BALLERINA TURNS TO MODERN DANCE

Whatever happened to the dancers of the now-defunct San Diego Ballet?

Many have hung up their toe shoes and tutus forever. But several determined survivors are still working and performing around the country.

Shawn Womack, an apprentice with the San Diego Ballet during the era of artistic director Keith Martin, is one of the lucky ones. She took on a new dance identity after the demise of the ballet company.

“I got frustrated with ballet,” Womack said in a recent interview, “so I turned to modern dance. They kept telling me I was too tall for ballet (5 feet 9 inches). Even Keith Martin used to say, ‘If only you were shorter.’ And I had always been interested in modern. While I danced with the San Diego Ballet, I was taking modern dance lessons with Jean Isaacs,” of Three’s Company and Dancers.

After earning a degree in dance from the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music in 1981, Womack stayed on in the city as a modern dancer (she spent three years with the Contemporary Dance Theater), and then began to concentrate on choreography. Now, she is director of the Three Cities Dance Project in Ohio.

“When I started choreographing,” she said, “I turned to the modern vocabulary. I use ballet symbolically, but I don’t use the form to create my work. I have a predisposition to moving fluidly and loosely--and surprisingly quirky.” She acknowledges that these new movement modes are diametrically opposed to the strict tenets of classical ballet.

San Diego audiences will get a glimpse of Womack and the choreographic style she forged for herself when she makes her first appearance in San Diego as an independent. The pair of concerts at 8:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Three’s Company Studio is part of the troupe’s Lo-Tec series and will feature performances by eight local dancers as well as the choreographer.

“I was teaching a workshop here and I picked some of the students to work with me on this concert,” Womack explained. “I’ll be showing ‘Screamers,’ a performance-oriented piece for six set to circus marches. There were two dancers who really took to my style, so I’ll be setting a new duet for them. It’s much more abstract than the others in this concert--more pure movement, and very gestural.”

Also on the agenda for this two-concert series is a highly personal solo titled “Jeanne Marie and Mary P.,” which juxtaposes the career paths of two sisters, a dancer and a computer engineer. The text-driven, multimedia work forced Womack to confront her ballet background head-on.

“There are a lot of ideas floating around in the sisters piece,” Womack said. “It’s about compulsion, about maturing, about letting go. Ballet is a symbol of that.”

“No Place Like Home,” a solo designed for Womack by Richard Burrows, is one of the highlights of this six-piece program.

“Rich Burrows was in Utah when I was there, and now he’s in Ohio,” Womack said. “When I performed there, he suggested we work together and set a solo for me.”

“Zones,” a twosome that traces the evolution of a relationship between a man and a woman, and “Scarecrow,” another solo choreographed and danced by Womack, will round out the program.

Womack was surprised by the developments in the San Diego modern dance community since her departure, and she credited Three’s Company’s Lo-Tec program for much of the progress.

“Three’s Company has consistently been a stronghold for modern dance in San Diego,” she said, “and I’m glad I could come back to be part of the series.”