Bucking the Odds With Positive Action

Even in an era of new hope for arts support, starting a dance company is a high-risk endeavor. But Danielle Shapiro is bravely bucking the odds.

A New Yorker who came to the Southland a year ago, Shapiro is the latest person to form a modern dance company in the City of the Angels.

“Instead of withering away, I decided I’d better do something,” she said recently.

Her new eight-member Pacific Dance Ensemble performed its first concerts recently at the University of Judaism and drew approximately 300 people, mostly friends and friends of friends, she said.

What is Shapiro--or anyone trying to start such a new venture--up against?

One thing, of course, is having enough money to survive long enough to draw attention.

The two concerts at Gindi Auditorium cost Shapiro $13,000, some $3,000 over her original budget. Of that, donations from friends and acquaintances accounted for about $3,000; box-office sales brought another $2,400, she said.

The rest of the money came from her family but was “mostly my money,” she said. “I got two extra jobs to do this.”

The net loss put her in a bad position, however. “I can’t produce another concert for a while,” she said. “I don’t have enough money.”

The story sounds familiar. Bonnie Oda Homsey left the Martha Graham Dance Company--where she was a principal--to found Los Angeles Dance Theater in 1978.

She anted-up $8,000 of her savings to launch a repertory company that would present contemporary choreography and historic modern dance works such as reconstructions of Doris Humphrey’s “Day on Earth” and Ruth St. Denis’ “Salome.” But in 1982, Homsey disbanded the company.

Not getting grants, she said, “was crucial.”

“Initially, the hardest part for me was the administrative and the fund-raising challenges. I literally did not know how to get bookings for the company,” she said.

“I was totally unprepared for the amount of work that had to go into writing (grants) and the whole art of grantsmanship. . . . “If I had been able to get certain grants for administrative support and for one or two key pieces, it would have helped my company get over the hump,” Homsey said. “But I didn’t get that funding.”

More successful has been Mary Jane Eisenberg, who formed her company, Shale, in 1980. (She changed the name to the Mary Jane Eisenberg Company earlier this year.) Eisenberg solved the money problem by imposing restrictions on herself.

“Initially, I didn’t have any money for many years other than what we took in at the door--and every penny that didn’t go for my rent,” she said. “That’s what paid for the company.

“You find ways of doing it that way--for costuming, music, whatever. I knew we only had so much money. So I always kept it within my range. I didn’t get majorly frustrated.”

Like Homsey, Shapiro decided to form a company with a distinctive profile: Hers is a repertory company that draws on the work of a number of choreographers.

“I’m very supportive of other people’s work, and rather than choreograph--which is not my drive--I’d rather support other choreographers’ works,” Shapiro said. “I definitely want to represent a lot of different choreographers’ work, contemporary viewpoints and as broad a range as possible, but new work, something that hasn’t been done in quite the same way before.”

Her feeling is that Los Angeles in particular has not seen such work. But that kind of attitude can get her into trouble.

She has encountered some resentment for being an out-of-towner on a self-appointed mission to educate the locals and for her choice of three New York choreographers--Barbara Allen, Ann Elizabeth Law and Mark Taylor--out of four for her program. (The fourth was Los Angeles-based Gilberte Meunier).

“Yes, I’ve gotten that from a few people,” she said. “But that is not the point at all. The point is to put on a good concert and expose people to good choreography. It doesn’t matter where a person is from. I just happen to have these New York connections.”

Shapiro said that she looked around for Los Angeles choreographers, but “I don’t know their work. A year is just not enough time. . . . I wanted a fifth piece, and couldn’t find one.”

Finding adequate and affordable venues for dance also has been a problem for Shapiro. Her search for a theater and rehearsal space took her from downtown Los Angeles to Mulholland Drive.

“I knew I wouldn’t find the same resources as in New York,” she said. “I know it’s bleak here.

“In New York, there is the Dance Theater Workshop, which has a theater, rehearsal space, a mailing list and which will channel donations for companies.

“In Los Angeles, there is no organization that does that. Dance Resource Center only provides a mailing list and a nonprofit permit for bulk mailing--and that’s it.” (The Dance Resource Center of Greater Los Angeles is a service organization for the dance community, formed in 1987 to replace the wider-ranging Los Angeles Area Dance Alliance--LAADA--which collapsed a year earlier.)

The future is a bit uncertain. Shapiro has formed no board of directors, hired no company manager, nor even incorporated as a nonprofit corporation.

“I don’t want to make that huge commitment to the government before I know even if this is feasible,” she said. “But you have to start somewhere.”

Eisenberg’s advice to Shapiro is to “stick with it.”

“It’s not ever particularly easy,” Eisenberg said. “There are a lot of aspects to running a dance company that you have to be fully on top of all the time. It takes huge amounts of energy. But it’s not really difficult. It’s not mysterious, really. It’s just having the time and the energy to be able to do all of that.”

Some local critics chided Shapiro’s first concerts for not venturing the experimental work she claimed would be the hallmark of her company.

Shapiro responded: “It’s always difficult to find a balance between the sort of risky, more avant-garde, critically acclaimed work and work that will appeal to the people who pay and make donations. You have to find a balance or find what direction to take to get financial support. . . .

“I think a tough thing will be enduring through time. This was a short period of a big splash. The harder thing will be enduring disappointment over time.”