'I was a young boy - 11 - so for me he was a man,' the 73-year-old says. 'He was maybe 20, 21. People call it statutory rape, but I hate to call it that. They lived in tents, and one morning I came there and no one was there, and I didn't dare to ask.'

Van Dantzig returned home to Amsterdam soon after, confused about what had happened, and needing support. But his mother had just given birth to a second son. 'She couldn't give me any attention,' van Dantzig says. 'Everything was focused on my little brother.'

Has the story inspired any of his ballets? Inevitably, the feelings worked their way into some of them, he says. 'But not Romeo and Juliet - not that one.'

Even so, van Dantzig has a different take on the tragedy, which premieres in Hong Kong on March 23.

'It's about loneliness of the mother of Juliet, who isn't in a good marriage,' he says. 'Her husband is a bully, and she has given the care of her daughter to the nurse. Juliet sees the nurse as warm and her mother as cold, and doesn't understand that her mother has her own difficulties.

'How strange,' he says, slowly. 'I never put it into the context of what happened to me after the war. But it was a very painful brother-mother-brother triangle where, whatever you do, you hurt someone.'

Romeo and Juliet was created for the Dutch National Ballet Company in the late 60s, and in the beginning van Dantzig had no plan to write it. His job was to find somebody else's version.

'The [ballet's] director at the time was Sonia Gaskell, and she wanted to do a Romeo and Juliet. So, she asked me to go to Russia to ask Leonid Lavrovsky at the Bolshoi if we could perform his.' Van Dantzig spent two days in Moscow, but returned empty-handed. 'Lavrovsky said our stage was too small, and wouldn't do it,' he says.

Next stop was Kenneth McMillan in Stuttgart. 'But he was too expensive.'

So van Dantzig went back to Gaskell. 'I said, 'Look, I've been travelling around Europe and I haven't got us a Romeo and Juliet. Maybe I should do it myself.' And she gasped and said, 'Do you dare?' And her gasp made me think that I could do it.'

Van Dantzig has always dared to do ballet where others said he should give up. He started dancing late, at 16, four years after seeing his first show.

'I saw The Red Shoes, and it was magical, and I knew it was the world I'd love to be in,' van Dantzig says. 'But I never thought it would be for me. My background was so simple.'

People told him to give up the idea, but then he met someone who said Gaskell was the one person in Holland who could make dancers out of late starters. She took him on.

'She said I had a strong body, and that I also had spirit,' van Dantzig says. 'But she said I shouldn't count on a long career. And that was good advice, because I wasn't a great dancer.'

He danced his first ballet in 1952, later turning to choreography and management, and took over the company in 1971.

In his 20 years as director of the Dutch National Ballet, van Dantzig helped define the national style, with his passionate, highly psychological creations. These are epitomised by his Romeo and Juliet, with its great masked character of Death, and its ghosts of Tybalt and Mercutio, who explain to Juliet that there's forgiveness and redemption beyond the grave.

Van Dantzig knew Rudolf Nureyev well and his biography of the Russian dancer will be published in English this summer. Nureyev performed in his Monument for a Dead Boy in Amsterdam six times, and the work is said to have converted the Russian to modern dance, a genre he mistrusted.

'I knew him for 25 years,' van Dantzig says. 'There were no [sexual] relations between us, and that was good because we could be friends.'

However, some time before Nureyev's death in 1993, van Dantzig had to tell his friend that he wouldn't invite him as a guest dancer any more. He wanted all the big roles, but was getting too old. 'And I had to say that I didn't want to do this any more,' van Dantzig says.

For one evening Nureyev was really angry. 'I thought this was the end of our friendship, but then a little while later he called me as if nothing had happened and said 'So when are we going to meet up?' And I knew it would be all right.'

Hong Kong Ballet performs Rudi van Dantzig's Romeo and Juliet, Sha Tin Town Hall, Mar 23-25. HK$80-HK$230 (HK$420 for two). Tel: 2105 9724