Rite of (Northwest Passage).

Five years ago Ballet Oregon and Pacific Ballet Theatre joined forces to become Oregon Ballet Theatre. Under the artistic directorship of James Canfield the company is becoming a valued cultural institution in the Northwest.

Oregon Ballet Theatre opened its fifth season with "A Tribute to Dennis Spaight," a program honoring the company's late resident choreographer who died last year. The program included his Scheherazade, Gloria, and Rhapsody in Blue and was accompanied by live music, a goal OBT has been trying to reach since it was established in 1989.

The repertoire of this anniversary season typifies artistic director James Canfield's vision for this company, which is, quite simply. to present classical ballet as well as can be done on a limited budget, make use of community resources - artists, musicians, and designers - in the production of new work, and provide a venue for innovative American choreographers.

A new $1.2-million production of The Nutcracker was considered by Canfield to be the centerpiece of the season. With sets and costumes designed by Campbell Baird in a Russian Imperial theme, this Nutcracker was the single most expensive show ever produced by a Portland arts institution.

"We are celebrating our fifth anniversary by giving the community a new Nutcracker so the audience can see the level we aspire to all the time," Canfield says. In March a retrospective of Canfield's work was presented, and May brought the project that is closest to his heart - the fourth American Choreographers Showcase, which included new, commissioned works by Karole Armitage, Bebe Miller, and Toni Pimble.

When Ballet Oregon and Pacific Ballet Theatre were consolidated to become Oregon Ballet Theatre in 1989, after years of rivalry that had dried up funding and annoyed the community, Canfield said in a press conference that the company's greatest assets were in its repertoire. The lavish Nutcracker and the previous season's Donald Byrd piece, Cracked Narrative, are representative of the approach to repertoire that the thirty-two-year-old Canfield insists on for the company. (The former Joffrey principal and his longtime partner Patricia Miller had arrived on the Portland ballet scene in 1985 to become principals with Pacific Ballet. In 1986 Canfield became artistic director, replacing Gregory Smith, who had led the company since 1983.) In his short tenure as artistic director of OBT, Canfield has forged an ensemble repertory company that can handle a number of classically based styles and is beginning to learn some contemporary and modem technique.

Canfield's own choreography, which accounts for a large portion of the fifty or so works in the repertoire, relies heavily on contemporary music, glitzy production values, and sexual energy, and it can be both repetitious and uneven. But two short works, Drifted in a Deeper Land and Anais, presented in March, showed considerable growth both in craftsmanship and versatility. With Degas Impressions in May 1992, Canfield had shown his command of romantic style.

Evening-length works are another matter. Although Canfield's Romeo and Juliet demonstrates his skill as a classical choreographer and the company performs both it and the second act of Swan Lake well, he remains reluctant to stage anything requiring a corps de ballet. With a small number of dancers and a fledgling company school, directed by Haydee Gutierrez, it will take a few more years to acquire the schooled look that Petipa ballets, even restaged in pared-down fashion, demand. The only other evening-length work actively in the repertoire is The Nutcracker, which Canfield has rechoreographed

Spaight, formerly artistic director of Ballet Oregon (which was founded by Keith Martin in 1979 as the Northwest Repertory Dance Company), was also responsible for a large portion of OBT's repertoire. His choreography was markedly different from Canfield's; it was often set to classical music and took a more intellectual approach. His 1991 season opener for the company, a fifteen-minute piece set to Debussy's Danses Sacree et Profane, was lovely to watch, with its references to Botticelli's paintings in both its movement and David Heuvel's costumes. Spaight's Scheherazade, which opened the company's 1990 season, was another visual treat, with a luminous set by local painter Henk Pander and costumes by Portland's most outre costume designer, the late Ric Young.

OBT had concluded its 1993 season with its third American Choreographers Showcase, a program that not only reflected Canfield's vision for the company but was also rooted in his own background with Joffrey Ballet, where he and Miller, both of whom were trained by Mary Day of Washington Ballet, created roles in Gerald Arpino's ballets and danced in that company's eclectic repertoire. Canfield has often stated that he is not trying to create a mini-Joffrey in Portland, although Mark Goldweber, formerly of that company, is his ballet master, and Miller was ballet mistress. "My approach to repertoire is the same as the Joffrey's, as well as the all-star, no-star status of the dancers," Canfield says. "We are doing some Balanchine, of course," he adds, "but with San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, we don't need another satellite Balanchine company on the West Coast. I want to hold on to what's going on in America and get recognized for that. And I have to appeal to a wide range of ages, from five to sixty-five."

Last May's Showcase had a program calculated to bring in a wide range of people. Subtitled "Women on the Verge," it included Karole Armitage's Poised on the Edge of Chaos, a fast, hard-driving ballet accompanied by rock music; Bebe Miller's A Certain Depth of Heart, Also Love, a blend of ballet and postmodern movement; and Toni Pimble's neoclassical Quartet in Blue.

OBT is receiving far more community support than its several progenitors ever had - and it is responding with everything it's got. An outreach program has put creative-movement teachers in Head Start programs; the company is active in Young Audiences, which takes ballet into the schools; and there is a Magic of Dance series that takes children to the Civic Auditorium for performances of the repertoire.

Despite the economic recession, reactionary attitudes toward arts funding, and a foolhardy property-tax limitation recently passed by Oregon voters, OBT managed to raise a million dollars for a spectacular and uniquely cohesive production of The Nutcracker. At age five, OBT is the toddler in Portland's family of performing arts institutions: The Oregon Symphony, the oldest in the West, celebrates its centennial in 1995, and the Portland Opera will soon be thirty. But with twenty-three dancers on thirty-two-week contracts, a $4.2 million season budget that includes the Nutcracker costs, more than fifty works, and a cadre of extremely promising young dancers that includes Michael Rios, John Ross, Fabrice Lemine, Tracy Julias, Elizabeth Lewis, and Tracy Taylor, Oregon Ballet seems poised to take its place in Portland's cultural firmament. Those elements - combined with the influx of people into the city from other places where ballet is taken as a given - and with the time and attention that has been paid to community needs and audience demands that Canfield seems to understand so well - indicate that ballet in Portland is here to stay.