Angelin Preljocaj has a touching way of remembering his dancers. Down at his modern, purpose-built base in Aix-en-Provence, there are two stone staircases engraved with the names of everyone who has ever performed for him and the company he founded back in 1984.
"I'm a very fidèle guy," says the choreographer, in his sometimes vividly improvised English. And his dancers are usually just as faithful in return. They commit unquestioningly to the physical and interpretive demands he places on them: whether it's his bleakly expressive cold war Romeo and Juliet from 1990, in which Verona is recast as a totalitarian state policed by a militaristic corps de ballet; or the abstract rigours of his 2001 setting of Stockhausen's work Helicopter, originally scored for a string quartet and four choppers. But when Preljocaj announced he was planning a full-length Snow White – a weirdly whimsical departure, it seemed, from his usual challenging agenda – even his most loyal supporters panicked.
"They thought I'd lost it," grins the 55-year-old, at ease in his HQ on the outskirts of Aix's ancient centre. "No one would even call the work by its name. It was just 'the fairytale project' – as if they hoped it would go away." They should have known better. Preljocaj has a history of springing dark surprises. The Casanova he created for Paris Opera Ballet in 1998 jettisoned the usual backdrop of Venice and carnivals: the set, with its x-ray images and blood-red cavities, drew the action deep into the body of its hero, while ballerina Isabelle Guérin read aloud from a medical textbook about VD.
Though Preljocaj was interested in "the fairytale tradition of ballet" (classics like Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake), his starting point for Snow White was the brutal, punitive folk story as told by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Details in the Grimms' version, like the evil stepmother being forced to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes, are noticeably absent from Disney's classic 1937 cartoon, but caught Preljocaj's eye.
"It's an incredible tale," he says. "Romantic but also dark and cruel, like a thriller with so many developments." He has emphasised the story's Germanic Romanticism by using Gustav Mahler for the score; but in narrative terms, what interested him most was the psychological conflict between Snow White and her jealous, narcissistic stepmother, no longer the fairest of them all. "I think this is a very modern conflict. Everywhere I go, I see women of 45 or 50, out on the streets with their daughters. With modern medicine and nutrition, these women appear very beautiful, sensual and young. They even share clothes with their daughters. But they no longer have their daughters' youth and freshness. I think we are entering the era of the Snow White complex."
When the production comes to Britain next month, audiences will see this "Snow White complex" portrayed with adult explicitness: the stepmother is pure dominatrix. Dressed by designer Jean Paul Gaultier in corset, boots and suspenders, she doesn't coax Snow White into eating the poisoned apple – but forces it, murderously, down her throat. Meanwhile, Snow White is a far more active, sexual character.
Preljocaj's vision was inspired by the psychoanalytical writings of Bruno Bettelheim, whose reinterpretations of fairytales were, as Philip Pullman once wrote, "Freudian enough to make your hair stand on end". It was through Bettelheim, too, that Preljocaj solved the problem of the dwarves. Hiring seven very short dancers was impracticable, but he felt justified in using his own regular dancers after reading Bettelheim's theory about the dwarves' symbolic function in the story. "He suggests that they represented something asexual in the collective unconscious during the period of the Grimms," says Preljocaj. "The point isn't that they're dwarves, but that they're protecting her."
If Preljocaj has come to Snow White from unfamiliar angles, it may be partly because he grew up seeing the world from two very different perspectives. Born in Paris just five days after his parents escaped from communist Albania, he felt French while at school and Albanian when at home with his parents and their tight-knit community of Albanian friends. In 1992, Preljocaj, now an internationally famous representative of the Albanian diaspora, was invited back to the newly democratised country, and taken by presidential helicopter to his parents' mountain village. "It's a very emotional thing arriving by helicopter," he says. "Out of nowhere, you see all these people running up. And then, in this crowd of strangers, I kept seeing faces I recognised – they looked like me, like my family." Today, he is grateful to have had this dual identity. "All my life, I have this French culture, very Cartesian, very rational; and the Albanian, which is more mysterious, more instinctive." It's a "double way of thinking" that, he believes, has informed his entire dance career: from his teenage years when he studied classical ballet and modern dance while remaining close to his rock'n'roll-addicted friends; to his adult years as a choreographer. There is certainly a divide between the work he makes for such classical companies as Paris Opera Ballet and the pieces he creates for his own troupe, Ballet Preljocaj, which is shaped more by the dynamic thrust and flow of contemporary dance than by the polished clarity of the classical tradition.
But there's another clear division in his work between abstract and narrative. The majority of Preljocaj's pieces are plotless. He thinks of them as "fundamental research" dealing with such choreographic concepts as energy, weight, space and dynamics – as in the exquisitely rising and falling phrases of his 2007 piece Empty Moves. Every now and again, though, he feels like "coming out of the laboratory" and telling a story.
Preljocaj invited Gaultier to create the costumes after seeing his 2008 catwalk show inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. "It was incredible, very beautiful: dresses with fish scales, hair with algae." Gaultier was delighted. When he came down to Aix with the costumes, says Preljocaj, "it was like Christmas – the dancers were so excited. But for Jean Paul, that was just the beginning, the first draft. For two days, he stayed with us, changing and adapting things, trying to push the vision further. It was so interesting to watch, because it was exactly the way we work in the studio, where the choreography changes every day."
That was four years ago. Since then, Snow White has travelled the world, becoming one of his most successful works. The Washington Post called it "one of the most original and immersive dance productions [of] recent times". It has also turned out to be ahead of a global trend: this year Snow White is everywhere. As well as the new movie Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts as the stepmother, a second film version, Snow White and the Huntsman, is due this summer. The story is also woven into the fairytale themed TV drama Once Upon a Time, currently on Channel 5 and written by the team behind Lost. Clearly, Preljocaj was more prophetic than he knew when, in 2008, he tried to convince his dancers that Snow White was a story for our time. "The conflict in the fairytale," he says, "is all around us now."
• Snow White is at Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (0844 412 4300), 10-12 May.
