Choreographer Viktor Plotnikov, who opens the Festival Ballet season with his remake of Cinderella, demonstrates an adjustment he wants for a movement.

Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

PROVIDENCE Something happened to Viktor Plotnikov. It was the late 1970s. He was 10 at the time, living in Kharkov City in the Ukraine, swimming, fencing and performing gymnastics.

Then his father decided he should do something different: ballet.

Naturally, Plotnikov was excited.

“I couldn’t care less.”

Okay, so it took a few years for the excitement to kick in. But know this: it did.

Fans of Festival Ballet know it. They’ve seen it again and again. Plotnikov, now 39, a dancer turned choreographer, creates works that are arresting and inspiring in their originality.

“I really didn’t want to move the way everybody else was moving,” he says.

Plotnikov follows the form of classical and traditional ballet, but only to a point.

“Anyone can put steps together: pirouette, pirouette, arabesque, arabesque, arabesque, blah, blah, blah. But is it interesting?”

The blahs certainly don’t sound interesting. So Plotnikov replaces them, with provocation: a few karate chops, a couple Charlie Chaplin shuffles, a Chuck Berry squat walk, you name it.

Call it quirky. But in the contrasting context of Plotnikov’s choreography, more often the movements seem brilliant.

So, naturally, Plotnikov’s back, launching Festival’s 30th season next weekend with his own particular take on Cinderella.

“Viktor’s a very intriguing choreographer,” says Mihailo Djuric, Festival’s artistic director. “He’s always original and clever.”

Over the last four years, Plotnikov has created a few memorable and imaginative works for Festival.

In 2006, this paper called Plotnikov’s Loof and Let Dime masterful and mesmerizing, “among the best modern works you’ll see.” And last year’s Coma we called “magical and fantastical.”

And we weren’t alone. Dance Magazine, a national publication, said the same thing, calling Plotnikov a “deeply accomplished” choreographer.

So here’s his challenge: present the Cinderella story, but do it in a different way.

That, of course, would be the Plotnikov way, which he calls “totally different from others.”

A good girl has a bad step-family. An unmarried prince has a match-making ball. A pumpkin becomes a carriage. A glass slipper becomes a clue. True love looms.

“Everyone can relate to it,” Djuric says. “Things do happen. Dreams do come true.”

The story is set, but not its telling. And on this day, a few weeks before the curtain opens on the production, Plotnikov can’t say exactly what he’s going to do.

“It’s whatever comes out,” he says. “It’s experimental because I’m coming up with ideas on the run.”

Time’s short. Demands are great. And developing dance doesn’t come quickly.

ON A GOOD DAY, Plotnikov says, a four-hour rehearsal could yield as much as four minutes of the production’s dance; on a bad day, as little as 30 seconds.

Plotnikov has picked some of the produce for his Cinderella choreography, which he calls “a salad.” There will be some fresh neo-classical ballet in pointe shoes mixed with some just-picked contemporary and modern dance, too.

“I think it might look quite cute,” Plotnikov says.

Djuric gave Plotnikov his first big break as a choreographer by hiring him for Festival’s full-length Carmen in 2003. This was after seeing some of the shorter works Plotnikov created while working as a principal dancer for Boston Ballet.

“His movements don’t go against logic or momentum,” Djuric says. “When you start his movement, it’s easy to follow. He uses all the classical vocabulary, but he pushes it in another direction.”

While Plotnikov is a fan of classical ballet, and uses its structure as the basis for his less-than-classical compositions, he only uses what he needs.

“I don’t need variations for just a person to dance. I need to tell the story, and if that variation is not going to carry anything in the story, it doesn’t make sense. So that music is gone.”

The Cinderella music is that of Prokofiev, which Plotnikov uses judiciously.

“If it does not fit the purpose of what I’m trying to say in the ballet, I cut. Out.”

THE CINDERELLA STORY is often presented as a comedy, which Plotnikov doesn’t plan to do.

“Comedy is so easy to make cheap. Try to make three acts together and you get ha-ha (polite) laughing. I’m not Robin Williams. I think Cinderella is a pretty sad story. My Cinderella is a character who’s optimistic about life. She’s happy. She’s a diamond. If you put her in the gutter, she’ll still shine. My Cinderella never cries. She may get upset, sad or mad, but she will never cry.”

Plotnikov wouldn’t stand for tears. He believes in dancing, not miming, and relying on bodies to convey feelings.

“It’s not acting. Your acting has to be done through movement, not through expression.”

Among the best at this, according to Plotnikov, is Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“You look at his face and it doesn’t do much, but his movements cry. He pronounces what he wants to scream or whisper through dance.”

This, in part, explains the peculiar choreographic movements of Plotnikov. While they may not be classical, he says, they are emotional.

“I’m trying to show the mood of a person. That’s how we hold conversation in dance.”

The conversation Plotnikov conducts through his dancers, he acknowledges, may not be the same one audience members experience.

“Three people watching the same thing will see different things. The meaning is different. But I definitely have my own interest in the movement.”

A PASSION FOR the movement would be more accurate. After Plotnikov’s father, an engineer and ardent fan of the arts, enrolled his son in ballet class at 10, it took a few years for Plotnikov to take an interest, which happened with private lessons at 14.

“I worked so hard. I started to sweat for the first time in my life. There was progress. That was a key moment for me.”

Plotnikov, who lives in Boston with his wife, Larissa Ponomarenko, of Boston Ballet, went from the Kiev-Ukraine School of Ballet to the St. Petersburg Ballet Academy to the Donetsk Ballet Company in Ukraine, and then to Ballet Mississippi and Boston Ballet.

“I had heard a lot about America. I always wanted to go. From when I was 15, I was already thinking about it. When I was 17, I was already planning it.”

The lure was creative license.

“That’s what drove me here. When you come here, you open your mind. They give you opportunities to do things. You can see different dance and you can do different dance. In Russia, there was no modern dance and no contemporary dance, nothing.”

HERE, PLOTNIKOV is combining dance forms, old and new, classical and unconventional. In Loof and Let Dime, Plotnikov put female dancers in pointe shoes and had them walk on their hands while men followed holding their feet, as though in some county fair wheelbarrow race. And in Coma, Plotnikov put prone dancers on wires eerily swinging above the stage.

And in this Cinderella, in three acts with 50 original costumes, Plotnikov says there will likely be some surprising steps or special effects. But he’s not saying.

“I don’t want to give them up.”

However, we know this, Cinderella will have Plotnikov’s particular style. And when asked how he might characterize it, he pauses, thinks and says what’s obvious to anyone who has seen his work, “mine, I guess.”

Cinderella will be performed Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Providence. Tickets are $17 to $62. There’s a pre-performance chat with company members 45 minutes before each Saturday and Sunday show. There’s a post-performance children’s reception on Sunday. For tickets, visit www.tickets.com, or call (401) 272-4862. For more information, visit www.festivalballet.com or call (401) 353-1129.

brourke@projo.com