On the Move

Choreographer Paul Vasterling wanted to create a ballet to Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” But he didn’t want to repeat the famous 1951 movie starring Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly.

“I wanted to do something totally different,” Vasterling said over lunch Monday at a Costa Mesa restaurant.

“I found a recording of it with [duo] pianos, and it changed the feel of the music quite a lot,” he said. “Listening to it more and more, I got the feeling of a circus. So that’s where I sort of started, with the circus, and that led to the commedia dell’arte.”

The result is his 20-minute “Saltimbanques,” which Ballet Pacifica will premiere in performances Friday and Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“There’s no real plot to it,” Vasterling said. “Still, the best works I do have some sort of character development. I really do enjoy finding movement that defines characters. That happens here too.”

The Louisiana-born, Nashville-based choreographer spent about three weeks in February creating the work for Molly Lynch’s Irvine-based company.

“I tend to work pretty fast,” he said. “I don’t let myself get stuck. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I like to be able to just move on. . . . I’ll do something and then maybe come back and make revisions. In fact, I think I drove the dancers kind of crazy with revisions [in “Saltimbanques”]. But I’m kind of excited about the piece now.”

The movement is rooted in classical ballet, but it uses other elements as well.

“When I first started choreographing, I was really into Balanchine--that sort of classical, structural kind of dance,” he said. “I’m still classical in that I tend to structure things. But as far as movement goes, right now, I really like Bob Fosse.”

Since the music came first, it provided the framework for the dance. But that turned out to be more difficult than he expected.

“I didn’t realize how episodic the music was until I started to really get into it. Gershwin uses these really short themes throughout. The sections are extremely short. Time signatures change.

“The whole feeling of it changes like this,” he said, snapping his fingers. “It involved a lot of problem solving.”

A native of Slidell, east of New Orleans, Vasterling, 36, went to Loyola University in New Orleans as a music major, intending to be a concert pianist.

“I actually got into dance by playing at our community theater,” he said. “I was playing for the musicals. I told this guy I wanted to take tap dance for fun. He said, ‘If you go to my studio, the teacher [Darlene Haik] will let you take lessons for free because you’re a guy. But you have to take everything.’

“So I went and I had to take ballet. It was like a revelation. I changed my major after my first semester.”

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After graduating, he danced with several companies, including troupes in Mississippi, Texas and Akron, Ohio, before joining Nashville Ballet in 1989. He stopped dancing two years later after a back injury.

“I could have gone on a few more years,” he said, “but I didn’t want to risk injuring my back so badly that I couldn’t choreograph, which is what I wanted to do.”

He became a teacher at the company, then, in succession, ballet master, resident choreographer and, in June, artistic director.

“The reputation of the company is growing all the time,” he added. “I have a good group of dancers now. I’m always looking for more. And choreographers really want to come. What I have to do is find the money to pay them. That’s where the main difficulty is, finding the money and the budget to pay the choreographers what they need in terms of their piece and to produce the ballets the way they should be produced.”

To bring in an existing work, he said, costs “at least $20,000, to do it right. A new work would be more--$25,000, $30,000.

“I don’t have a desire to create a whole repertory of works of my own,” he said. “Right now, to be honest with you, my ideas come from--it’s almost a necessity thing. I have a repertory of ballets to fill in and I have this and this, and I need something like this. It is very practical.”

When he does create a new piece, he said, he’s not “hard-nosed about dancers doing a particular step.”

“It’s just a movement. It can be changed. It’s a small thing in a big picture, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “How it fits in with the concept is what your looking for, your overall concept.”

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Vasterling first worked with Ballet Pacifica in 1994, when he was one of four guests brought in to create new works in the troupe’s annual summer choreographers’ project. He created “Intermediary,” to music by Poulenc, and came back the following season to restage it for the company’s subscription series.

“This company is really good now,” he said. “I’m really impressed with the way they’ve improved since I was here in ‘94, the times I’ve been back. Molly has a lot of strong personalities, and they’re extremely willing to work. They’ll do anything.

“I think that comes from their working with so many different choreographers. The company is really a choreographer’s company,” he said. “They’re used to doing different styles.

“Sometimes they have trouble doing the movement, but they’ll keep doing it until it’s right. That’s the best thing about it.”

* Ballet Pacifica will dance Paul Vasterling’s new “Saltimbanques” at 8 p.m. Friday and at 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. The program also will include works by David Allan, Stephen Mills and Lynne Taylor-Corbett. $17-$20. (949) 854-4607.