Seizing the Moment

He has the sinewy frame of a prizefighter and the finely chiseled, romantic head of a Chopin. Yet fellow dancers sometimes openly laugh at his exaggerated, stalking movements and the way his arms tend to undulate like reeds under a river. Technically, he is solidly schooled, and his physical embodiment of a musical line is superb. Yet one choreographer, sardonically noting the audience roars and whistles that greet his appearances, says: "I think he goes onstage with only one mission: to present himself as a salable commodity. He tends to relegate everything else to second place."

One thing is certain: since Italian Dancer Paolo Bortoluzzi left Maurice Bejart's Brussels-based Ballet of the Twentieth Century to join the American Ballet Theater in June, he has caused more excitement in the U.S. than any male dancer since Rudolf Nureyev leaped through the Iron Curtain.

It all began with Bortoluzzi's debut in Giselle, early in the A.B.T.'s current stand at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. He danced the role of Albrecht, which had become identified with the elegant and stylish Erik Bruhn before his retirement in January. During rehearsals, Bortoluzzi so shook up his colleagues with his arrogant bearing and exuberantly melodramatic interpretation that the ballet master threatened to walk out. At the first performance, Ballerina Carla Fracci, the Giselle and a longtime partner of Bruhn, kept whispering instructions to Bortoluzzi--where to put his feet, how to move his hands. Hissed Bortoluzzi: "If you don't stop, I'll drop you." By the second performance Fracci had decided it was "exciting to work with Paolo."

"I don't want people to watch me in Giselle and say I am a kind of printed stamp of 1850," explains Bortoluzzi. "I want people to live the story with me now. I want them to say, 'Oh, isn't it awful, that poor boy lost his girl.' " As for his unorthodox gestures, which some observers describe as a carryover from his twelve years with the oriental-inspired, contemporary-styled Bejart company, Bortoluzzi says: "My personality is the same whether I dance for Bejart or whether I dance Giselle, and I don't intend to change it."

A quick study, Bortoluzzi has learned five widely differing roles in only a few weeks for the current A.B.T. season. In Erik Bruhn's staging of Bournonville's La Sylphide, he portrayed the unhappy lover of an elusive sylph (Natalia Makarova) with something like delicacy and restraint. In Anton Dolin's Variations for Four, he stole the show with the sheer, pantherish abandon of his movements. As the young seducer in Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire, he was appropriately ardent. Last week, in Fokine's Le Spectre de la Rose, he was a little too effeminate as the Spirit of the Rose (not helped by a lurid pink, rose-petaled body stocking) but danced with lyrical grace.

The son of a Genoese clothing merchant, Bortoluzzi began dancing at 15 mainly for the exercise. At 20, he moved to Milan to join a ballet company that his teacher was starting there. After the company folded two years later, Bortoluzzi's freelancing took him to such showcases as the Nervi and Edinburgh festivals, and in 1960 he joined Bejart's then new troupe. One of his most famous portrayals was the title role in Bejart's The Swan, an unusual bit of casting that Bortoluzzi approves. "A swan is not something very sweet, like a girl," he says. "It is an aggressive animal. And to give the sensation of flying is much more suited to a man."

Nowadays Bortoluzzi's flying is done offstage as well as on. In line with his desire "to guest everywhere," he jets to appearances at La Scala, the Paris Opera, the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, the Hamburg and Stuttgart ballets and the Vienna Staatsoper. His calendar is crammed with bookings through 1973, barely leaving time for intervals with his wife and newborn daughter, who still live in Brussels. "A dancer's career is very short," says Bortoluzzi, who is 34. "I left Bejart because I wanted to open my horizon. I cannot wait. Now is the right moment."

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