MUSIC & DANCE : A Decade of Dance : L.A. Chamber Ballet marks the occasion with a retrospective season opening Friday

Raiford Rogers and Victoria Koenig have dream jobs. They spend their days working with people they like and listening to their favorite music--in Rogers’ case, these days, the “dream ballads” of Roy Orbison. The two artists are succeeding at something generally thought impossible: building a ballet company in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Chamber Ballet is celebrating its 10th anniversary, with an ambitious retrospective season of nine dances, including two premieres, opening Friday at the Japan America Theatre. Co-directors Rogers and Koenig look tired; he does all the managerial chores as well as choreographing, and she has just returned from leading the company’s seven-state, 2,800-mile bus-and-truck tour, which jumped from San Luis Obispo to the snow belt of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, with a detour to Chattanooga, Tenn.

“This was our first 13-week performance season, paying dancers on a contractual basis,” said Koenig as she stoked up on caffeine for a rehearsal last Saturday. The 39-year-old Angeleno talks twice as fast as her Michigan-born partner. She’s still dancing; he isn’t. He choreographs; she doesn’t. They are ably supported by their ballet master, Laurence Blake, 35, who both choreographs and dances, and whose newest work, “Black Angels,” deploys 11 of the company’s 13 performers in a dark balletic exploration to a score by George Crumb.

The company’s longtime association with the Stanley Holden Dance Center on West Pico Boulevard has provided a stable home and a continuing supply of dance talent. Visitors to LACB’s rehearsal spaces there inevitably find, in addition to staff and dancers, a couple of businessmen and passionate dance fans who spearhead the group’s support structure. David Ahdar founded the company in 1981 “with a big check,” reports Rogers. “He just said, ‘Do it.’ ”

Paul Wahlquist met Rogers and Koenig “and recognized that they knew what they were doing,” he confided during a break in rehearsals of “Wishes and Turns,” an early Rogers choreography to the metrically complex music of Martinu, being revived by Blake and Koenig for this spring’s season.

“I’d been around enough performing arts organizations,” said Wahlquist, “to know that some people do it because they want to be somebody important. Vicky and Raiford wanted to do something important--that’s what impressed me.” He took over as president of the board in 1985 and has been a bearlike, supportive presence ever since.

Rogers, 41, may be the only choreographer in Los Angeles without a harsh word for the city’s dance environment. “I’m always befuddled by people who blame Los Angeles,” said Rogers.

“Does LA prevent them from dancing? Perhaps they’re not willing or able to put in the administrative time, or work on fund-raising, publicity, budgeting. Dancers in New York realize that 90% of running a dance company has nothing to do with dance, and they just accept it. The ones complaining here won’t acknowledge that it takes effort.”

He credits the collaborative nature of LACB for its endurance and success, while flashier operations, like John Clifford’s Los Angeles Ballet, struggle for financing and visibility. “Chemistry is so vital. John tried to do it himself. Vicky and I share the responsibility, and the board takes a very active part in doing whatever they can.

“It’s very important for us to continue to take very small steps. There’s a practical aspect to growing slowly; community theaters can continue to afford to book us. Someone described a successful artist as the last one standing. The greatest fear we all have is the fear of success. I would not want to say that we’re fearless. I go out on the limb; Vicky braces it.”

Superficially, the two collaborators could not be less alike, but they’ve been building their operation in increments for more than a decade. “Vicky and I were working on a video project together,” remembers Rogers, “and realized that we had the same vision and dream of a dance company, and the same dislikes. We didn’t like the feudal system of ballet. The companies we liked, we realized, had all found their own voice.” Koenig was a member of Eliot Feld’s original ensemble in New York; Rogers, who’d studied in Amsterdam, admired the Netherlands Dance Theater.

Rogers’ newest project, “Dream Baby,” is conceptually related to last year’s “So Nice.” Like that ballet, this one has a easy-listening score composed of popular tunes from the ‘50s, laced together with wry sound effects by Scott Frazier. “It’s Americana, but it’s not Agnes de Mille,” says Rogers of the work, which features five immortal ballads sung by his idol Orbison (including one in German). It also features six women, one man, and Blotto, a large dog playing a sheep.

“Orbison is my man, the Caruso of rock ‘n’ roll,” says Rogers. “No one could sing like this guy. He was very homely, very insecure about his looks . . . a moray eel in a leather jacket.” In the new ballet, which inhabits a stage space surrounded by a toy corral fence, the Orbison character, danced by Eric Rochin, gets one woman after another, all of them dressed in two-tone, bright, candy-colored drugstore cowboy chaps. Rogers’ night-club-style tribute to Orbison lets the singer’s “very sentimental, overly romantic, wonderfully vulgar” dreams come true.

“What L.A. teaches you, more than anything, is that all great art, directly or indirectly, leads to kitsch. Maybe there isn’t such a clear division between style and substance. The great architecture today, like Frank Gehry’s, has an element of kitsch in it. It’s playful, child-like; the minute someone tries to create a monument to their ego, they’re in trouble. In L.A. there are no monuments. It’s like a great stage set, constantly moving.”

Life at LACB is certainly not all fun and games; reviews of the work have been mixed, and the company has been attacked by AIDS, losing three of its members, Bruce Wurl, Kenneth Kreel, and, just a couple of weeks ago, Daniel Jamison. But Victoria Koenig is philosophical even in the face of plague.

“There’s a camaraderie of people connected by something deep, even though it’s frightening,” she says. “Real meaning comes through in the work, comes out of your interaction and respect for your colleagues. The quality of relationship to people is intrinsically important. We just eliminate the pettiness, the things that don’t matter, and focus on the task at hand.”