A Second Wind for 3’s Company : Dance: The group has a new name and new works as it prepares to open a four-night run at UCSD.

“Places, please,” and the company’s nine dancers ready themselves.

Latin jazz filled the 3’s Company studio on 5th Avenue in Hillcrest on a recent afternoon. For the next 20 minutes or so, Jean Isaacs, choreographer and artistic director for the company, surveyed the dancers rehearsing her sensual new work, “Canopy.”

This daily rehearsal was just one phase of the preparation by the dance company--officially 3’s Company: Isaacs, McCaleb & Dancers--for the four-night Winter Concert opening tonight at the Mandell Weiss Theatre on the UC San Diego campus. Having some time ago completed collaboration with composers Miles Anderson and Davis Stout, who wrote much of the score for the performance, Isaacs and associate artistic director Nancy McCaleb have been busy conferring with lighting and set designer David Thayer and various costumers.

For the upcoming concert, moods range from the darkly dramatic in Isaacs’ apocalyptic battle of the sexes in “Hoedown at the Boneyard” to the otherworldliness of McCaleb’s “Mirror of Simple Souls,” which is loosely based on the life of the 14th-Century mystic Marguerite Porete, who was condemned and burned for asserting the primacy of love over theology.

Dance styles vary from Isaacs’ expressionistic setting of Kurt Weill’s “Red Dress/White Dress” to the athletic stamina required in the premiere of McCaleb’s “Torch.”

McCaleb’s journey to self-enlightenment, titled “Illuminatus,” is a stylized work that focuses on a geometric, formal sense of beauty, while “Canopy” is organic and exotic, depicting life inside a rain forest.

3’s Company’s sights extend beyond its four-night run in La Jolla. This season the company plans to go to New York City for the second time in three years, as well as to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the company has previously garnered excellent reviews. In May, in a co-production with the city of San Diego and Tijuana’s Casa de la Cultura, 3’s Company plans to tour Tijuana, Mexicali and Ensenada. June will see the company return for its third summer European tour, including stops in Switzerland and Italy, with possible dates in Germany and Poland.

Seven salaried dancers, concerts in major American cities and an international tour--that’s a great distance from the humble origins of 3’s Company. When master dancer Isaacs moved here in 1970 from Boston, there was no modern dance in San Diego. In 1973, Isaacs, along with Patrick Nollet and Betzi Roe, founded 3’s Company.

Says Isaacs: “We decided that, if there was going to be a climate in San Diego to support modern dance, we were going to have to create it ourselves. And we did do everything. Trucking from one studio to the next, we made our own costumes, staged our own events and began giving classes.”

This was the phase Isaacs describes as “the first life of the company.” Building steadily on its early grass-roots efforts, the company began its second life. It added dancers and bought works from other choreographers. Thus was born San Diego’s first regional, modern dance repertory company.

One of Isaacs’ continuing projects to expose San Diego audiences to modern dance began that first year, 1974, when she brought famed choreographer-dancer Rudy Perez to San Diego.

“I brought the people I wanted to see here,” she said.

Over the years, 3’s Company has also produced Martha Graham, the Blake Street Hawkeyes and Eiko and Komo (precursors of the Japanese Butoh dancing that now has popular currency on the contemporary dance scene). Last summer, 3’s Company’s opening show for the Lo-Tec series included a solo performance by Nancy Colahan, who dances with Baryshnikov’s modern company, the White Oak Dance Project.

In 1985 the company’s 14-year-old Lo-Tec series, which presented both national and emerging local talent, brought McCaleb, a local performer, to the company’s attention. Her solo concert so impressed 3’s Company’s staff that they invited her to become their associate choreographer.

This year, in an acknowledgement of Isaac’s and McCaleb’s leading roles in the company, and with co-founders Nollet and Roe pursuing more independent, individual projects--Roe is now performing solo and Nollet continues to work with the company on its projects in the city’s schools--the third and current life of 3’s Company came into being, warranting a name change from the original 3’s Company and Dancers.

Though 3’s Company now choreographs all its own dances and has evolved into a touring company, it maintains a focus on what McCaleb calls “our mandate to keep exposing and educating San Diegans to modern dance.” In that effort, twice a year, Isaacs, McCaleb and other company members provide seven modern dance classes each week.

Isaacs reported with sadness that efforts to showcase emerging local talent through the Lo-Tec series may have come to an end.

“We have some irons in the fire, but it doesn’t appear that we are going to come up with the $30,000 we need for this summer’s series,” she said. Even though this is only a tenth of what it would now cost to produce Martha Graham, the depressed American economy does not bode well for finding the funds, she said.

The rest of the company’s educational projects, however, appear to be stable and thriving. In 1988, Isaacs and McCaleb collaborated with KPBS-TV on a 30-minute dance video. The result, “TAKE 3,” was aired on PBS affiliates nationwide and won five national broadcasting awards. A second video, “TAKE 3 MORE,” was recently completed, and a third video is now being edited. With continued involvement by Nollet and Roe, the company also performs for thousands of school children each year through the Young Audiences Program and the San Diego Institute for Arts Education.

McCaleb says they continue to follow their other critical mandate: “To keep extending the art form, to keep creating truly modern, contemporary dance.”

3’s company: Isaacs, McCaleb & Dancers’ Winter Concert plays at 8 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. The Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts is located on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla.