Ballet Pacifica Earns National Recognition, Award

Ballet Pacifica has received its first major national recognition in the form of a 1997 Choo-San Goh Award for Choreography. The $7,500 grant will support a new work to be created by choreographer David Allan, a former American Ballet Theatre dancer and currently a member of the UC Irvine dance faculty. The new work will be premiered in June.

“It’s nice to be recognized for working with new choreography,” Ballet Pacifica director Molly Lynch said Thursday. “[It] puts us in the same sort of league with the other companies that have received these grants.”

The other award recipients are the New York-based Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Judith Jamison, choreographer), Atlanta Ballet (Val Caniparoli), North Carolina Dance Theatre (Peter Pucci), Richmond (Va.) Ballet (Maurico Wainrot) and New York-based Susan Marshall and Dancers (Susan Marshall). The six recipients were selected from more than 60 applicants.

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The purpose of the grants--awarded by the Choo-San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation in Washington, D.C., since 1992--is to provide support for adding newly choreographed works to a dance company’s repertory. Goh, an internationally known choreographer born in Singapore in 1948, died in New York in 1987.

Applicants are judged on artistic strength and long-term commitment to developing new work.

Ballet Pacifica has commissioned new work throughout its 36-year existence, mostly through an annual summer choreographers workshop started in 1991.

It was in one of these workshops that Allan created “Capriol Suite” in 1994 in memory of celebrated Orange County dancer Gregory Osborn. He also created “Come to Me My Love” in 1995 and “Out of the Shadows” in 1996 for the company.

North Carolina’s Pucci created “Myth” for the troupe in 1997’s summer workshop.