Downtown Dance Gallery Takes Step Nearer Reality

With the signing Wednesday of an agreement between the Dance Gallery, the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles and Bunker Hill Associates, Bella Lewitzky’s dream of building “a nurturing place for dance” took a major step toward realization.

The agreement, signed at a CRA meeting in the Hotel Tokyo downtown, implements a 1981 agreement that made Lewitzky’s Dance Gallery an integral part of the 11.2-acre, $1.2-billion California Plaza project on Bunker Hill.

Revised and amended eight times since 1981, the agreement signs over the $2-million site at 4th Street and Grand Avenue to the Dance Gallery and coordinates the construction schedule of the four-story, mostly subterranean $18-million facility with the construction of the central plaza and an office building. It also releases a 10-year CRA loan of $5.5 million to the Dance Gallery--provided that all funds for the completion of the project are in place by June 30.

According to Executive Director Arline Chambers, Dance Gallery is $5 million short of its fund-raising goal of $20 million--an amount that includes a $2-million endowment for initial production and operating costs. Consequently, she speaks of the next four months as the “make or break” time for the project.

“It lives or dies in ‘88,” she says, explaining that major fund raising has been hampered by a condition in the agreement that construction cannot begin until all the money needed is received.

“It’s very difficult when you’re selling air,” she exclaims. “I was general manager of the Orange County Performing Arts Center through the construction. I know what happens when you take potential donors onto a site and there is a girder, a crane, a shovel, a beginning of something.”

Jim Wood, chairman of the seven-member Community Redevelopment Agency, says the demand for all the money up-front comes from “an attempt to protect the public investment in this project and limit it to the $5.5 million.”

“If it’s partially under construction, but they don’t have all of the money, there would be a tremendous pressure on the agency to come up with the rest,” he says.

“We have found ourselves dealing with the Dance Gallery from the experience of having dealt with the L.A. Theatre Center where we were forced to put funds into the actual operation.

“We were faced there with a building under construction and had to come in subsequently (to subsidize the project),” he continues. “We have found ourselves every year having to put a million dollars into the L.A. Theatre Center. We won’t do that again. We have no intention of subsidizing the operation of the Dance Gallery.

“Ours is a construction loan. I want to make that very clear. It’s going to be up to them to keep the community involved and supporting them so they can keep the doors open.”

For all his caution, Wood insists he is optimistic that the Dance Gallery will meet its June 30 deadline. “I don’t see any reason to speculate on what will happen if they don’t,” he says.

“I believe that Barbara Bain (president of the gallery board of trustees) and Bella Lewitzky are two of the most tenacious fund-raisers I have ever met. I also believe that (real estate attorney) Fred Nicholas is a proven fund-raiser. The Museum of Contemporary Art is one of his most striking success stories. I think he can do for MOCA’s neighbor, the Dance Gallery, what he did for MOCA.”

Nicholas is the president of the Hapsmith Company, a real estate development firm. He chaired the building committee for MOCA and is chairman of the building committee for Disney Hall, the new Music Center expansion project. He is confident that the Dance Gallery is well on its way to becoming a reality. “Based on my involvement and what I’ve seen, I’m positive the deal is a go,” he says.

However, working out the details in the new agreement between the Dance Gallery, Bunker Hill Associates and the CRA has been very difficult, Nicholas says, “because part of the money that the Dance Gallery has raised is in the form of pledges to be paid out over a period of 2 to 4 years. And the problem has been how do you convert pledges into dollars before the pledges are due?”

Nicholas’ long involvement with the project makes him equally likely to offer the founders praise (“I think that at the present time the Dance Gallery is in better shape than at any time since it started the whole process”) and criticism.

He points out, for example, that the Gallery sought out professional fund-raising help only last March and that this delay was a factor in the postponement of the project as a whole. “I don’t think the fund raising was organized properly,” he explains. “It wasn’t institutionalized like you have to do in any nonprofit organization. You have to get a lot of people into the process. You have to get professional help; you can’t do it with amateurs.”

Bain disagrees: “In the early days, we interviewed any number of (fund-raising) professionals and, generally speaking, they didn’t seem capable of doing much more than we were already doing in our fashion,” she says.

To Bain, a key part of the fund-raising problem has been public confusion about what the Dance Gallery is intended to be.

“Unlike the Museum of Contemporary Art, the title doesn’t tell you what it is,” she says. “We have to simultaneously define ourselves as we are raising the funds.

“Because Bella was the creator of it, people have assumed at various stages along the way that we’re only building a studio or a theater for her company. The project is brought down to something smaller than it is.”

Bain and Lewitzky describe the four major components in the Dance Gallery master plan:

--A 1,000-seat theater with sight lines, wing-space and stage flooring designed especially for dance. The theater can be closed down to 600 seats so, as Bain explains, “new choreographers won’t be lost in an empty house.” There are also two other performance areas: a studio-theater that can serve as a 75- to 99-seat house and an outdoor dance space seating approximately 300.

--A dance library, the core of which is the extensive archives of dance historian Ruth Clark Lert. Although Lewitzky says she has always felt that “history makes an art form literate,” this is one component of the Dance Gallery that was not originally planned. “I’m not sure I would have gone into a research library without having this initial extensive and invaluable collection offered,” she says.

--A resident dance company, initially to be the 13-member Lewitzky ensemble, formed in 1966. The company will perform at the gallery for two weeks annually and company members will also be involved in its teaching activities.

--An educational institute, offering ongoing training for professional dancers and choreographers as well as classes for children and non-professionals. Special outreach programs for minority communities in the city are planned and the institute will also incorporate a state-of-the-art physical therapy room, rehearsal spaces as well as video and audio labs.

“There will be dance management classes, dance lighting, costuming--everything to do with making dance,” Bain says. “And if kids are taking class there, they will be exposed to all the companies coming in and they will have master classes with them.”

These will be modern dance master classes, for the most part. Lewitzky acknowledges that there are “innumerable wonderful ballet teachers in Los Angeles, but it is very difficult to find a continuous kind of sequential training program in modern, except in a very few places.” The gallery institute will attempt to address that problem.

Lewitzky’s primary interest in the institute, however, relates to her role as choreographer and artistic director of a company.

“I don’t think you can run a company without having a school, a training ground,” she says. “I’ve always believed that rather firmly.

“In addition, there has been an investment in my training by any number of people that I value highly. They left a legacy with me and, in all modesty, I think I have also have been able to contribute to it. I have no interest in taking all these secrets to the grave; I would love to be able to share them.

“I have always trained my company members to be teachers because, long before ‘Alternative Careers’ became a buzzword in dance, I’d lived in this field long enough to know that you have got to prepare for the day when the body says, ‘That’s it.’ ”

Lewitzky traces her idea for the Dance Gallery to the mid-’70s when she served a three-year stint as vice chair of the dance panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. “It gave me a national overview that I think is not possible to get unless you are in a national position,” she recalls.

“I realized that the companies that were springing up like mushrooms were going to far outweigh the amount of funds available to them. I knew dance companies had, like theater before them, to come off the road, to rely less on touring and find homes for themselves.

“I had behind me a very nurturing history of a home for dance in a very modest way with Lester Horton’s Dance Theater in Los Angeles (founded in 1948). I knew what it did to develop both audience and artists. We had a school connected with it. The audience for dance in Los Angeles then was very small, but it began to build.

“So these two experiences formed the nucleus of momentum for what I felt was logical: a home space for dance.”

The idea started out more modest than it has become, she says, but developed “as the dance field itself has broadened and grown. Things sort of happened.”

Four years ago, the Dance Gallery organization co-produced the dance events at the Olympic Arts Festival. Lewitzky considers that experience a preview of the kind of programming Los Angeles should expect when the 100,000-foot facility opens sometime in 1990.

“The excitement of the initial programming will be high and carry everyone through,” she predicts. “Next comes the battle: Can we really be brave and daring and experimental?

“The presentation of a festival is a relatively safe thing to do--there’s a certain amount of excitement that happens around it. The point that’s going to be difficult is sustaining an interest in that which is less acceptable, dance that doesn’t have glamour, that is venturesome and needs to be seen. That will be a challenge. But if we cannot afford to do that, I don’t what the building is for.

“Right now the greatest problem is certainly the capital (construction) campaign,” she says, expressing the hope that a single donor will contribute the last $5 million. (The plan is for the Dance Gallery to be named after this major donor, just as various spaces in the facility have already been named for those individuals and corporations underwriting them.)

She confesses to some frustration with the accelerating costs and frequent delays. “It’s just never-ending,” she says. “It’s much easier making a dance. Everybody wants to build a hospital because they are pretty sure they are going to be in it sooner or later. It’s hard to convince them they’ll be in it later if they put up an arts building.”

However, Lewitzky is adamant that “the dream is not the building. The dream is the program and sometimes, when the building begins to take precedence, I worry.

“I wish it weren’t a fancy, expensive space but we have to conform to the developer’s look, and that’s understandable,” she continues. “I have always said this is a workplace and we want it to feel and look like a workplace.”

Above all, perhaps, a workplace for Bella Lewitzky? “I believe the rewards are there for me personally,” she admits, “but the need is there far beyond my personal interest. There has just got to be such a place and if we can do it, it can also be done in other cities.”