BALLET SAN JOSE EMERGES FROM CLEVELAND COLLAPSE.

So far, so good. Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley was born October 12, with an inaugural program at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. Rising from the ashes of the defunct San Jose Cleveland Ballet, Dennis Nahat's new company presented a calling card of August Bournonville's Napoli, George Balanchine's Theme and Variations and Nahat's own Moments. The evening, conducted by Dwight Oltman, began with brass fanfares from the balconies and ended with a surprise: A platoon of tiny future dancers from the Ballet San Jose School entered clutching bunches of flowers, one for every dancer in the company. There were tears on and offstage, and there were sighs of relief all over the Bay Area.

The two-city operation fell apart last year when its Cleveland component, which had had financial problems for more than a decade, ran out of money, canceled its season, laid off its staff and terminated its contracts with its dancers--many of whom signed on with the San Jose troupe.

"Everything has been happening so fast," said Nahat, "we haven't really had to time to take it all in. But dancers are resilient people: They are working hard, rehearsing harder than ever, dancing as if nothing happened."

A lot happened, of course. Many people did not expect the Ballet San Jose opening to happen at all, and in fact the trucks with sets and costumes arrived from Cleveland just the day before the performance. But the situation at press time is encouraging. Ballet San Jose has acquired all the sets, costumes, audiovisual archives, toe shoe inventory and other properties of the old San Jose Cleveland Ballet, including the sets for Nahat's Nutcracker. That holiday treat was rescheduled and its San Jose run expanded for a split run of December 1-10 and again December 19-28.