body will inevitably let her down; her keen mind can will it only so far. "I'm still exploring, opening my eyes to the fact that the journey will end," she said bluntly. "I don't blind myself, but I still have a few things I want to do." When she first worked with Maliphant, on his 2003 "Broken Fall," a sensation at its premiere in London, she struggled with a step that her partners, William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, had already absorbed. "She had to go from kneeling down to standing up by throwing one leg behind her," recalled Trevitt. "She went home and practiced it all night. She came in the next day covered in bruises, but she had cracked it." Most dancers, he added, would have said, '"I can't do that, give me a different step.' Sylvie has this determination not to be beaten by it."

Guillem has shown a similar determination when it comes to her creative choices. Though a major star at the Paris Opera Ballet, where she was Rudolf Nureyev's protege, she defected to London's Royal Ballet, where she was the only dancer allowed to approve partners, ballets, costumes and photographs. She now jokes about having been called "Mademoiselle Non" by the Royal's former director Anthony Dowell, and admits that that reputation probably cost her opportunities.

"People were frightened by an image, by a reputation, and they didn't want to try," she recalled. In her 17 years at the Royal, she had been a modernizing force, pressing the company to bring in contemporary ballet choreographers. Still, no major ballet was created expressly for her. Last spring she tired of working in a company where "you're part of a program that doesn't belong to you." She saw an opportunity in Sadler's Wells, which has become a lab for new dance and boasts some of the hottest choreographers in Britain. Its artistic director, Alistair Spalding, was prepared to make her a partner. "We'll say, 'What do you want to do?'" he explained, "and create the circumstances to make it happen."

And so they did. With Guillem in the house, Sadler's Wells has had an upsurge in ticket sales, media attention and interest in Maliphant's work. "Push" had its premiere to ecstatic reviews last autumn and won the 2005 Olivier Award for best new dance. Its success led Guillem to join Sadler's Wells as artistic associate in June and to set in motion a third project with Maliphant. Guillem makes a demarcation between her public and private lives and counts few dance insiders among her close circle. When not on tour, she and her husband, Gilles Tapie, a fashion photographer, move between their apartment in London and their house near Nice, France, where she spends much of her time gardening, studying Japanese and working on pottery. Occasionally she'll give a peek at her private self.

Early in her career she appeared in Vogue in a series of fashion photographs by Tapie. But she said she felt the photos showed her as "a model, something I am not." More recently, when French Vogue invited her to pose again, she suggested a series of self- portraits. This time she wanted to show "the way I am and the way I see myself," so she photographed herself dancing in her studio, naked, without benefit of makeup or airbrushing. "I did brush my hair before," she said, laughing.

"Push" has a decidedly downtown edge. It features four works, three of which star Guillem: "Solo," a new dance created for her; "Two," a solo remade for her, in which she appears trapped in a cube of light; and "Push," a duet with Maliphant that she persuaded him to make.

Their duet forces Maliphant, 44, a compact, muscular man with a shaved head and coiled intensity, to position himself in the role of partner. In "Push" he sets Guillem's willowy limbs hurtling and tumbling through maneuvers that play up the contrast between "my downward energy and Sylvie's skyward energy," he said.

Guillem says the farewell tours and tributes that ballet has customarily bestowed on its anointed are not for her.

As she left to rehearse "Sacred Monsters," a new work by Akram Khan, she remembered that the legendary Alicia Alonso was overseeing a dress rehearsal of her Ballet Nacional de Cuba at Sadler's Wells.

"I should go say hello," she said, recalling that she saw Alonso dance when she was 60. "I understand that," she said. "I think it's going to be the most difficult thing to do, to leave the stage. But if you have no lucidity about it, it's even worse because you don't see the negative side of you still being onstage." She believes, she said, in "stopping when you're still at the top."

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