NYC BALLET PLANS DATES IN COUNTY

The New York City Ballet, in its first West Coast tour since 1974, is scheduled to perform the week of Oct. 13 in the newly opened Orange County Performing Arts Center as part of a three-city tour, NYCB officials said Thursday.

“We have the money. We have the dates. It (the tour) is definitely on,” said Barbara Horgan, special projects administrator for the New York company.

Thomas Kendrick, the Orange County Center’s executive director, would not confirm the engagement Thursday but said: “We are still negotiating and are still very interested since this is the company’s (NYCB’s) first tour here in more than a decade, and it would be an Orange County exclusive. But nothing has been signed.”

According to NYCB press officer Leslie Bailey, the tour is scheduled to open Sept. 30 in Berkeley for a one-week run at the Zellerbach Auditorium on the UC campus. The Pacific Northwest Ballet Assn. is expected to present the company Oct. 8-11 at the Seattle Center’s Opera House. The Costa Mesa engagement would close the tour. Bailey said there are no plans to perform in Los Angeles or any additional cities.

The dates for the Orange County Center engagement, as well as details about repertory, are expected to be formally announced early next month, said Bailey. “Contracts aren’t signed yet. This a preliminary announcement . . . the program hasn’t been set, but we expect to have all this by next month.”

An engagement of the New York City Ballet--widely considered the premier American company--would be a coup for the Orange County Center. Led by founding artistic director George Balanchine, the NYCB last played in Southern California in August 1974, at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.

Since Balanchine’s death in 1983, the New York company has been led by dancer-choreographer Peter Martins, an NYCB principal dancer since 1967. (Martins shares the title of ballet master-in-chief with choreographer Jerome Robbins.) The company usually has a home season of about 20 weeks, starting in November, at the Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre.

Programs, soloists and touring costs have not yet been disclosed for the Western tour. But NYCB’s Horgan said that based on the company’s 1985-86 budget, touring costs for the full company, orchestra and technical crew--about 185-200 people--is about $625,000 a week.

Finding underwriters for the Western tour had been the crucial factor in negotiations with individual presenters, NYCB aides said. Other locales considered earlier--but since dropped from the 1986 tour--included Denver, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.

Negotiations between the Orange County Center and NYCB have been going on since last November. Now under construction in Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza Town Center, the Orange County Center’s 3,000-seat, multipurpose theater is to open Sept. 29 with Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Others announced for the inaugural season include the American Ballet Theatre, with a one-week run of “The Nutcracker” beginning Dec. 9, New York City Opera, Chicago Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra.