SAN DIEGO COUNTY : Ballet Season to Include Act III of ‘Sleeping Beauty’

Act III of Petipa’s fairy-tale ballet “Sleeping Beauty,” the long-awaited company premiere of Anthony Tudor’s classic dance drama “Jardin aux Lilas,” and a continuing exchange with Russian dancers are all part of California Ballet’s lineup for the 1989-90 season.

The company’s season begins Sept. 9-10 with a pair of outdoor performances at Sea World’s Nautilus Bowl. The classically based concerts will feature the company’s first staging of Act III of “Sleeping Beauty” and two repertory works, “Les Sylphides” and “Opus 55.”

Although the California Ballet’s plans to participate in the Soviet Arts Festival as a sponsoring institution petered out early this summer, the San Diego-based company will not be left entirely out in the cold during the October salute to Soviet arts.

Company director Maxine Mahon has been tagged to choreograph the San Diego Opera’s production of “Boris Godunov,” slated for a Civic Theatre run from Oct. 21-31, and members of the troupe will perform the opera’s brief balletic segment.

Once again, the ballet’s Yuletide offering will be “The Nutcracker,” the company’s biggest moneymaker. California Ballet boasts the city’s longest-running staging of this Christmas bauble, which serves as a major showcase for the company kids. “The Nutcracker” will bow in on Dec. 8 for a full weekend of performances at the East County Performing Arts Center (ECPAC).

The production will move to the downtown Civic Theatre on Dec. 15, where it will be ensconced through Dec. 24. As usual, the Civic staging will be danced to a live orchestra, with more high-tech effects than the ECPAC offering.

The company’s annual spring repertory concert will return to ECPAC on Feb. 16-17. The centerpiece of this year’s program is “Jardin aux Lilas,” a masterwork that Mahon has been negotiating for over the past few years. Also included is Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco” and Mahon’s “Western Orpheus.”

The season will conclude May 12 with the company’s fourth cultural exchange in as many years with the Soviet Union. Dubbed a “gala performance,” the concert will feature eight dancers from the Kirov and Leningrad state ballets in the American premiere of “The Yakobson Miniatures.” Mahon discovered this suite of dances, by a Soviet choreographer whose work is almost unknown in the West, during her visit to the Soviet Union.

“We were all set to bring (the “Yakobson”) into the Soviet festival, but the mayor said no--stop everything--just when everything was ready to go,” Mahon said. “So, we decided to bring it for our Soviet program.”

(Sal Giametta, the mayor’s assistant for arts and cultural affairs, disputed Mahon’s account, saying the festival’s planning committee “talked about ballet . . . but you can’t put everything into a festival.”)

To compensate for the paucity of San Diego-based danseurs, the California Ballet will import two leads this season: Mark Lanham, a frequent guest with the troupe, and William Starrett, who makes his company debut in September as Bluebird. Home-grown dancers Denise Dabrowski and Karen Evans-Poolos will handle most of the female leads.

“We’re not doing ‘Dracula’ again this year, because we’ll be working with the opera on ‘Boris Godunov,’ ” Mahon noted, “but we’ll still have the dancers for 30 weeks. We’re really excited about doing our first Act III of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ We’ve done the pas de deux before, but never the full third act.”

Mahon is also eager to show off the first local staging of Tudor’s “Jardin aux Lilas.”

“We just got final permission from Baryshnikov (the ABT owns the rights to this highly-acclaimed modern ballet), so we can finally put it in our repertory.”

Although fund-raising is a perennial “struggle,” Mahon noted, “our budget is $987,568 this year. That’s up a little from last year’s $799,000. We’re going to have to raise a lot of money for ‘The Yakobson Miniatures’ program.”