POINTING THE WAY : From Plans to Pointes, Lila Zali Has Led Ballet Pacifica for 25 Years

“I’ve always thought the reason I gave up violin and piano and voice was that my (opera singer) mother was always saying, ‘That wasn’t right, That wasn’t good.’ ” Ballet Pacifica founder Lila Zali’s throaty alto rumbled over the roar of a vacuum in the company’s Laguna Beach studio. “But she knew nothing about dancing, so I think it was self-defense!”

A slight, tense woman with luminous brown eyes, Zali is the driving force behind Orange County’s oldest resident ballet company, celebrating its 25th anniversary tonight with a gala event at Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel.

“(My) board says, ‘When you can no longer make costumes and do choreography when necessary, what’s going to happen?’ I keep telling them, ‘You just have to find sources of money because nobody’s going to do what I do.’ ”

For Zali, who takes no salary from Ballet Pacifica (“I’m criticized for this,” she says), the company’s “greatest accomplishment” is the guaranteed 50-week contract it offers its 10 dancers, an unusually long period for a regional troupe.

Paid $125 or $150 a week, they are obliged to work at another job to make a living. (Rehearsals are scheduled for weekends to accommodate the dancers’ other commitments.) But this modest payroll accounts for by far the largest proportion of the company’s roughly $200,000 annual budget. And Zali’s awareness of the bread-and-butter issues of the terpsichorean life extends to offering three company dancers housing at reduced rent in property she owns.

Talk of money surfaces fairly often in Zali’s no-nonsense reminiscences. Her own career began in the 1930s, when she performed in the Mordkin Ballet, created by a celebrated Russian dancer who was at one time Pavlova’s partner. As a “minor soloist” in the touring company, she was paid a “terrific” $50 a week in the days when good hotel rooms cost only $1.25 a night. Even so, “we used to love one-night stands (because) it would save us a night’s hotel expense--we had our Pullman waiting for us.”

A brief stint with the Original Ballets Russes, a spinoff of the famous Diagihilev Ballets Russes , ended when Zali’s mother refused to let her 19-year-old daughter tour South America with the company.

But the ‘40s offered the lure of the fledgling days of television. Zali danced on a CBS show called “Balleretta” that had two dancers, three harpists playing show tunes and a singer.

“Kind of an all-girl thing,” Zali remarks dryly. “It was wild. I remember one time when my mother came in the studio to watch and she practically fainted because I wore an almost black lipstick--it was such a dark purplish brown that it looked black--and makeup the color of that couch.” She gestured to the orangy-brown studio couch. “It looked fine on the tube because the lights were so strong they washed everything out, but it looked terrible (in person), like a Halloween monster.”

Later, she appeared on the CBS Colgate Comedy Show with Tony Martin in a ballet about toys that came to life. One of the toys was Harpo Marx. (“He played, and I danced.”) Martin and wife, Cyd Charisse, both members of Ballet Pacifica’s star-studded honorary ball committee, whose chairman is Gene Kelly, is expected to attend the anniversary celebration.

Zali met Kelly on the set of her first film, “An American in Paris.” Wearing a striped dress and a little straw hat, she danced in one scene with six other girls and co-star Leslie Caron (“I think I’m the one closest to her”).

Although she enjoyed working with Kelly and loved the bountiful salary--especially in comparison to a dancer’s meager income--Zali found film making maddeningly discontinuous and hedged with rigid protocol.

As Caron’s double in “Gigi,” Zali was sent out to a park every day for two weeks to try to attract a flock of recalcitrant swans so Gigi could be filmed feeding them. Zali had to wear Caron’s own costume because “some bright character decided (the swans) would be able to tell the scent.”

Every day for two weeks, she went out to the lake with the required cortege of chauffeur, hairdresser, makeup person and the assistant director. They sat around and played cards while she offered food to the swans and finally coaxed them to eat from her hand.

“Then came shooting, and the whole crew came--all these technicians, hundreds of people--and the swans took off to the other side of the lake and never returned.”

But she was not one to bank her future on small dancing parts in films, however lucrative they might be. Diversifying with the aplomb of a one-woman corporation, Zali became a co-founder (with former Ballets Russes dancer Michel Panaieff) of Ballet Musicale, a forerunner of Los Angeles City Ballet.

She also began teaching dance, first at the studio of Adolf Bolm--a legendary Russian expatriate who also partnered Pavlova, and then at Panaieff’s Los Angeles studio. There, her most famous student was Cynthia Gregory, star of American Ballet Theatre. A photograph hanging in the Ballet Pacifica studio shows Gregory as a roly-poly child, sticking out her stomach as she stands at the barre .

Zali opened her own ballet school in Laguna Beach in 1959 and founded Laguna Beach Civic Ballet Company (now Ballet Pacifica) three years later. Today, the company presents between 60 and 70 performances annually in a regular and children’s subscription series.

“We have always been very careful; we have never had a deficit,” she says proudly. About 65% of the company’s income comes from fees, subscription series and box office. The remainder comes from loyal corporations and foundations, among them the Security Pacific Charitable Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, Southern California Edison, Pacific Bell, Pacific Mutual Life and the Northrop Corp.

In 1967 Ballet Pacifica was one of five regional ballet companies in the United States to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was used to mount a production of “The Nutcracker,” choreographed by Zali, and to offer a series of lecture-demonstrations for schoolchildren, projects that have become company staples. One year the company did 24 performances “which practically killed everybody,” Zali said. “So we cut down; we’re only doing 12 this year.

“(At first), I hadn’t wanted to do “Nutcracker.’ For a small company in a small community, I thought, what can I do that’s going to look good? But I went to see a ‘Nutcracker’ in Santa Ana done by a ‘ballet company’ and it was so awful that I thought, well . . . we’d better do it!

“We have our tree that grows and a wonderful nutcracker head and a mouse king head. You’re limited to a certain extent on what you can do at the (Laguna) Playhouse because we have no flies (the area above the stage that permits scenery to be ‘flown’ up and down), but we’ve managed.”

Advanced students from Zali’s school fill out the cast (“We just don’t have the money to put them on salary”) and others come from several dance schools that offer their students only limited recital opportunities. But it’s getting harder to recruit little mice and soldiers.

“Suddenly all of these new areas--El Toro, Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo--all have studios that have started doing ‘Nutcracker,’ ” Zali says. “They absolutely shouldn’t, but you can’t tell them that. Girls who maybe would be a big rat here are being the Sugar Plum Fairy at their school, so, of course, they’ll stay there if they can do a pointe variation.”

“Nutcracker” is the hands-down audience favorite, while repertory programs are much harder to sell, Zali says. Yet subscriptions are up this year for the concert series, which offers other classical ballets (which Zali reconstructs based on her memories of the Original Ballets Russes productions) as well as new pieces in modern and jazz idioms by young choreographers, among them Zali’s former student Molly Lynch.

One sign of the company’s achievement is the number of former company members who have continued their dancing careers elsewhere at prestigious companies.

Cynthia Tosh, who has the distinction of being the only dancer to perform every role from mouse to Sugar Plum Fairy in Ballet Pacifica’s “Nutcracker,” has danced with Chicago Ballet and, as a soloist, with Boston Ballet. Others are principals or soloists with Cleveland Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and National Ballet of Canada.

Yet performance reviews, an important indicator of a professional company’s artistic achievements, have been very scarce in Southern California. (The last Times review dates from 1976.) Does that bother Zali? Not really.

“If they’re going to try to judge you the same way they do a company with a $12-million budget, it’s not exactly right,” she says, noting that the larger papers tend to concentrate on major arts groups, and the other local papers “don’t have anyone who knows enough about ballet.”

“One thing I know is that we get good reviews when we go out of town. We go to a regional dance festival every year. This year it’s going to be in Utah; last year it was in Sacramento. We’ve always been on the gala program, which is supposed to represent the best companies of a region. Our region is pretty big--it stretches to Idaho, Alaska, Washington.”

Indeed, the now-defunct organization Regional Ballet America (formerly the National Assn. for Regional Ballet) named Ballet Pacifica a “major company” for the 1987-88 season, based on its “dancing excellence, repertory development and production.”

Former Regional Ballet America executive director Doris Hering, speaking from her New York home, has nothing but praise for Zali and her company.

“They have a widely ranging repertory, and they have a director who has a very deep and a very fine knowledge of her craft, and they serve the community,” she said. “Lila Zali has been one of the most steadfast members of the association. . . . If she says she’ll do something, she darn well does it.”