DANCE : Meet the Other ABT : American Ballet Theatre has bounced back from the harsh economics of the early ‘90s. But you wouldn’t know it by the programs coming here.

Two years ago, for its annual gala at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, American Ballet Theatre mounted an all-Tchaikovsky program--a compendium of classic, neoclassic and contemporary choreography crowned by guest stars Nina Ananiashvili and Julio Bocca in what New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff called “their pull-out-the-stops rendering of the Black Swan pas de deux.”

In 1995, the Met gala celebrated Twyla Tharp’s return to Ballet Theatre after a five-year absence. The event not only offered three Tharp premieres, but Wynton Marsalis and his jazz ensemble accompanying one of them. “The entire evening,” Kisselgoff wrote, “had an extravagantly creative air.”

Unfortunately, in Southern California during the 1990s, it’s been difficult to consider Ballet Theatre an “extravagantly creative” institution--or one boasting “pull-out-the-stops” virtuosity.

When the company returns to the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday for its first local visit in a year and a half, the engagement will offer just six performances of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” a Royal Ballet chestnut that Ballet Theatre has danced in season after season since 1985.

In addition, the company will appear June 26-30 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in four performances of its fourth revision of “Don Quixote” (a company staple since 1978) and two of largely familiar repertory: “Theme and Variations,” “A Brahms Symphony,” a “Leaves Are Fading” pas de deux and a Tharp work yet to have its premiere.

That’s two full-evening ballets and four one-acts on view locally since 1994, compared to six full-length works and 21 or so shorter pieces and excerpts presented in New York during the same period.

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But if scarcely comparable to the company’s eight-week Met engagements, these two local 1996 visits can be seen as steps in rebuilding Ballet Theatre’s identity outside New York.

Consider the casting: To New York dance writer Robert Greskovic, the excitement about Ballet Theatre at the Met “is essentially about dancers. Just as in [company co-founder] Lucia Chase’s day, any dancer who seems to be of interest on the international ballet scene and has the time and inclination to dance with Ballet Theatre is brought in.”

Certainly, the Orange County roster looks unusually promising, with company newcomers Jose Manuel Carreno (last seen here with the Royal Ballet) and Vladimir Malakhov (the Bolshoi Ballet Academy and other companies) both scheduled to dance Romeo. Among the Juliets: Paloma Herrera, the first star developed within the company during Kevin McKenzie’s tenure as artistic director. (No casting has yet been announced for the Pavilion performances.)

It takes money to import stars even on a short term basis. So the 1996 OCPAC roster suggests we’re in a different era than three years ago, the first time the company was presented there under McKenzie’s direction. Reviewing opening night, Times music/dance critic Martin Bernheimer described “a company in trouble. Big trouble.”

Bernheimer’s list of the company’s woes included “a hand-me-down repertory, a curtailed season, a reduced touring schedule, a slightly shrunken corps, an ensemble that has the right to feel worried if not demoralized and aesthetic priorities predicated on the need for cost containment.”

“This is a company that almost didn’t make it,” acknowledges Elizabeth Kaye, a New York-based arts writer and author of the recent book “Mid-Life: Notes From the Halfway Mark.” “Its survival was really in doubt. And now it’s not only back but one of the really exciting parts of living in New York, period.

“It’s as versatile as a great company has to be these days,” she continues, naming its stars but also praising “its range of choreography from the Petipa classics--slightly redone or even greatly redone--to Tharp and, beyond that, [Ulysses] Dove, [James] Kudelka and those throbbing, modernist things in which one wrong move and the ballerina never dances again.

“Ballet Theatre does all those things with real brilliance.”

The question that remains, however, is why aren’t we seeing those things here?

The answer is economics. In the tight ‘90s, most companies seek local presenters, rather than taking the financially riskier route of bearing all the costs through self-presentation. And that means accepting the programming choices of whomever offers to guarantee the company its basic fees.

OCPAC President Tom Tomlinson says “Romeo and Juliet” was chosen for 1995-96 based on questions of balance (full-length works versus mixed bills, weeklong engagements versus split weeks) across his entire season.

Tomlinson has found that full-length works outsell mixed bills by as much as 50%--and in this one respect Costa Mesa and New York City are the same. Therefore he’s helping the company build that repertory.

“Right now we’re working with Ballet Theatre to commission--or, rather, they’re commissioning--a full-evening work which we will present in its world premiere next season,” Tomlinson says. “They’ll be here for a considerable residency to put that work on stage. That doesn’t mean there will be more performances, but with a brand-new work there’s obviously more load-in time and the company will be here longer.

“During that time, we hope we’ll have a chance to get the company out in the community a little more,” Tomlinson says. “One of the things that’s happening nationally [with dance presenters] is a discussion about how to have long-term relationships with companies. I think that’s why they do so much better in their home cities than on the road--there is a real sense of local connection.”

Ballet Theatre Executive Director Michael Kaiser agrees. “It’s increasingly difficult to do fund-raising [outside] your home city,” he says.

In what Kaiser calls “the old days,” Ballet Theatre self-presented in Los Angeles. “We had a gala every year in L.A. and a lengthy season,” he says. “But now it’s hard for an outside organization to come in and not look like it’s carpetbagging. There are so many other cultural institutions and social causes with which you compete. As a result, it becomes less and less attractive to go to Southern California and self-present.

“If it were up to us, we would have longer seasons in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington than we do,” he says. “But we simply don’t have the capital base necessary to invest in bringing lots of repertory for long periods of time into cities other than our own.”

Indeed, Ballet Theatre currently has a $5-million deficit, which Kaiser hopes to erase in the next four years, and he says it costs the company about $1 million a week to self-produce its annual Met engagement. (OCPAC sources give similar estimates for self-presentation in Costa Mesa.)

“That’s a huge amount of money for an arts organization,” Kaiser comments, “and the risk is great when an organization is already financially challenged, as we are.”

Ballet Theatre last presented itself locally in an extended season at Shrine Auditorium in March 1989, six months before Mikhail Baryshnikov resigned as artistic director.

“Romeo and Juliet” was part of the repertory--but so were four works by Tharp, two Petipa classics plus ballets by George Balanchine, Leonide Massine, Mark Morris and Clark Tippet. Kirov guest stars Altynai Assylmuratova and Konstantin Zaklinsky appeared in “Swan Lake” and the presence of Italian ballerina Alessanda Ferri and Andris Liepa of the Bolshoi in different casts of “Romeo and Juliet” further boosted the company’s star power.

Does this sound like the kind of repertory and casting currently in vogue at the Met?

If so, it’s no coincidence: Kevin McKenzie was on the roster as a principal dancer that season, and he says his aim as artistic director always has been “to nurture the dancers--the individuality of the dancers--and also to form relationships with a number of choreographers. The whole profile of the company has been about a very varied repertory.”

But the early ‘90s was a bad time for American dance in general and Ballet Theatre in particular, so McKenzie was immediately forced into what he calls “rebuilding and cutting back at the same time.” Citing the downturn in the U.S. economy and declining government arts support, he speaks of the growing pressure on local arts presenters to avoid deficit spending--and a resulting avoidance of dance events in favor of more sure-fire attractions such as Broadway musicals.

“In the arts, everyone in the country stumbled a bit,” he recalls. “Everybody had to reassess. I can only say that now we’re trying to get out there and tour again. The audience is there--we’ve reestablished that--and we’re working on expanding everything, talking to people and finding ways to cut our costs so that we can go everywhere in the country.”

One possibility McKenzie mentions: extending Ballet Theatre’s touring by periodically dividing it into smaller performing units that would attract presenters in communities that can’t afford the full company. “That would help us be in a more secure position to go back on a big scale to the bigger cities with more repertory more frequently,” he says. “That’s our objective.”

Having danced under three different regimes at Ballet Theatre, McKenzie is especially sensitive to what he describes as “nurturing an art form [under] brutally realistic circumstances. Those circumstances don’t allow you to nurture everything at once. We started with some momentum in New York. And now we have to start at Ground Zero everywhere else.”

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Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” American Ballet Theatre, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and next Sunday, 2 p.m.; next Sunday, 7:30 p.m., $18-$55. (714) 740-2000.