DANCE : Group Launches Three-Pronged Competition for Student-Inspired Ballet

In 1983, Beth Burns launched the St. Joseph Ballet Company to offer free dance lessons to inner-city youngsters in Santa Ana. Since then, the company has struggled and ultimately flourished: Last November the troupe moved into new, classy rehearsal studios in the Fiesta Marketplace in Santa Ana.

Now Burns has another idea to reach more talented youngsters: a three-pronged competition from which winners will supply the story idea, the music and the scenic design for a new ballet. The new ballet, to be choreographed by Burns, will be danced at the spring, 1991, concert. This year’s dance concerts will be held Thursday and Friday at Chapman College in Orange.

“There is a real need for inner-city youths to express some of their powerful experiences,” Burns said in a recent phone interview. “We know that intervention and creative expression are keys to these young people having more opportunities and having the options and the insight to create (new) options in their lives. In that sense, the competition has already been a success.”

The Young Artists Competition will take in schools and colleges from south-central Los Angeles to Santa Ana and Garden Grove.

Burns sees the competition as “an expansion of our mission to uplift inner-city youth through the arts.”

“It’s a way to motivate and encourage young inner-city artists, a way to recognize them and a way to let their voices be heard,” said Burns, who was a nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange when she formed the company but left the order in 1989 to develop and promote the company further.

“Some people, because of the complexity of problems and violence in the inner city, may be tempted to throw up their hands and not know what we can offer these youth. . . . This is a positive way to show the potential within the inner city.”

Each stage of the project is targeted to a different age group. “We wanted to reach as many young people as possible,” Burns said.

The story competition, which has just concluded its first round, was offered to high school sophomores and juniors. The musical-composition competition will be open to high school and college students. The visual-arts competition will be for junior high school students.

“We might reach as many as 50 schools” before the project is concluded, Burns said.

Entries for the story competition topped more than 1,300 essays from 12 high schools in south-central Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Garden Grove, Burns said.

The schools were “hand-selected” by Burns and the school districts because “we wanted to reach the students from neighborhoods that need the most investment,” Burns said.

Burns asked the students to write on the theme of “Lost and Found.”

“We wanted to provide their imagination to relate with real issues,” she said. “At the same time, it’s a universal mythic theme.”

She may have gotten more than she bargained for.

“The stories express the whole gamut of issues facing our society,” she said. “They cover drug abuse, gang violence, child abuse, AIDS, ecology--every concern in the society. And what’s quite poignant is that so many of the stories are told in such a way that’s it’s evident it’s a first-person experience.”

Restricted to a one-page limit, the entries express “the conflicts the young people experience both at home and at school and on the streets,” Burns said.

“There’s a sense of alienation these children feel in these different areas.”

A number of the essays were written in languages other than English, and Burns found volunteers from the Latino and Vietnamese communities to assist.

Panelists will meet May 31 to begin paring down the entries. The winner of the story competition will be announced in June. (Story panelists include television director Michael Berman; Jose Cruz Gonzalez, director of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory; Adleane Hunter, artistic director of Orange County Black Actors Theatre; Thomas R. Kendrick, president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center; and Marvin Tunney, a member of the California Arts Council dance advisory panel. Chairman is Charles Champlin, The Times arts editor.

(Panelists for the visual-arts competition will be announced. That panel will be chaired by Los Angeles artist Frank Romero. Among the music panelists will be composer William Kraft and film composer Bill Marks.)

The finalist for the story competition will receive $1,000. Three semifinalists will each receive $250. (Cash prizes also will be awarded to the instructors of the finalists: a $200 gift certificate to a bookstore for first place; $100 gift certificates for the teachers of the semifinalists.)

Prizes for the other competitions will be similar, although “we may use more than one musical composition,” Burns said.

Ultimately, Burns hopes to prove that every child involved is “a winner.”

“Some of the kids, asked why they want to win, said (it was) for the money or to make their parents proud,” she said. “But what’s sad--and why the competition is necessary--is that so many said, ‘Oh, I know I’ll never win.’ They have this total belief, already, in being a failure.

“But when we recognize these young artists and present their works professionally, it’s going to be something that these young people will never forget.”

The St. Joseph Ballet Company will give a benefit dance concert at 8 p.m. on Thursday and Friday at the Memorial Hall Auditorium at Chapman College, 333 N. Glassell St., in Orange. New works will include “Mi Corazon Canta” and “A Seed,” both choreographed by company artistic director Beth Burns. Tickets: $5 for adults; $2 for children under 12 and seniors. Benefit tickets: $25. Information: (714) 542-8314.