Modern Dance Choreographer Dies at Age 65 : Dance: Gloria Newman was founder of the oldest and most respected troupe in the county.

Gloria Newman, founder of the oldest and most respected modern dance troupe in Orange County, has died of complications resulting from surgery. She was 65.

She died on Saturday at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. Her family declined to specify what surgery she had been hospitalized for. She was buried Tuesday in Hungarian Union Cemetery, Queens, New York.

A native of New York, Newman had studied and worked with such giants in the field of modern dance as Louis Horst, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon and Charles Weidman.

She taught dance at Cornell University and New York’s High School of the Performing Arts, before moving to California in 1954. She began teaching at the Hollywood studio of Eugene Loring, the choreographer of Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” and also at SARK Studios, a multi-arts venture she created with two musicians and a painter.

She moved to Orange County in 1961 and founded her company, the Gloria Newman Dance Theater, which varied in size but never had more than 12 dancers. She choreographed more than 50 works for the troupe.

Newman received five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including one to re-create Anna Sokolow’s challenging 1955 dance “Rooms.” She also commissioned and re-created works by other modern dance figures such as Donald MacKayle, now professor of dance at UC Irvine, and New York choreographer Donald Byrd.

Although her company danced in the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival/California Dance Festival, Newman suffered a kind of neglect in Orange County and her local appearances were rare. The company danced at Cal State Fullerton in 1988, its first full-fledged concert since a 1986 performance at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. The company had, however, given exhibitions at the annual “Arts on the Green” festival in Costa Mesa.

To celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary, she had to take the troupe to Cal State Los Angeles in 1987.

“We have scoured the county in terms of places that would be suitable for my company,” Newman told The Times, “but without finding one.”

Nonetheless, she tried to keep her dancers working all year long because, she said, “you can’t work as a pickup company. You have to build on what has been done before.”

According to Newman, the company survived on “small donations and memberships.” She had hoped to find a financial backer to create a permanent performing space for modern dance in Orange County, but never realized that dream.

“Very few communities have addressed the problem of where dancers and small theater companies can work,” she lamented in 1989. “I can’t see (local dance) growing without that kind of support.”

Among her many works, she choreographed “Carmina Burana” in 1984 for the Master Chorale of Orange County, commissioned by then-artistic director Maurice Allard. In 1990, she won a competition for an original piece for the Irvine Arts Festival, co-creating a site-specific work with company members titled “Moving Spaces,” seen in October, 1990, at Irvine Heritage Park.

Despite considerable obstacles, Newman never gave up choreographing. “It certainly does get hard,” she said in the 1987 interview. “But I have such a passion for dance--and art itself is so nourishing--it keeps you alive.”

Surviving are her husband Charles (Bud) Schoenberg of Orange; a son, Jeffrey Schoenberg, of Los Angeles; two sisters, Anne Steinberg of New York and Estelle Burke of Chicago, and a brother, Victor Newman of New York. A memorial service is planned on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the University Theatre, Cal State Long Beach. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Gloria Newman Dance Scholarship at Cal State Long Beach.