ASK dancer Paul Mercurio why he's so passionate about working for the Sydney Dance Company and his answer is brazenly simple;

"It's real."

"What we do is of today, and perhaps tomorrow," he explains. "It's not from yesterday. We don't get up and do Swan Lakes and things that people can't identify with. "We try to express the thoughts and opinions and moods of today - the experiences of everyday life."

His response is not as glib as it sounds for this must surely be the basis of the company's large and devoted following and, more especially, the growing number of young devotees.

Artistic director and choreographer Graeme Murphy has created and exploited a market for his works with skill and flair, while consistently coming up with the goods to satisfy the critics. In doing so he has won acclaim for the SDC in New York and London and, perhaps more importantly, a handsome $750,000 sponsorship from Wang computers.

Little wonder few can resist calling him a genius. The perfect overview of Murphy's magic will be provided by the company's Adelaide season (April 9-26) which features two acclaimed works - Some Rooms, by far the most popular work to date, and After Venice, Murphy's favorite.

Mercurio, who has pivotal roles in both pieces, is a typical Murphy dancer in that he came to the SDC with little professional experience, raw and ready to be moulded. The son of gravel-voiced actor Gus Mercurio, he studied with the WA Ballet Company before joining the SDC five years ago.

One of the main attractions for dancers is the way Murphy choreographs around their own personalities, then encourages them to bring their interpretations to characters.

"The good thing about the company is that you don't just get up on stage and dance," he said. "You get up there and act. You have to communicate with the audience. "When I dance something that he choreographs for me it's not just his choreography - it's also a little bit of myself, so I can understand it much better."

In After Venice, Murphy's reinterpretation of Death In Venice, Mercurio makes the boy, Tadzio, considerably less angelic than usual. Here he is a wilful, and slightly punk-looking, spoilt brat alongside Garth Welch as Aschenbach.

"He's a combination of Thomas Mann's Tadzio and Graeme Murphy's Tadzio, both early 19th century and late 20th century," he said. "He's the innocent boy and on the other hand he is also a nasty sort of character.

"He doesn't know the power that he wields. There is an evil streak in Tadzio, but that is brought out by how people see him and are affected by his beauty. He's like a child wanting more attention.

"Graeme has taken the story and concentrated more on what was between the lines - or perhaps what could have been written between the lines. Graeme tells us what he's after and we go away and think about it so we can build up a character.

"Before playing Tadzio I read Death in Venice, but then I read Portrait of Dorian Gray and that helped me a lot more with the character. I've tried to bring out the two different identities.

"The subtleties in the character change because it grows each time we do it. At first you want to get up and shout it out, so to speak, but sometimes you have to whisper it, or just be it. It's a matter of finding the right strength to portray something." In Some Rooms Mercurio dances The Voyager, the main character in one of four related dances set in four different rooms - a bedroom, a bathroom, a changing room and a reading room. Each represents a different state of mind or stage of maturity, he said.

"The Bedroom deals with true love, then there's The Bathroom which deals with how you view your own sexuality, The Changing Room which could be how sexuality affects our relationships with each other and the last room, The Reading Room, is the end of the journey, the more spiritual side of ourselves." As The Voyager in The Changing Room Mercurio is an innocent youth discovering himself and his sexuality for the first time. "Some Rooms takes people back to their own journey and they really identify with it," he said.

"Both ballets are quite different choreographically. After Venice is much more theatrical but both require people to think. You don't just watch it, then go home and say; `I enjoyed that'. You have a bit of a chat about it afterwards."

Although he has not tired of the two roles, both of which he has danced for more than two years, Mercurio has decided to part company with the SDC in July to travel throughout Europe in search of some new direction for his career. After Adelaide he will tour with the company to Alice Springs and Darwin, then a performance at the Spoleto Festival in Italy after which he will leave.

"I'm 22 and I'd better not leave it too late or I'll be over the hill," he said. "Physically I'm probably in my prime, and I'm not saying I'll be over the hill in another year, but I need to adapt to change while I can still do that. If I was going to settle down it would probably be here."

Just what sort of new direction he craves he isn't quite sure. It's even possible, although not probable, that he will want to flirt with the past for a while, perhaps even in Swan Lake.

"I enjoy classical ballet and it's certainly a valid art form, but obviously I'm in a contemporary company because that's what suits me," he said. "To do classical dance you have to have excellent technique, and I don't think I'm yet qualified for it. Maybe one day I'll have a shot at it, but I don't think I`m quite where it's at."