A Stretch for Choreographer and Company

Each year, Molly Lynch, artistic director of Ballet Pacifica, invites four American choreographers to a summer workshop called the Pacifica Choreographic Project. They create new pieces for Ballet Pacifica dancers, and the works may later make their way into the company’s permanent repertory.

The project, now in its 11th year, is a chance for choreographers to stretch and grow, experiment and see rapid results--the intense, three-week in-studio period requires that ideas evolve quickly into dances, which are then presented at a pared-down, works-in-progress showing with minimal sets, costumes and lighting.

This year’s show, along with its traditional question-and-answer session between the choreographers and audience moderated by Lynch, takes place Saturday at South Coast Repertory.

Past participants have included choreographers in a range of styles: Peter Pucci, Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Ann Marie DeAngelo and Robert Sund.

Dance-makers participating this year include Jacques Heim, artistic director of L.A.’s Diavolo Dance Theater; Houston Ballet principal dancer Dominic Walsh; Manard Stewart, a former principal dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada; and Susan Hadley, an associate professor at Ohio State University.

“It’s a very savvy move on Molly’s part,” said Hadley about the project, which recently received a $150,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation to further the company’s commitment to producing new dances.

“While we get to work with professionals and try our ideas, she gets a sneak preview, the chance to pick repertory and build an ongoing relationship with a choreographer that’s really right for the company.”

The project allows Ballet Pacifica to check out choreographers who work in a spectrum of styles. Hadley and Stewart, for example, represent different sides of the dance coin: Stewart is classically trained and Hadley is a former modern dancer who has performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group and Meredith Monk/The House.

For Stewart, who quit dancing in 1999, the project is a chance to loosen up a little and break from the formalities of strict classical dance.

“I was always a ballet dancer, so I have this thing of trying to extricate myself from my heritage,” he says.

Lately he’s embarked on a journey of self-discovery that contains a certain rebellious streak. Recently he’s been prone to reject the straight lines and synchronicity of traditional ballet in favor of a sort of controlled chaos; he has been creating abstract pieces and the Pacifica project is an opportunity to take that track one step farther.

His untitled abstract piece will be an emotionally layered work set to sections of Polish composer Henryck Gorecki’s haunting Third Symphony.

Stewart’s only intent is to rise to the moody beauty of the music, which he calls “an emotional sledgehammer.”

“I tend to pick music intellectually, so this experiment of tapping into the emotional side is a real stretch for me,” he said.

Hadley will be doing some experimenting of her own.

She’s decided to forgo her attachment to structure and to pieces with a message, and will explore just letting things happen. Her contemporary ballet, set to various selections from Giovanni Sollima’s CD “Aquilarco,” will follow the music’s myriad rhythmic influences with movements that range from Riverdance-quick to sleepwalker slow in a lyrical piece for large ensemble.

“This is an enormous departure for me because the piece isn’t trying to be about something,” she said.

It’s also only the second piece she’s choreographed with dancers on pointe. She said she is working hard to marry her modern aesthetic with the dancer’s classical training. “It makes me nervous, but I wanted to challenge myself with a piece that would say that great music and interesting dancing is enough.”

The creative risks engendered by the project’s nurturing atmosphere not only promise a payoff in artistic growth for the choreographers and dancers, but there’s also a chance the dances will have a ripple effect on stages beyond Orange County.

“There aren’t many situations where you can really take the opportunity to explore and deepen different sides of yourself, but that’s what fuels creativity and makes us grow,” said Hadley, pointing out that if ballet doesn’t change to reflect the world as it is now, it risks becoming a “museum piece.”

“Our role as contemporary artists is to reinvent the wheel; we study the masters in order to rebel against them,” she said. “That, in a way, is what this project is all about.”

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Pacifica Choreographic Project Works-In-Progress, Saturday at 8 p.m. at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. Tickets are $20 for general admission, $50 for patron seating. For more information, call (949) 851-9930, Ext. 107.