Making Overtures : Ballet: Pasadena-born dancer and his wife take steps to fill a void and establish the area’s first professional company since the demise of the Los Angles Ballet in 1984.

PASADENA —  Today, most talented young ballet school graduates from Pasadena don’t have much choice: Either give up their dreams of turning professional, or move.

“There’s a lot of dance in the Los Angeles area, but no professional ballet company,” says Charles Fuller, executive director of the Pasadena Dance Theatre, whose alumni have populated the ranks of most of the country’s prestige dance companies for 14 years.

Now, ballet dancer Charles Maple, a Pasadena native recently returned from Europe, and ballerina Gilma Bustillo, Maple’s wife, are talking about starting a professional ballet company in Pasadena. It’s the missing ingredient in the city’s cultural salad, contends Maple, 39, a trim, energetic man with an air of insistent optimism.

“We’ve got the (Pasadena) Playhouse, we’ve got symphony orchestras, we’ve got auditoriums--there’s a lot going on here,” Maple said.

But no professional dance.

Maple, who was preparing last week for this weekend’s opening of the Pasadena Dance Theatre’s production of “The Nutcracker,” in which he plays the Cavalier and Bustillo plays the Sugar Plum Fairy, can testify from personal experience.

After graduating from Pasadena’s John Muir High School and studying at the Pasadena Dance Theatre and UCLA, Maple was recruited by the American Ballet Theatre in New York, where he became a soloist. A principal dancer for eight years with the Basel Ballet of Switzerland, he has appeared with ballet companies all over the world.

“This school is a hotbed of training for professional dancers,” Maple said on Tuesday, relaxing in a rehearsal room at Le Studio on Villa Street, the training wing of the Dance Theatre. “But the students end up having to go to New York, or San Francisco even, if they’d like to stay here.”

Maple and Bustillo’s idea is to create a professional extension of the Dance Theatre, beginning small, with six or eight dancers and a six-month season, using arts grants and philanthropies to start. The company would seek to train not only dancers, but set and costume designers.

Its mission would be to raise interest in dance in the Los Angeles area, which has not had a professional ballet company since 1984, when the Los Angeles Ballet went under after 11 troubled years.

Until last year, the Joffrey Ballet considered Los Angeles its second home. The Joffrey served for nine years as the resident company at the Music Center. But the company headquarters has always been in New York, and its current season included only one week of performances in Los Angeles.

“Much smaller places have professional ballet companies with 15 or 20 dancers,” Maple said. “How is it that Jackson, Miss., can support a ballet company and we can’t do it here?”

For the moment, Maple and Bustillo are preoccupied with “The Nutcracker,” Tchaikovsky’s beloved holiday fantasy, which opened Saturday at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium for 10 performances through Dec. 20.

For the past month and a half, the couple has been rehearsing the challenging second-act pas de deux .

First, they run through the routine from start to finish. There’s a gliding, sweepingly romantic duet, with the pair coming together in the middle of the room and Maple lifting the long-limbed Bustillo high off the ground.

There’s a Maple solo--a brisk, athletic dance, with swooping, slam-dunk leaps--and then Bustillo by herself, in a gracefully reckless dash across the floor, ending in a series of four running spins. Finally, the two dance together in a short, formal coda.

The sequence, which they perform without pause, leaves Bustillo bent over, her hands on her knees, gasping for breath, and Maple circling the room like a runner who has just completed a four-minute mile.

“Part of the reason for the rehearsal is to build up stamina,” Maple says. “It’s like a runner doing slow runs, fast runs and high jumps.”

The other part is getting it right. After the run-through, the two dancers critique themselves, recalling a rough spot or two and doing some polishing.

“Our first pirouette--that was our first disaster,” says Maple. “You got off on the wrong foot.”

Being married to your partner can help the performance, Bustillo says.

“You can say things in the most direct way (to each other),” she says. “I’ve seen couples scream and fight and throw things at each other. But we work very well together. We’re pretty honest with each other.”

The two, who recently left the Hamburg Ballet after three years, talk about dance with evangelical zeal, fervidly throwing around ideas about making the art more accessible to average citizens.

Maple--who now spends more time as a choreographer than as a dancer--wants to hold dance festivals and choreography competitions in Pasadena, maybe a summer outdoor event, with dancers young and old coming together in a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Bustillo would like to see dance rehearsals opened to the public, as the Hamburg Ballet used to do it under director John Neumeier.

“He would put on Sunday matinees for less than the price of a movie,” Bustillo said. “No lights or makeup or costumes. The dancers would be in practice clothes, and we often didn’t know what he would ask us to do. The audience might get to see a dancer learning a role or learning new steps.”

The idea, said Maple, is to give audiences a greater sophistication about dance--”not only about the pretty stuff at the end, but the process of getting there.”

So far, there has been some interest among arts-minded philanthropists in the idea of a professional company, but Maple and Bustillo are still “planting seeds around the community,” Maple said.

They are not intimidated by the gloomy economic picture, which is straining the resources of most arts projects.

“It’s a perfect time to do this,” Maple said. “Buy low, sell high, right?”