LOVE AFFAIR WITH BALLET AIDS DANCE

Suzanne Townsend was not about to let anything scuttle the San Diego Arts Foundation’s season opener set for tonight.

Only weeks ago, Townsend, the foundation’s director, thought that all systems were go for its fourth season of dance. Two big-name companies--the Joffrey Ballet and the biggest of all, American Ballet Theatre--had been signed, and the Feld Ballet was to make its San Diego debut.

Then, on Nov. 1, Columbia Artists Management International Inc., Feld’s management company, telephoned and said it looked like the tour might be canceled. The contracts for dates at UC Riverside, El Camino College and Palm Springs were incomplete, Townsend said, and one by one, each had dropped out.

Over the weekend of Nov. 2 and 3, furious negotiations took place in which UCLA, the final stop on the tour, was told it would cost an additional $35,000 to get the program and the full company of dancers originally scheduled. UCLA did not have the money, so the tour was canceled.

As the newest and largest presenter of professional ballet in San Diego, the Arts Foundation was in a different position. “I needed to have a show in the Civic Theatre on Nov. 22 and 23,” Townsend said.

With Feld’s executive director, she worked out a deal to bring the company to San Diego for two evening performances and a matinee. Townsend is pleased with the compromise deal she struck, although not overjoyed that it puts her 20% over budget. The Arts Foundation does not have the support of a major foundation or university.

Townsend’s determination to bring the Feld Ballet to San Diego is typical of her style. At a sleek 5 feet, 11 inches tall, Townsend, 42, looks more like someone photographer Richard Avedon might pose with a boa constrictor than the head of an arts organization with a $1-million budget. She is loaded with energy.

Only six years ago, Townsend was teaching aerobic dancing and knew little about ballet other than what she had learned at the few performances she had seen with her children.

“I really was a beach bum almost until my mid-30s,” she said. Yet she had skills she was not using. In 1979, Townsend chaired an aerobic dance-a-thon that raised $54,000 for the Old Globe Theatre’s construction fund. “What was required in putting that event together is really no different than what’s required in doing what I do here. You have to get a facility, arrange for the sound equipment, do the publicity, get this, get that.

“I said there must be a kind of job where these skills are useful,” Townsend recalled. Shortly after the Old Globe fund-raiser, she was asked by a neighbor to join the board of directors of the struggling San Diego Ballet. Townsend became an interim business manager and then assistant manager, working partly for pay but mostly on a voluntary basis.

Meanwhile she was falling “madly in love” with ballet. “To me it’s a perfect art form. I have a fascination with the human body and form. Ballet is a wonderful blend of the two aspects of the human being--dealing with the physical side . . . and putting it frequently in an intellectual or emotional context. The spiritual and the physical. No other art form brings that all together quite so wonderfully for me.”

Until she was let go along with other workers for the now-inactive San Diego Ballet, Townsend learned on the job how to write grants and press releases, and a lot more about how to run--and not to run--an arts organization, “I felt that working in the arts is an excellent place for a generalist. I don’t have any one great talent at all. If I have any talent, it’s bringing all the pieces together.”

Upset over having been fired by the troupe, Townsend made a commitment that “I was going to make a bigger contribution to dance in this community than anybody else who was involved with the San Diego Ballet.” She volunteered her services as a manager to the new Three’s Company, immediately writing a grant to fund her position. Townsend wrangled a deal with the UC San Diego drama department in which the Three’s Company dancers would teach students movement in return for time in Mandeville Hall for dance concerts. And Townsend began presenting two concerts a year by outside dance troupes for Three’s Company, lining up performances by the Lewitzky Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble.

She later bumped into arts activist and patron Danah Fayman at an arts meeting in Sacramento. Fayman told her she would love to bring the main Alvin Ailey company to town, and that, Townsend said, was the birth of the San Diego Arts Foundation, of which Fayman is now president of the board of directors.

The Arts Foundation launched its first season in 1983, presenting Pilobolus, Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp and the Joffrey. Despite a nearly disastrous summer season a year ago involving the Australian Circus Oz, the Negro Ensemble Company and the Japanese Sankaijuku dance troupe, Townsend and the foundation have had three successful years. Nationally, the earned income--as opposed to contributed funds--for groups that present dancers is 50% of budget. Earned income for the Arts Foundation is 70% to 75%, a figure Townsend has achieved by being “very lean” on the administrative side.

For the past three years, the San Diego Arts Foundation has received the California Arts Council’s largest grant for such groups. This year, to build a solid base and to afford bringing the American Ballet Theatre to San Diego, the foundation will present only three mainstream ballet companies plus a concert of pieces by local dance companies. Townsend hopes to next year bring in three ballet companies and three contemporary dance companies. She plans to eventually have a series of one-night concerts of avant-garde troupes in smaller venues such as the Old Globe or the new Lyceum Theatre.

Tonight San Diegans will see the Feld Ballet for the first time here, albeit not the full company--fewer than 20 dancers will perform in San Diego. But, Townsend said, these will not be “stripped down” versions of the ballets. “They chose the repertory pieces that used the same dancers,” and the fare will be representative Eliot Feld choreography, she said.

“I must bring these companies to San Diego,” Townsend said. “It’s obviously important to the community because the community supports very much what we’re doing. I suppose I need to do what I’m doing in much the same way that Bella (Lewitzky) needs to make a choreography or somebody else needs to paint a painting. I wouldn’t say I’m driven . . . I am exceptionally determined, however.”