He is artistic advisor to the Berlin Ballet and leads his own widely touring Ballet Preljocaj. The latter's British debut was in a Dance Umbrella eleven years ago, with Liqueurs de Chair (1988), a brilliant essay in provocation that dangerously linked sexual and religious imagery. Then came other programmes, among them a Ballets Russes homage in which he rewrote works such as Les Noces, likening brides to manipulated marionettes.Now it's Romeo and Juliet, so charged with drama it might be shoving a brief but violent fist into your guts and your heart. Originally made in 1990 for the Lyons Ballet and adapted for Preljocaj's company in 1996, it takes the story into the harsh twilight of a police state, where Capulet muscle-power crushes an underclass that includes the Montagues. Preljocaj uses an edited tape of Prokofiev, interspersed with electronic passages by Goran Vejvoda. His dance is searing realism choreographed into artistic patterns.

"Each time I try to invent afresh, to find a movement style appropriate to the theme or character."Choreographing is nowhere as easy as most of us think. Although he incorporates a lot of naturalistic gesture, he must first analyse it carefully in order to transform it into art. And there is always the unpredictable yawning gulf between intention and realisation. "Sometimes you can arrive with a big and wonderful idea, but when you start working with the dancers it reveals itself to be pathetic."Sex often occupies a large place in his work. "Choreography is after all an art focused on the human body," he argues. Le Parc (to Mozart) for the Paris Opera Ballet contains the most erotic, most affecting, most ravishing pas de deux you have ever seen. The pas de deux in Romeo and Juliet are inevitably less balletic.

But they carry the shock of brutal physicality made beautiful, a thrilling virtuosity impelled by inner emotional fire. His 25 dancers have to plunge themselves, body and soul, into what they do, and being just a deft mover in this company is not enough. "I look for a personality who can dance really well, rather than someone in the mould of a dancer."Vaison-la-Romaine is 140km from Aix-en-Provence, the home of the Ballet Preljocaj. Six years ago, Preljocaj almost settled in Britain, when he was invited to co-direct London Contemporary Dance Theatre with Richard Alston: a project scuppered by LCDT's dissolution Then began a Preljocaj Diaspora. With LCDT gone, he accepted a simultaneous offer to head the Ballet du Nord (in Roubaix), integrating his own dancers into the company. "But people started to get worked up because of articles in the regional press saying I was a pornographic choreographer and impossibly avant-garde...

the mayor who had first invited me, completely caved in to the pressure. So I sent out a press release that I wasn't being supported and was leaving. And suddenly everybody - the local politicians, the journalists - were shouting they wanted me back. And I said to them, are you joking or what?" Instead he found his company another base at Châteauvallon, in the South "I was so happy. We had a wonderful building, two studios, more money - and six months later the National Front takes power. In fact, it's at moments like that, that you are at your most free morally, because you have a clear choice.