On the move with Jorma Elo

Last August, Jorma Elo, Boston Ballet's resident choreographer, arrived at the company's Clarendon Street headquarters to start rehearsals for a new dance. He didn't know how long the piece might run, nor how its movements might fit together. He didn't even have a title.

In other words, Elo was right on schedule.

Some choreographers spend lots of time mapping out a piece before rehearsal. Not Elo. He comes with music or a concept, and watches as the dancers respond.

"It's not like architecture, which you plan and make a drawing and it becomes more or less like you planned it," says Elo, whose work, "Brake the Eyes," will receive its world premiere with Boston Ballet on Thursday as part of the company's "New Visions" program at the Citi Wang Theatre. "Every ballet," Elo says, "the process gives it life."

The Finnish-born Elo has become one of the busiest choreographers in the dance world. He's fresh off world premieres with New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre , and Aspen Santa Fe Ballet -- in fact, he'll have seven world premieres around the globe during the 2006-07 season. His high-energy dances are known for their whip-smart combinations, virtuosic physicality, and unexpected, slicing, off-kilter movements.

But almost nothing had been prepared yet that August morning. Elo (pronounced EL-o) gathered a dozen or so dancers in one of Boston Ballet's studios and began by playing a recording of Mozart sonatas stitched together with a gloomy, industrial-edged soundscape created by Elo's longtime girlfriend, Nancy Euverink, a dancer at Nederlands Dans Theater .

Next, Elo, a professional dancer until three years ago, demonstrated a few gestures. Taking his cue, the dancers launched into the piece, imitating, improvising, and adjusting when he stopped them to shape a sequence.

"Pretty soon they start bopping," he recalls. "I don't know what it is with dancers. They like to move."

At 45, Elo remains at his dancing weight, just under 160 pounds. His short, mussed-on-the-top brown hair is graying at the temples. In person, he's gentle and modest. Over a recent dinner at McCormick & Schmick's in the Park Plaza, Elo spoke quietly of his work, letting his fettuccini get cold and declining several offers by a waitress to put it back in the oven.

There were rehearsals in Boston in August, November, and January, he says. Still, at the start of his latest visit from his home in Holland, he doesn't yet know the order of the movements in "Brake the Eyes." Much of the 25-minute work remains to be organized. "That's the great thing and the scary thing," he says.

Normally a fast-approaching deadline might be cause for concern, says Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen. But Nissinen knows better than to worry. Elo has already created three productions for the company, including 2004's acclaimed "Plan to B."

Nissinen also knows Elo may tinker with a piece right up until opening night -- and even beyond. Elo was still working on last year's "Carmen," for example, even briefly after it opened. "The run was fantastic from then on," Nissinen says. Elo says he regrets not having "Carmen" in shape by opening night; he knows the dancers would have been more familiar with the production. But he adds that he's never completely happy with his work and might even do more tinkering were he to stage "Carmen" again. "You just keep on going through the process, deeper and deeper," he says.

Nissinen has known Elo for more than 30 years -- they danced together in Finland as ballet students, and with the Finnish National Ballet -- and he says he is just glad to have the choreographer working for his company.

"Right now, Jorma is the big thing," Nissinen says. "He comes with this unique baggage. He was a classical dancer. Then he went to work with Mats Ek, a brilliant contemporary choreographer in Sweden. He comes from the contemporary world but with an understanding of classical ballet, which is a unique combination."

Elo, who dancers say is notable for his sense of humor and calm temperament, doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the career success he's having. As far as perks, he's just glad that he can occasionally afford to have Euverink come along on his travels as a paid assistant. Elo also doesn't feel overworked.

"This is what I love to do," he says. "There's really no time to think about anything else, in a way. I'm just hoping this lasts as long as it's interesting to me."

Last Wednesday, Elo gathered a couple of dozen Boston Ballet dancers together to work on "Brake the Eyes." (The title is a play on words, from "break the ice.") For the rehearsal, Elo wore blue sweatpants, a T-shirt, and socks. Once the dancers began to move, the results had all the hallmarks of Elo's choreography: Traditional jumps and turns mixed with undulating hips, windmilling arms, and jerking, thrusting moves more likely to be seen in a modern dance piece.

Elo watched as Larissa Ponomarenko and Sabi Varga performed a short duet. As Ponomarenko retreated across the dance floor, she twisted an arm in the air. Varga's upper body moved with it, as if connected by a string. Elo, putting down his pen and notepad, stepped in to tighten the movement by showing her a few more jagged waves. He looked over at Varga and told him not to jerk his neck.

Varga says that dancing one of Elo's pieces, even for just a few minutes, can be exhausting. "It's sort of like running 15 times around the block and lifting two mail bags in your hands," he says. "Sometimes they say there's no story in one of his ballets, but you have to have a different focus than in "Sleeping Beauty." There's nothing in your head like, 'I am the prince.' It's more in your head. It's you. You're facing yourself. You're facing your fears, your musicality."

Melanie Atkins, Varga's wife and also a soloist, says that dancing for Elo is "freeing." Of the choreographers she's worked with, Elo is the most spontaneous, his pieces emerging out of his hands-on work with the dancers.

"He's really the first one who doesn't come in with 'There's six eights and then a four and then a three, and this is how it's going to go,' " she says. "And it always works out. He has an idea, but I think he likes to wait and see what his dancers are going to do with it."

Growing up in Finland, Elo first took to hockey, playing goalie as a boy, he says. He took up dance thinking it would make him more flexible; his sisters were already taking dance classes. Then, to the dismay of his parents, both doctors, he decided to become a professional dancer. At 16, he was picked for the Finnish National Ballet. He went on to study under Ek in Sweden and, in 1990, became a dancer with the Nederlands Dans Theater. It is there that Elo began to choreograph for the first time. The company offered dancers a chance to create their own 10-minute pieces.

"It was fantastic," says Elo. "We had about 32 dancers in the company, and some years, 20 people were doing stuff."

In recent years, as Elo's schedule has filled up with prestigious commissions, he's become known for a particular contemporary spin on ballet. Some critics, such as The New Yorker's Joan Acocella , have been dismissive, calling a recent performance of Elo's "Slice to Sharp" "an instantly forgettable aerobic exercise." But Anna Kisselgoff , praising "Plan to B" in The New York Times in 2004, called the piece "high-tech ballet in human terms, and its impact as pure movement is explosive."

"This is not modern dance and ballet," she wrote. "It is modern ballet."

Anthony Randazzo , ballet master at Boston Ballet, says that Elo's work is staggering to watch. "There's an astonishing, kinetic urgency," he said. "There's a great deal of surprise inherent to his approach. There's varying texture and varying velocity. It creates kind of an electric image."

Atkins, who danced in "Plan to B" but won't be in "Brake the Eyes," said that Elo's work demands more energy and a different approach than most others

"He always tells us, 'You have to get much more into the floor, you have to get much lower,' when dancers, especially women, are taught to be really pulled up and on top of everything. He really wants the movement to be grounded. He'll tell you to always put your whole foot on the floor, where in a lot of ballet, it's 80 percent on the ball of your foot.The juxtaposition of your bottom being very solid and into the ground, that's what gives it such an interesting look. And if you watch Jorma work, he's always down, but its his upper body always moving."

As inspiration, Elo cites such choreographers as Ek, Jiri Kylian , William Forsythe, and George Balanchine -- and even an avant-garde filmmaker, Stan Brakhage , whose abstract work, Elo says, reveals its meaning only after several watchings. "You go to the movies, you look at it once," he says. "You're supposed to look at it several times and look at it as a painting."

Elo doesn't like to analyze his own work much. He won't say what his pieces are meant to convey, or how his own calm demeanor offstage relates to the often frantic energy onstage.

"You don't really want to know why," he says. "You want to create a situation where you create some magic."

Nissinen says he's watched bits and pieces of "Brake the Eyes," and he's eager to see how it turns out. "It's a little bit like a symphony," he says. "You don't know what it is until the last note is composed."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. For more on the arts go to boston.com/ae/exhibitionist.