DANCE VIEW; Swedish Dance Tries To Reclaim Its International Standing

To be located in the People's House in central Stockholm, the museum and the Dance House will be independent of each other. But they will cooperate and share an intimate nonproscenium space called the ''Black Box,'' for chamber-size performances.

Erik Naslund, a leading critic who has succeeded Mr. Hager as the museum's director, stressed in a separate interview the need to make the museum (unique in its Ballets Suedois material; rich in its resources on Asian dance and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and in its collection of 19th-century prints) more of a public institution. Special exhibitions and film series, as well as international conferences, are on the agenda.

Mr. Zetterberg's approach rejects the common view that high-quality innovative dance can be created only if schools are first set up to train dancers. He insists that both dancers and viewers must be exposed initially to a variety of top professional companies.

Although he does not say so, Sweden has to a large extent become a backwater on the international dance scene. There has been no dance explosion comparable to the one in France since the late 1970's. In London, Robin Howard founded the Contemporary Dance Center in 1967, hoping a school rooted in Martha Graham's technique would foster modern dance in Britain. It did, but again with little major impact.

''Society is complex,'' Mr. Zetterberg said. ''The insistence in Sweden on schools does not deal with the problem. You cannot educate a public through a school. You must have a general discussion with people and expose them to quality performance.''

A late starter as a dancer, Mr. Zetterberg was one of a group of dance figures and officials from the Ministry of Education and Culture who, after 1978, campaigned for a suitable dance theater in Stockholm. As director of the Dance Theater, a presenting organization with no theater, Mr. Zetterberg has rented various spaces, like a 19th-century circus building, to sponsor events including a festival of seven French dance companies in 1986-87. This season's series offers the Cullberg Ballet, Trisha Brown, Sankai Juku, a group of new Swedish choreographers and the Stora Teaternsbalett from Gothenborg.

None of this would seem unusual, except that, as Mr. Zetterberg pointed out, the audience for dance outside the mainstream has been so small that in 1984 Pina Bausch (who sold out the Brooklyn Academy of Music in her New York debut the same year) attracted only 300 viewers in a 600-seat space for her first night in Stockholm.

The Dance Center, an organization of independent dancers, choreographers and noninstitutional troupes, will also have an office in the Dance House. ''The idea is to work more effectively,'' Mr. Zetterberg said, ''to be united.''

The overall Dance House project has now been approved on several governmental levels, with an annual subsidy of approximately $1.4-million divided among the Cultural Ministry (50 percent), the city (25) and the regional authorities (25).

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As the Dance Museum reminds us, the history of ballet throughout the world is studded with founding fathers of Swedish blood. The patriarch of Russian ballet, Charles-Louis Didelot, was born in Stockholm of a Swedish mother. So was Marie Taglioni, the Romantic ballerina. Her Swedish partner, Christian Johansson, stayed on in St. Petersburg, to train Russia's greatest ballerinas at the turn of the century. His own teacher was August Bournonville, the son of a Swedish mother. (At the Confidencen Theater at the Ulriksdal Palace, I saw a reconstruction by Miss Beck-Friis of ''Opportunity Makes a Thief,'' a 1785 ballet by Louis Gallodier, the Royal Swedish Ballet's first director. She included a typical Antoine Bournonville step, with feet kicked up. Miss Beck-Friis said it is a Swedish folk step known as the Halling Kast. In her view, Bournonville, who succeeded Gallodier, later took it with him to Copenhagen.) A major international dance center in a union house that makes room for variety shows produced by a restaurant chain may seem a long way from the brilliant era of King Gustav III, who before his assassination in 1792 laid the groundwork for Swedish ballet's original, fleeting glory. Glory, however, can be regained.