The Last Dance: How Molly Lynch Built a Ballet Incubator in Irvine and Changed the Art Form

Kaitlin Wright
15 minutes ago
7 min read

For 35 years, the National Choreographers Initiative gave ballet makers something almost no one else would: time, space and permission to fail. On July 25, it takes its final bow.

Dancers take a bow at the conclusion of a piece during the 2025 National Choreographers Initiative showcase at Irvine Barclay Theatre. Photo courtesy of NCI/Skye Varga

Molly Lynch, founder and artistic director of the National Choreographers Initiative (NCI), will tell you she didn't plan for it to become what it did.

Molly Lynch, founder and artistic director of the National Choreographers Initiative, which presents its final performance at Irvine Barclay Theatre on July 25. Photo courtesy of NCI

Not the 136 choreographers. Not the 185-plus dancers who traveled from 60 companies across the country to spend three weeks in Irvine every July. Not the alumni who went on to run their own ballet companies, or the pieces that traveled from a UCI studio to stages at Richmond Ballet, Smuin Contemporary Ballet and Milwaukee Ballet. Not the web of professional relationships that spread quietly outward from Orange County for 35 years.

"The networking that has gone on with this has been just pretty phenomenal," Lynch said. "The web of connections and networking is way bigger than I ever thought it would be."

On July 25, National Choreographers Initiative takes its final bow at the Irvine Barclay Theatre with a performance called “The Last Dance.” Four choreographers – Sarah Tallman, Julia Feldman, Emily Adams and DaYoung Jung, all women, all NCI alumni – will present new works-in-progress created over three weeks with 16 professional dancers from companies across the country.

A post-show reception on the Barclay patio replaces the program's traditional Q&A, swapping discussion for something more befitting a farewell: light bites, mingling and the chance for an audience to say goodbye to something that mattered.

"I don't want it to be a sad thing in any way," Lynch said. "We're looking at it in an upbeat way, as a celebration."

Dancers perform a piece by Glenn Edgerton during the 2025 National Choreographers Initiative showcase at Irvine Barclay Theatre. Photos courtesy of NCI/Skye Varga

A Play Reading, But for Ballet

To understand what Lynch built, it helps to go back to 1985 and to a theater company in Costa Mesa that had nothing to do with dance.

That year, South Coast Repertory launched NewSCRipts, a play-reading series built around a simple idea: Let playwrights hear their work-in-progress aloud, in front of an audience, before it was finished. Over four decades, plays that passed through NewSCRipts went on to become Pulitzer Prize winners and Broadway productions.

Lynch, then running Ballet Pacifica, Orange County's only professional ballet company, recognized something she had never seen offered to choreographers: a laboratory with no consequences. In 1991 she launched the Pacifica Choreographic Project, staging early showings in the very theater where NewSCRipts held its readings.

"It was sort of modeled after their play readings," she said. "And I'm proud of the fact that David Emmes still comes to NCI and sees what's going on." Emmes, SCR's co-founding artistic director, has been a quiet witness to the program he inspired.

"I started it not knowing whether it was going to work," Lynch said. "So I told myself I'd give it a try (independently) for three to five years."

Since moving to the Barclay, it's been 22.

Dancers perform a work by Makino Hayashi during the 2025 National Choreographers Initiative showcase at Irvine Barclay Theatre. Photo courtesy of NCI/Skye Varga

The Studio, the Stage and the Proof

The structure of NCI has barely changed since its inception. Four choreographers, 16 dancers, three weeks, one showing. Lynch does not ask for proposals. There is no mandate to finish.

"I want them to feel like they can try whatever they want to try," she said. "They can just see what the day brings."

To choreographers working inside American ballet companies – where Nutcrackers pay the bills and new works must justify their costs before choreography begins – this kind of freedom is genuinely rare.

"Every time I'm going to set a piece or create something, it's like, OK, you have five days," said Emily Adams, a principal dancer and choreographer at Ballet West who participated in NCI in 2022 and returns this year.

"Sometimes you just need to get through a bunch of bad ideas to find the good one. And if you don't have the chance to take risks, you can't really grow."

The results have traveled. Ma Cong came to NCI in 2008, created a piece called “French Twist” during his three weeks in Irvine. Smuin Ballet picked it up. But the bigger ripple came from the dancers he'd worked with at NCI, some of them from Richmond Ballet, who brought his name back to their artistic director. He was eventually invited to create for the company. He is now its artistic director.

Adams' own story is more recent. The piece she developed at NCI in 2022, “Mass Hysterical,” a work about group psychology set to an original score by her frequent collaborator Katy Jarzebowski, was unfinished when Ballet West's artistic director attended the showing, but he saw enough. He commissioned the work for the main stage, where it premiered in 2025. Adams kept roughly 60 to 65 percent of what she'd made in Irvine.

"I saw parts where I was like, that is chaos, Emily, calm down," she said. "And then there were some sections I almost kept completely the way they were because I liked them so much."

The NCI showing had done something a studio rehearsal never could: Put the work on a stage and let Adams see it from a distance.

"I knew which things worked on stage and which things maybe didn't look the way I hoped," she said. "Up close that looks cool. Far away you don't even notice it."

PHOTO 1: Dancers perform Sarah Tallman's “The Door In The Wall” during the 2015 National Choreographers Initiative showcase. PHOTO 2: Dancers perform Julia Feldman's “Wherever We Go” during the 2019 National Choreographers Initiative showcase. Photos courtesy of NCI/Dave Friedman

What Else Exists – and What Doesn't

Programs designed to develop new choreography have multiplied in recent years: Jacob's Pillow's Pillow Lab, the New York Choreographic Institute affiliated with New York City Ballet, ABT's Incubator launched in 2018. Lynch notes the growth without taking credit for it.

"There's definitely more programs now than there were when we started," she said. "That's a good thing."

But what Lynch built was structurally different. Most programs are in-house – company dancers, company walls, company boards setting the terms. NCI was always independent, always cross-company and always open to the public. No parent institution to answer to. No imperative to produce something stageworthy.

"They all have boards of directors and they have to satisfy those boards as far as content and schedule," said Bobbi Cox, a longtime NCI donor and advisory committee member who has attended nearly every showing in the program's history. "It's not the freedom to do what you do at NCI. Here it's just: Try anything, do anything."

Cox, who supports numerous dance organizations throughout Orange County, doesn't see any of them positioned to fill the gap.

"Each year is different and fresh and full of anticipation," she said. "It reflects so much of what's going on in the world at the time, in the arts at that time, in the personal lives of the people involved. They're moments in time."

Lynch believes something will eventually emerge – maybe different, maybe elsewhere. But it is, she noted with quiet pride, a gap that opened here.

"It's right here in Southern California," she said. "Not in New York City."

PHOTO 1: Sarah Tallman, choreographer and ballet master at Wonderbound, presents new work at NCI's final showcase on July 25. PHOTO 2: Julia Feldman, company artist with Sacramento Ballet, first participated in NCI in 2019. PHOTO 3: Emily Adams, principal dancer and choreographer at Ballet West, developed "Mass Hysterical" at NCI in 2022 before premiering it on the Ballet West main stage in 2025. PHOTO 4: DaYoung Jung, former principal dancer with Oklahoma City Ballet and current rehearsal director, most recently participated in NCI in 2024. Photos courtesy of NCI

Going for the Gold

The decision to end NCI was not made lightly. Lynch and her advisory committee weighed the familiar pressures shadowing every small arts nonprofit: rising costs, a shrinking donor base and the difficulty of rebuilding after a pandemic the arts are still recovering from. When she noticed that the Irvine Barclay Theatre would be celebrating its 35th season – the same milestone NCI could claim counting back to Ballet Pacifica's 1991 Choreographic Project – the timing felt right.

"I don't want to just have it kind of fizzle," she said. "I think we should go out on a high note."

For this final edition, Lynch made one deliberate choice: All four choreographers are women. The gender gap in ballet choreography and company leadership is well documented, and addressing it had been part of Lynch's mission from the start.

"I decided this year we were going to go for the gold and have four women," she said.

The four span a decade of NCI cohorts: Tallman (2015), a ballet master at Wonderbound; Feldman (2019), a Sacramento Ballet artist with works premiering this year at Smuin, Joffrey and Milwaukee Ballet; Adams (2022); and Jung (2024), a former Oklahoma City Ballet principal now choreographing nationally. Each is creating entirely new work.

Adams was candid about the creative tension.

"Last time I felt like I had to have a finished ballet," she said. "I'm a little more willing to experiment and not feel like I have to prove myself."

Her new piece explores what she calls "the psyche of a ballet dancer" – including a section she's described as "a ballet nightmare."

PHOTO 1: Dancers perform Emily Adams' “Mass Hysterical” during the 2022 National Choreographers Initiative showcase. PHOTO 2: Dancers perform DaYoung Jung's “Fleeting” during the 2024 National Choreographers Initiative showcase. Photos courtesy of NCI/Dave Friedman

The Ripple Effect

Cox was asked what she hopes Molly Lynch hears from the audience on July 25. She answered without hesitating.

"Standing ovation and thank you," she said. Then: "And pass the Kleenex."

Lynch keeps returning to the thing she didn't plan: the web. The dancers who became choreographers, the choreographers who became directors, the connections made in a California studio that rippled across the country for 35 years.

She isn't going anywhere – she'll continue teaching at UCI's Claire Trevor School of the Arts, and has fielded requests to consult and mentor others looking to build programs of their own.

"Maybe there's a new chapter," she said.

Emily Adams, for one, has no doubt about the chapter that’s already written.

"There's just this web that is spread out all across the country and maybe even the world from Molly," she said. "And she's so humble, she's perfectly happy just kind of being in the background."

Right here in Southern California. For 35 years.