DANCE : Ballet Pacifica Project Stretches the Limits

New York dancer-choreographer James Sewell is one of four guest choreographers scheduled to create new works for Ballet Pacifica during a two-week “Choreographic Project ‘91” that begins Thursday.

The project, the company’s first to involve multiple choreographers, is a workshop dreamed up by Ballet Pacifica artistic director Molly Lynch and New York choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning to expand the company’s repertory and to promote “newer” talent in dance.

The project will end with a dance concert Aug. 3 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

Lynch said last week that she whittled down a list of 18 prospective participants to Sewell, Leslie Jane Pessemier, from San Francisco, and Colin Conner and William Soleau, both from New York. She made her choices, she said, on intrinsic interest and variety.

She liked Pessemier’s “modern lyrical style,” while “Colin Conner seemed to be dealing very much with human feelings and reactions, and society and the environment,” she said.

She was “intrigued” at how William Soleau “incorporated gestures and humanistic elements into his ballet work.”

But perhaps the most off-the-wall work will be done by Sewell, who is choreographing four operatic arias or ensembles for the project.

He’s picked “Vesti la Giubba” from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci”; “Una Voce Poco Fa” from Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”; the “Lontano” duet between Margaret and Faust from Boito’s “Mefistofele”; and a Quartet from Mozart’s “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail.”

“I have been interested in vocal music for some time, dealing with text and music,” Sewell, 30, said in a phone interview last week from his apartment in Manhattan. “I’ve been doing pieces where I dance and recite the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy from ‘Hamlet.’ ”

Regarding opera’s most famous clown’s cry-from-the-heart (“Vesti la Giubba”), Sewell said: “I’m very straight with that one, very serious. I have tried to follow the text, but not to mime it out exactly. I’ve tried to do it how it might be done in an ideal and fanciful way if it could be staged completely. It is probably the most literal of the four pieces.”

He called his treatment of Rossini’s bel canto aria “campy.”

“The main thing I tried to do is take the attitude which a diva has on stage of owning the stage and translate that into ballet terms,” he said. “I’m taking some quotes stylistically from different ballets--from ‘Swan Lake,’ or from ‘Don Quixote’ pas de deux, things in that vein. It’s farcical.”

The Boito excerpt is a “Romantic pas de deux,” but at this point, the Mozart Quartet is “the least sketched,” he said.

“I can’t work out the ideas as much by myself as when I get out there and work with the dancers. But I’m seeing that more as a strict translation but in choreographic terms how the two couples relate to each other and explore in terms of the (movement) patterns and relationships, when they’re upset with each other, when reconciled. All that is yet to be explored.”

Although a recent work established a story relationship among all the parts, “there isn’t any link” among the works he’s planned for Ballet Pacifica. “They’re meant to stand as separate vignettes.”

Sewell’s background is ballet (“That’s the tradition I came from”), but he also has “a strong modern dance influence,” he said, studying Graham and Jose Limon techniques.

He danced for six years with the Feld Ballet in New York. In 1990, he left to form his own six-member company, James Sewell Dance.

“Feld certainly has been a big influence on me,” Sewell said. “We’re both interested in exploring and making up movement and what new vocabulary we can invent. But we also diverge and deal differently with dramatic material and construction.”

In working with his own company, Sewell said, he’s been “developing a kind of advanced coordination, where I have the body working independently in many different ways.

“For instance, an organist can be playing with one hand, pulling stops with another and doing something with his feet. How the body can organize all these things at once? There hasn’t been a dance technique that explored this. But I don’t know how much of that will be in the works for Ballet Pacifica.”

* James Sewell will be among the four choreographers participating in Ballet Pacifica’s “Choreographic Project ‘91,” Thursday through Aug. 3, at the Laguna Beach-based company studios. The project will culminate in a dance concert Aug. 3 at 8 p.m. at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets for the Aug. 3 concert: $5. Information: (714) 957-4033.