DANCE : Ballet Pacifica Is Stretching Its Wings : The company prepares for an international competition next month and looks ahead to an expanded season in the new Irvine Barclay Theatre.

As the curtain is about to fall on her second year as artistic director of Ballet Pacifica, Molly Lynch can point to a significant amount of progress on the local front. The company’s children’s series has been expanded, there’s been an increase in concert series subscriptions and single ticket sales, and Lynch expects to see a modest increase in next year’s budget over this year’s figure of $230,000.

She also has guided the 28-year-old company into the new Irvine Barclay Theatre, where it will appear April 12 and 13 and May 31 through June 1 after performances earlier next year at its usual home, Laguna’s Moulton Theatre (Feb. 15 and 16).

Yet the most exciting event looming in Ballet Pacifica’s near future lies well beyond its home turf: The company will travel to Jackson, Miss., next month to dance in the Regional Dance America concert of the Fourth U.S.A. International Ballet Competition.

“This will be the first time we will be performing in front of an international audience, with other companies similar to ours,” Lynch, 34, said in a recent phone interview. “That’s exciting.”

The company will dance Norbert Vesak’s “Gift to Be Simple,” set to traditional Shaker songs, which also will be on the weekend program. To make the trip, Ballet Pacifica has to raise an additional $10,000. “We’re still working on that,” Lynch said.

The scheduled opening of the Irvine Barclay Theatre in mid-October has helped to solve one of the troupe’s more pressing problems: a dwindling number of performance dates available at the Moulton Theatre, which is run by the Laguna Playhouse.

This year, the children’s series will remain at the Festival Forum in Laguna Beach, while a week of “Nutcracker” performances will be held, as usual, at the Moulton Theatre (Dec. 18 through 23).

“We’re still talking with (the Playhouse) for other dates,” Lynch said. “We’re still negotiating for upcoming years.”

Evaluating her stewardship so far of the company she took over from founder Lila Zali, Lynch says: “We’ve gotten a more cohesive group working together.

“We’ve been developing some better relationships and some new relationships with some choreographers. So the repertory for the company is slowly changing to working with more outside choreographers. I would like to do that more.

“(But) primarily, what I’m looking toward in the future is being able to have the dancers for more time. It’s hard to improve the quality of the dancing if you can’t work with the dancers more, and it’s hard to get outside choreographers to come in and work with you if you can’t give them blocks of time with the dancers.

“It’s a high priority in my mind. It may take some years to get to that point. But it’s something we need to do, to bring the company along.”

Like many young choreographers, Lynch is anxious to stretch her creative abilities. These days, she is testing herself in time-honored forms such as the pas de deux and also trying to work in more abstract forms.

Two of Lynch’s new pieces will be danced on the Ballet Pacifica programs this weekend at the Moulton Theatre.

The first work, called “Three Romances,” is a series of three pas de deux, set to music with the same title as the ballet, scored for clarinet and piano by Schumann.

“What I was trying to do is explore various romantic relationships between a man and a woman,” Lynch said.

“It could be seen as three different aspects of one couple’s relationship over time or as three separate couples, dealing with how people react together.

“I thought of doing different kinds of romantic relationships--two women or two men--but I felt there were so many different aspects to one male-female relationship that I wanted to explore that more fully.”

The second new work, “Counterpoint,” set to Steve Reich’s “Vermont Counterpoint,” has no such meanings.

“It’s a completely abstract piece,” Lynch said. “It doesn’t have any idea or emotional or human relationship. I was just trying to work with the music.”

The music is written for a solo flute playing 11 different parts that are electronically combined. But Lynch said she didn’t try to follow the music literally.

“I don’t have 11 dancers doing the 11 different flute lines,” Lynch said. “I picked out different points and played the dancers off each other in groups, changing the steps, floor patterns and movement patterns. I was working off of the idea of counterpoint, but not doing a literal translation of the score.”

The pieces also challenge the dancers, Lynch said.

“ ‘Three Romances’ has more emotional context to it,” she said. “ ‘Counterpoint’ probably has a lot more precision, with six women dancing together. We haven’t done a lot of work to that type of music, which presents different challenges.”

In working on her choreography, Lynch begins by working on her own. “I improvise, count the music, listen to the phrasing, have it sort of mapped out on a graph sheet,” she said. “Then I do a lot of improvisation and try to develop that into the movement I want to use.”

From there, she goes into the studio “with a skeleton of what I want to do” and begins the process of mapping it on her dancers.

“I do a lot of adjusting, especially in pas de deux work, which is difficult to do myself.”

The process is difficult. “You always have trouble,” Lynch said. “It wouldn’t be right if it were easy.”

Ballet Pacifica will dance two new works, “Three Romances” and “Counterpoint,” by artistic director Molly Lynch at 8 p.m. Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. The program also will include Stanley Zompakos’ “Divertimento” and Norbert Vesak’s “Gift to Be Simple.” Tickets: $12. Information: (714) 642-9275.