As Ballet Pacifica Opens Year, It’s in With the New

Of the five works Ballet Pacifica is presenting in its season-opening program this weekend at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, four were created especially for this company. And three of them are world premieres.

Not a bad ratio for a regional troupe founded 38 years ago in Laguna Beach.

The fifth piece--”Valse Fantaisie” by 20th century choreographic titan George Balanchine--isn’t exactly chopped liver, either.

“Doing new works is the heart of what we do at Ballet Pacifica,” Molly Lynch, who has led the troupe for the last 12 years, said at her Irvine studio.

“Ann Marie DeAngelo’s ‘Blackberry Winter’ was created as a work in progress in our 1999 [summer] choreographers workshop. We commissioned ‘Moonlight,’ which is also a world premiere, from [company ballet master] Raymond Van Mason. We did a work of his last October, ‘Reverie,’ which had come out of a previous workshop.”

Mason also is premiering his newest work, “White Light.”

The fourth dance, Peter Pucci’s “Myth,” also came from a summer workshop, Lynch said.

“This program is a good example of the work we’ve developed over the past 12 years and are able to bring to the Orange County community,” she added.

The title of DeAngelo’s ballet is a Southern weather term for a frost that remains on blackberries too long.

“Instead of killing them, it makes a richer harvest,” DeAngelo said from her home in New York. “So it becomes a metaphor for change.”

Danced by six men and five women, the ballet was inspired by a score written by Nashville composer Conni Ellisor.

“The music is rich in moods, feelings, expression and dynamics, and the way she mixes styles is something I like to do in my work,” DeAngelo said.

“The more I kept hearing it, the more images of death I started getting. A lot of my pieces are about death and change, and I first thought, ‘Oh, no, not another one!’

“Then I had a conversation with her and learned that she composed it--actually rewriting the entire piece--while her mother was terminally ill with cancer. So what I was actually imaging was true. I decided to be true to the messages I was getting [and] based the piece on that . . . conversation.

“It’s pretty much an impressionist interpretation of her music,” she added.

Mason’s “Moonlight” began as a pas de deux he created in 1996 for his Utah-based Out of the Wings company and done to the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.

“I’ve seen the first movement choreographed before, but not the other two,” Mason said. “They’re so different. But it’s come out OK. Very OK.”

The work is danced by seven women and three men.

“It’s very romantic,” he said. “One couple starts the ballet. They’re on a walk in the moonlight. . . . He leaves her, she leaves him. They get back together. They leave each other. Finally, the couple that starts the ballet ends up together.”

The scenic elements are important and involve clouds and a moon that changes its shape.

“In the first movement, the moon is quite small,” Mason said. “In the second, it’s a little larger. By the third, it’s really huge, as the moon gets more and more intense. The whole thing is basically [about] how the moon controls us sometimes.”

Mason’s “White Light” is a seven-minute work for two men.

“It’s about someone’s insanity, someone searching for something,” he said. “It will be danced right before ‘Moonlight.’ There’s a lot of light going on there.”

* Ballet Pacifica will open its 1999-2000 season with works by George Balanchine, Ann Marie DeAngelo, Raymond Van Mason and Peter Pucci on Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. $20-$24. (949) 854-4646.

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Chris Pasles can be reached by e-mail at Chris.Pasles@latimes.com.