S.D. BALLET MASTER HEADS EAST TO UTAH

SAN DIEGO —  John Hart, former ballet master, assistant director of London’s Royal Ballet and a San Diego resident for 15 years, has been named artistic director for Ballet West in Salt Lake City. Hart was San Diego Ballet’s last artistic director before the company ceased operations in 1980.

Hart opened the Utah company’s 1985-86 season Wednesday with the production of three ballets by Sir Frederick Ashton, according to a ballet company spokesman, and will be moving to Utah soon.

Hart moved to San Diego in 1970 after a 32-year career with the Royal Ballet. Here he helped create the dance program at United States International University. In 1979, he left the USIU program to take the reins of the financially troubled San Diego Ballet. But its fiscal difficulties proved insuperable and Hart left within a year without staging a show.

Since then, Hart has maintained a low profile, returning for a brief period with USIU. His terpsichorean handiwork was most recently seen here during the dance sequences of San Diego Opera’s February performance of Franz Lehar’s “The Merry Widow.” In October he will direct the opera’s ballet corps again in Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”

Hart is an exceptional administrator, according to Erling Sunde, head of the USIU dance department and an associate of Hart at the London Ballet. “It was Sol Hurok, I think, who called him the best ballet administrator he had ever come across.”

Hart, 64, worked in several capacities with the Royal Ballet (originally the Vic-Wells Ballet, and later the Sadler’s Wells Ballet). He joined that company in 1938 as a principal dancer, dancing the male leads before he was 20 in “Swan Lake,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Giselle,” “The Nutcracker” and “Coppelia.” After 17 years, he became ballet master, then assistant artistic director and artistic administrator to Ashton.

Hart first came to Ballet West in 1984 as an emissary from Ashton, who wanted to check the company out prior to allowing it to stage his ballets. Later Ashton was chosen to set the ballets in the company’s summer season in Aspen, Colo.

Hart will be joining a company with an operating budget of $3.5 million. It has a four-concert regular season plus a lengthy Christmas production of “The Nutcracker,” an associate company in Phoenix, a touring program and the Aspen summer season.

Last spring it attracted highly favorable notices in the national press in Washington when it revived “Abdallah,” a long-lost ballet by Auguste Bournonville, at the Kennedy Center.

Wednesday night at Salt Lake’s Capitol Theatre, Hart premiered Ashton’s “Les Patineurs,” “Monotones 1 and 2” and “The Dream.”