Big Aspirations on Smaller Scale

“Kudos to Molly,” said a woman in the audience Saturday night, after seeing the four new works-in-progress that Molly Lynch’s sixth annual Pacifica Choreography Project had just developed.

Kudos indeed. With the famous Carlisle Project in Philadelphia closing its doors for good next month, the already few opportunities for American freelance choreographers to create new work will be drastically reduced.

The Carlisle Project, founded in 1984, has been the standard for such things. Operating on an annual budget of $300,000, it has given studio space, dancers to work with, travel expenses, housing, honorariums and daily living expenses to an average of 20 choreographers a year. The project hasn’t required the choreographers to present finished pieces or even works-in-progress.

Ballet Pacifica works on a much smaller scale, with a budget of about $50,000 and four choreographers here for about three weeks. The new dances are presented as works-in-progress, without sets and elaborate costuming (but with sensitive lighting designed by Liz Stillwell). After the performances, the audience is invited to comment and to question the choreographers.

“The project has developed its own reputation,” noted Lynch, Ballet Pacifica’s artistic director. “I did some soliciting from some choreographers, but I also received information and inquiries from a lot of others. A lot of people are seeking us out. There are not many opportunities like this in the country.”

Asked how she picked the four choreographers from the 22 who applied, Lynch said she “picked people who created pieces I would like to dance and who are interesting and have something to say.”

This year’s four were Rick McCullough of North Carolina, Dennis Wayne of Florida, Miriam Mahdaviani of New York and Stephen Mills of Florida. The new pieces are McCullough’s “In the Ruins” (set to Arvo Part’s “Fratres”), Wayne’s “Sharing--It’s for You” (Saint-Saens), Mahdaviani’s “Etudes de Jazz” (Erwin Schulhoff) and Mill’s “The Naughty Ones” (to music by the Naughty Ones, a rock group from Austin, Texas).

The 15-member Ballet Pacifica troupe was divided up among the choreographers; the maximum that any choreographer could have was six women and three men. Each piece was to last about 15 minutes. The music was recorded.

“The choreographers watched a company class and worked with all the dancers for about 15 minutes,” Lynch said. “Then they had to go out and bargain for them.”

All but McCullough were working with the company for the first time and, Lynch said, “the dancers had no idea what the choreographers were going to do before they arrived.”

Judging by audience reaction, Mills’ “Naughty Ones” was the hit of the evening. It is a series of four duets and a group finale that might fit neatly into a production of “Grease.” The dances all are set to ‘50s-style rock.

The musicians in the Naughty Ones band “are friends of mine,” Mills said during the question-and-answer period. “Coming to California, I picked music that--pardon me--sounded like old surfer movies.”

For her ballet, Mahdaviani picked some of of Schulhoff’s quirky jazz piano pieces. “My husband and I were driving along, and this music came on the radio,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that make a nice ballet?’ ”

Her “Etudes” is a series of seven pieces with such descriptive titles as “Shimmy,” “Charleston” and “Tango.” One person in the audience felt that, with two tangos, the work was a little long. Mahdaviani said she was trying to make a work long enough to fill the conditions of the commission, and she didn’t know “which one I’d leave out” eventually.

Wayne’s “Sharing,” a lyrical group piece, also uses music that highlights a piano, in this case the first movement of Saint-Saen’s Piano Concerto No. 5.

“For me, the music comes first,” Wayne said. “I tell the dancers, ‘You don’t dance to the music; you are the music. You dance for yourselves and share that with the audience.’ Dance is an intimate art form.”

McCullough too found inspiration for his work, “In the Ruins,” in the music. “I was listening to this music for a long time,” he said. “I really like it. It’s music for piano and violin, but it sounds so much more lush than just two instruments.”

His was the most serious and, to this viewer, interesting piece of the evening, a work he described in terms of “emotional dependence, people needing someone to lean on and not being able to break away. Everyone [in the dance] is more or less an emotional wreck. They’re in a psychological state of ruins. . . . So the title came to me in a flash.”

Mahdaviani and Mills said they start at the beginning of a piece when they go to work. Not the other two. “I start with the nucleus of a piece and expand from the inside out,” McCullough said. “I started in the middle,” Wayne said. “I tried to do the beginning, but I had a lot of problems with it.”

All the choreographers gave credit to the Ballet Pacifica dancers. “‘When I came here, “ Mahdaviani said, “ I hadn’t thought of any steps.”

“The dancers have a lot to do with it,” agreed McCullough. “They contribute. When I used to dance, I felt the choreographer got all the attention, with his name way up at the top of the program. I was there, too, in the list of dancers. But there was a lot of me in the dance too.”

Mills said his work is “not about technique. A lot is personality. So there was a lot of mixing and matching the dancers to the pieces.”

Wayne said he thinks Ballet Pacifica “is a fantastic company. Imagine what it could do if it were full time.

“But there should be two [workshop] performances instead of one. I can’t even give the dancers their notes!”