Leaps and Bounds

About to celebrate her 10th anniversary as head of Ballet Pacifica, Molly Lynch surveys her tenure with satisfaction.

“We’ve been definitely on a growth curve essentially in every way,” she said recently. “We’ve expanded our repertory to encompass a lot of variety in choreography. We’ve hired dancers and better-caliber dancers.

“We’ve gone from being a fairly small organization to being a very good mid-sized organization that I believe has a place here in the county among the other arts organizations.”

The county’s oldest and best-known dance company, Ballet Pacifica was founded in Laguna Beach in 1962 by Lila Zali, a former soloist with the De Basil Ballet Russe. Zali stayed at the helm until 1988 when Lynch, then 33, took over. Lynch had studied with Zali, but her previous job had been as a fund-raiser for South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

A typical Ballet Pacifica season includes three pairs of subscription programs at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, four programs of ballets for children at the Festival Forum Theatre in Laguna Beach (each repeated a number of times) and more than two dozen performances of “The Nutcracker” at the Irvine theater.

In the early days, the company focused exclusively on such classical works as “Swan Lake,” Lynch said. “I tried to change the direction and work more with new choreographers.”

*

In 1991 Lynch instituted an annual summer choreographers’ workshop during which four visiting artists create works for the troupe. Eleven of those pieces have been incorporated into the repertory. She has commissioned 27 other new dances, a remarkable number for such a small regional company.

“We’ve worked with 37 living choreographers,” Lynch said. “That’s kind of boggling. You plug away, day by day, year by year, to maintain your vision and head in a new direction. It’s interesting to tally it.”

Other accomplishments over the past decade include company growth from nine dancers to 16, budget growth from about $180,00 annually to a little more than $700,000, and, in 1995, a move into spacious new studios in Irvine where more than 90 aspiring students study, another 20 take pre-ballet classes and “quite a number of adults” take daily classes recreationally.

“We still have a lot to do,” Lynch said. “I want to increase the caliber of the dancing.” That means raising money to attract experienced professionals.

“I also want to continue to increase the caliber of the choreographers we work with and to be able to restage other Balanchine works, Tudor ballets and maybe works by [Agnes] de Mille or Loring for our company.

“Then I want to present, produce and develop works based on traditional literature. We’ve done a chamber-sized ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ a chamber-sized ‘Carmen.’ We have a ballet based on [Thorton Wilder’s] ‘Our Town.’ There are other Shakespearean stories and other classical literature. ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ would be interesting to turn into a ballet.”

All of which seems ambitious for a company Lynch has described as “regional,” a term whose provincial connotations now bother her.

“What does ‘regional ballet’ really mean?” Lynch asked. “From a region? I’ve always been confused by that term. We’re a professional-caliber company that works all year-round. Our dancers work about 48 weeks a year. We rehearse three days a week.”

Some full-time companies may rehearse five days a week but work 26 weeks a year, she said.

*

As she hit the 10-year mark, Lynch resisted the temptation to fall back on old work.

“I wanted the whole season to be representative of the past but very representative of the future as well. We will continue to do new works and present different works by a number of different choreographers.”

* Ballet Pacifica dances today at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theater, 4242 Campus Drive. The program includes works by David Allan, Tina Girstler, Paul Vasterling and company director Molly Lynch. $15-$18. (714) 854-4646.