Like a good son, Bocca is quick to credit his mother with his successful ascent through the dance ranks. "She started training me when I was four," Bocca remembers, "She was a dance teacher and had a studio behind our house here in Buenos Aires. She gave private lessons. I can remember playing around between the legs of the dancers and trying to dance like them, but the real training began between 7 and 8 when I really decided I wanted to be a dancer." While assuring me she's not the typical caricature of the stage mother -- "Oh, my son is a dancer," Bocca imitates, "She leans against the ballet barre and talks to the other mothers" -- He's quick to point out that not only his mother, but his entire family, was quite supportive of his decision to become a dancer and there's really been no looking back. He eventually left the backyard studio to study at the Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colon while dancing professionally with the Caracas Ballet Company at the same time.

In 1983, Bocca joined the Ballet del Teatro Municipal de Rio de Janeiro as a principal dancer and, in the same year, appeared with the ballet company at the Colon Theatre and with the International Ballet of Caracas. He began winning gold medals in international ballet competitions and toured the former USSR with the Russian ballet company Novosibirsk. In 1986, Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was running New York's American Ballet Theatre at the time, came calling. By 1990, he had danced unforgettably in a variety of roles including Apollo and Don Quixote as a principle with the company. He even picked up the nickname Don Q when a slew of injuries felled almost all the other Quixotes and Bocca danced practically every performance. At that point he also launched his own company, Ballet Argentino, to bring homegrown Argentine talent to the world stage. There have been film roles and in 2000 Ann Reinking paid a visit to cast Bocca as her former lover Bob Fosse in the Broadway show named for that legendary choreographer. "Maybe it was strange for someone so young to make that decision," shrugs Bocca looking back on his life in the dance, "But it was always inside."

But enough about good boy Bocca, what about the rock and roll bad boy? And what the hell is going on with all these porn sites? "Well, I try to do things differently than what people think a ballet dancer has to do," he begins, "So I did Playboy Magazine with my partner. We posed naked. For Argentina, that was a big scandal just to be in Playboy, but I try to be natural, just a regular guy. A lot of people have an idea that a ballet dancer has to be in a crystal house, but I feel like it's 2004. Everybody can be a dancer if you really want to and that's what's happened here. They can see that." And the other ancillary activities? The movies? Broadway? Might they suggest that ballet is simply not enough? "I love ballet," Bocca insists, "It's a very international art. The plasticity, the acting, the movement, the musicality, it's all in one place. All I did was to try and make it more popular. My idea was why can't we do ballets in stadiums? So I started doing ballets outside in stadiums for 100,000 people. And they just loved it. We were doing it four times a year. The audience always wants to see something new and beautiful. But we're trying smaller theaters now because I want to do something more intimate. And also, I'm getting old. I cannot run that big stage anymore."

So self-deprecating is added to the running list of Bocca's charming qualities. But frankly, any artist trying to break out of Latin America to a more international platform is going to need all the charm they can muster. Just ask Carmen Miranda, beloved by her fellow Brazilians until she made it in Hollywood, which her compatriots perceived as a slight. She was too good for them now. And so faced being pelted with eggs and tomatoes in the streets and consequently never returned home. Not so Bocca. He tends to blame it on the Bossa Nova. And rock and roll. And Mambo. And ballets created with locals. And local set designers and musicians. "And, of course," he says, "I use a lot of tango. I feel like they feel that I'm close to them," he says dissecting his popular appeal, "I'm not like a star. So the people are really friendly and they like me a lot. I feel like I'm one of them. Also, I won gold medals and went to ABT when I was 18. I'm already 22 years into my career. I've been dancing professionally since I was 14 so it's a long backdrop and the people know that. I do a lot of AIDS benefits, too." Like Evita, Bocca also has a foundation that distributes money and scholarships, but unlike that glamorous leader, he's not breaking the national bank doing it. The subsidized Colon Company manages only 20 performances a year while Bocca's puts on 120. And he does so with no government subsidies or even sponsorships from the private sector. "It's all from my package," he explains, "My school, my foundation, it's all from me. I don't have no one else."

But Bocca is certain to have packed houses when he installs his Ballet Argentino in theaters on their North American tour. The company will be premiering BOCCATANGO, a 90-minute piece he shares with six male dancers, two female dancers, an eight piece orchestra and two singers all mixing up the classical tango vocabulary of Astor Piazzolla and Carlos Gardel with the more contemporary work of choreographer Ana Maria Stekelman. But don't dare call it fusion. "We're a ballet company. We do neo-classical pieces. We just finished a season doing pieces from Jose Limon and Twyla Tharp. We do Martha Graham and Balanchine and, of course, we do tango. I love tango and people like to see it." Still, that does yield a tango version of Martha Graham's "Diversion of Angels" which the company dances, although that could be pretty fabulous. "Separate!"

Bocca insists hearing the idea, "The company has to learn different styles. We separate everything." And it's something Bocca, in particular, exceeds at. Who else could go directly from ABT and its turned out technique to Bob Fosse and his almost antithetical, turned-in movement. "In the beginning I was little nervous about it. I remember my first rehearsal with Ann Reinking. The first week in the studio we jut worked out and saw how I felt. How I looked. And it was amazing."

When pressed to be more specific, Bocca offers, "It's hard to explain, but it's easy to do it. I always compare dancing to making love -- to do sex--each time you do it, it's going to be different. Even if you do it with the same person, it's going to be different. You're there and you feel that moment, but you have to really feel it inside. But I'm a person that cannot do sex just for doing it. It doesn't work that way. It's the same way with the ballet. If you don't feel it, you are boring in your performance and the audience is going to be bored." Onstage, or, to borrow his metaphor, in bed, it's not something Bocca needs to sweat.