Choreographing coast to coast.

EUGENE BALLET COMPANY'S TONI PIMBLE IS A REGIONAL BALLET DIRECTOR WHO WORKS WITH COMPANIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

SOME FIVE YEARS AGO, one sunny day in April, Toni Pimble went out into Lincoln Center Plaza and, by her own account, "danced a little jig with this silly grin on my face." Pimble, artistic director of Eugene Ballet Company, had good reason to be jubilant: she had just reported for duty at New York City Ballet as one of the ten choreographers whom ballet master in chief Peter Martins had selected to contribute to the first Diamond Project, in 1992.

Unlike most of her project colleagues, Pimble was little known in New York City. The opportunity to show her work in the Big Apple, accompanied by a full orchestra and performed by City Ballet's first-class dancers, was a large part of what made this usually reserved British native, a graduate of the Elmhurst School of the Arts, want to jump for joy. "This is a tremendous opportunity for me," she said at the time of her selection. "Not only to be able to show my work in New York, but dancers of such a high technical standard can be a great inspiration."

Pimble had cofounded Eugene Ballet Company, with her former husband, Riley Grannan, in 1978. The couple used their retirement money from dancing in German opera houses in Kiel (where they met), Mannheim, and Bonn to buy the Oregon ballet school where Grannan had taken his first ballet lessons. They established the company soon after.

In their first four years in Eugene, the state's second largest city and a university town, Grannan and Pimble did it all. They designed costumes and scenery and danced in the repertory, performing the principal roles.

In 1982 both retired from the stage, though Grannan, who is now managing director of Eugene Ballet, still danced character parts from time to time. The company has doubled in size from its original dozen dancers and now tours throughout the West. (In 1994, Eugene Ballet merged with Ballet Idaho, and the artistic staff, including the dancers, is now based in Boise. The company is called Ballet Idaho when in residence in that state.)

By the time Martins extended his invitation, Pimble had already gained considerable experience as a choreographer. Her artistic vision is as culturally diverse as her adopted country; her choreographic subject matter is as broad as her interests. Furthermore, she has a highly intellectual approach to her work, doing months of research by looking at videotapes and reading about her subject matter. She has made dances about the relationships between people in works such as her Diamond Project piece, Two's Company, and in the earlier May Dances. She has put her own stamp on fairy-tale ballets such as Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Coppelia.

Among her big, evening-length works is Romeo and Juliet (1984), set to Prokofiev's bombastic twentieth-century score but choreographed to place the audience squarely in Elizabethan England. Her 1989 Cinderella is also very English, even reminiscent of Ashton's version, though Pimble says she has never seen it. Her version of A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed by Nevada Dance Theater in February.

There were also choreographic explorations of American culture; her Children of the Raven is based on Pacific Northwest Indian legends, and The Skinwalkers gives a very different treatment to Southwest Indian culture. Silent Movie deals innovatively with the early days of Hollywood; Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear is based on Ken Kesey's retelling of an Ozark folktale.

In 1992 Eugene Ballet presented a concert series, "A Celebration of the Uncommon Woman," five pieces choreographed by women to music of women composers. Her own work, Columba Aspexit, was set to a score by Hildegard of Bingen. In five minutes of sleek neoclassical dancing in a cathedral created with lighting effects by Lloyd Sobel, Pimble made a powerful statement about the traditional church's attitude toward women as either saints or sinners, with nothing in between.

"I feel I started something," Pimble says of the all-women's series. "And while there have been quite a few festivals of women's choreography since then, none of them have been accompanied by the music of women composers." (One of those programs was given by Oregon Ballet Theatre in 1994, with Pimble's Quartet in Blue presented in an evening that included work by Bebe Miller and Karole Armitage.)

By the time she received her Diamond Project commission, Pimble had built a repertory of more than thirty ballets. She still looks every inch the doe-eyed English ballerina, but she has long since traded in her pointe shoes for wrestling shoes ("Wonderful in the rehearsal studio").

Her first choreography was a tap dance, made when she was a twelve-year-old ballet student at the Elmhurst School. "I was already serious about ballet," she says. "But I was also taking tap. I think all kids should take it. It improves the sense of rhythm." While dancing in Germany, she participated in some group choreography. Her first piece for the Eugene company was for a concert version of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. Inevitably, The Nutcracker followed, as well as a host of short works, beginning in 1982 with The Firebird. (Her version of this Stravinsky classic. for which she recruited corps members from Eugene s modern dance community. was the inaugural production for the Hult Center for the Performing Arts.)

She danced her last performance in the title role of The Firebird. "I wanted to make the shift to choreography from dancing for a number of reasons," she says. "My hip was bothering me, and I didn't want to have an operation. Also, I just felt very pulled between being a dancer and being a choreographer who was responsible for everything happening onstage. You can't give all your energy to one when you are doing both."

It was one of her shorter works, May Dances, a series of neoclassical variations to Robert Schumann's piano music, that brought her the Diamond Project commission. Violette Verdy saw it when it was performed in Aspen in 1991 and was so impressed she suggested that Pimble send Martins a videotape. "I liked first of all her use of the classical vocabulary," Verdy says, speaking of May Dances and Pimble's choreography in general. "She uses her head to express what is in her heart, and there are no tricks." Martins shared her enthusiasm, and invited Pimble to join the Diamond Project.

Her project work, Two's Company, which premiered on May 28, 1992, and is now in the repertory of Rhode Island Ballet, was set to the first two movements of Dvorak's String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, and danced by Stephanie Saland, Peter Boal, Jeffrey Edwards, and a corps. Or at least it was on opening night. Only the pas de trois for Saland, Boal, and Edwards could be performed at its second performance, due to injuries in the corps. The audience didn't mind, and Pimble was delighted. A pas de trois was all Pimble had wanted to do in the first place, but Martins had refused when she suggested it. As it turned out, Pimble was right about her own work.

Doris Hering found Two's Company "especially rich in texture" because it gave the three dancers "the opportunity to project tenderness and to engage in moments of meaningful stillness as it depicted a woman conflicted in her love for two men." To Hering, Pimble "seems to care not only about the impact of a phrase but about how that impact is reached" [Reviews, October 1992, page 65].

Common Ground, a commission she had received from Atlanta Ballet before the Diamond Project, followed in the fall of 1992. Created in collaboration with composer James Oliverio, this elaborate production with a large cast was underwritten by a grant from Meet the Composer. As he did for Columba Aspexit, Silent Movie, and Alice in Wonderland, lighting designer Sobel played a major part in the production design. Alice, another 1992 triumph--"incredible" is Pimble's word for this year--has highly sophisticated special effects and costumes that are derived from the original Tenniel illustrations. It is now in the repertories of Washington Ballet, Omaha Ballet, and New Orleans Ballet.

Major commissions have come her way since the first Diamond Project. "Having it on my resume," she says, "means I'm taken seriously by artistic directors. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have gotten the commission from Pacific Northwest Ballet's Offstage series otherwise." (Ironically, PNB codirector Francia Russell disagrees: "If anything, the Diamond Project commission nearly stopped us from offering her the Offstage slot . . . we like to help gifted, emerging choreographers like her, who don't get that much opportunity to show their work around the country.")

Pimble feels that The Skinwalkers, which premiered in the spring of 1995, with Two's Company and Common Ground also on the program, is the most significant and satisfying work she has done since the project. "If anything, [being chosen for it] was an ego boost. I can't pretend otherwise. I attack my work with much more confidence than I used to."

It took real boldness to make Skinwalkers, which is Pimble's own take on Southwest Indian culture and a choreographic exploration of it. Inspired by the work of Helen Hardin, a Santa Clara Indian painter who was very much influenced by European cubism and expressionism, Pimble, with the help of Eugene Ballet dancer Jennifer McNamara, developed a new movement vocabulary; they worked an hour a day during a summer stint in Aspen, where Pimble has been teaching for several years now.

Just as Hardin used traditional design motifs and combined them with modern style in her paintings, Pimble designed some of the movement for Skinwalkers with the traditional motifs in mind. The result is a fascinating example of cultural fusion, as well as a totally viable piece of theatrical entertainment. A more recent example of such work is last year's Raramuri, her abstract take on Latin American culture.

This month Eugene Ballet Company will present the first program devoted entirely to her shorter works; along with Rhapsody in Blue, Pimble, who works well with contemporary musicians, will include three premieres set to Michael Torke, Patricia Van Ness, and Erik Lundborg, the company's composer in residence.

Asked if her experience with NYCB has had any effect on how she works with her own company, she replies crisply. "I don't have thirty million dollars." And if she had? "First I'd put it in a trust fund, so that I can always pay my dancers. Then I would use some of it so that I could have weeks of research and development for new work and lots of time for rehearsal." Like all the project choreographers, Pimble felt highly pressured in terms of time. "I loved working with Peter and Jeff," she said. "But the dancers were working on seventy ballets when I was there, including Martins's Sleeping Beauty. "

In the summer of 1995, Eugene Ballet was invited by the United States Information Agency to tour India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Syria, Jordan, and Tunisia with a program made up exclusively of Pimble's choreography. Children of the Raven was the featured work, but such short pieces as Columba Aspexit and the pas de deux from Common Ground were also on programs that were enthusiastically received everywhere. Further government recognition came this year, when Eugene Ballet was one of only two Oregon organizations to receive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

As befits the first Pacific Northwest choreographer to receive a National Endowment for the Arts choreography grant, Pimble is rushing around like a madwoman, often choreographing in motels, and having plenty of opportunity to observe the ballet scene in America. She finds it quite impressive.

"If you think about it," she says, "the oldest ballet company in America is a little over fifty years old. Today, there are well over fifty professional companies with choreographers creating work all the time. Fifty years ago, how many choreographers were there? Not that many. I don't think there is a crisis. I think it's phenomenal what's going on today."

Martha Ullman West, Dance Magazine correspondent in Oregon, is a frequent contributor on the performing arts to several publications.