Bumper Dance Crop Wows Fans but Harvest at Box Office Is Iffy

This city’s dance card has never been busier or more diverse than it is this season. And though the local dance community continues to grow, only a portion of the action on local stages has been generated by home-grown troupes.

Two major presenters--the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts and San Diego Performances, the new kid on the block--packaged 1988-89 seasons featuring a spectrum of internationally known dance troupes.

And filling in most of the cracks left by these two groups are UCSD’s University Events and Sushi, a downtown arts organization committed to cutting-edge dance and performance, emphasizing lesser-known but widely acclaimed dance ensembles and non-mainstream artists.

These four presenters alone will have brought San Diego aficionados a bumper crop of nearly two dozen imported dance events by the time the season comes to a close in June.

Many of the events have come in clusters, with one troupe arriving right on the heels of another, or even overlapping, as did the Joffrey Ballet and the David Gordon Pick Up Company concerts.

Can the local community support such an explosion of big-league dance? Even the folks in the front lines of the dance revolution have their doubts.

“I don’t know if we can support it all,” said Suzanne Townsend, founding director of San Diego Performances.

“But one thing is sure, if you’re going to have this many attractions, the spacing of the events has to be better.”

Until Townsend teamed up with arts angel Danah Fayman to sponsor the first full season of brand-name dance in 1983, San Diego was only an occasional stop on the dance trail. Their maiden effort, with Joffrey Ballet as its centerpiece, was a smash.

The two gurus continued to expand dance horizons on the home front until they parted company about five years later. Each carved her own niche, and for the 1988-89 season alone, they had booked 15 attractions between them.

Townsend brought the big-name dance companies, under the San Diego Performances banner, while Fayman held the fort with the foundation. Instead of fighting it out with Townsend for the high-profile ballet troupes, Fayman forged a path for top-notch but fringe-level modern dance.

But the growth and success did not continue.

Even troupes with household names, such as American Ballet Theatre and Joffrey Ballet, fell short of sell-out crowds in San Diego this season, Townsend acknowledges. And Fayman--with a heavy roster of unfamiliar attractions--found herself unable to fill houses or sustain the full season.

Last winter, to avoid fiscal disaster, Fayman lopped off two of the events scheduled for 1989, drastically cut back her administrative staff and embarked on a major fund-raising effort.

Those actions turned things around for the organization in a hurry, according to the foundation’s interim director Fred Colby.

“We’re deficit-free for the first time in our career, and we’re planning for a new season,” he said. “But we learned that San Diego is not ready for an all avant-garde season. I think next year will probably be a period of adjustment to reestablish a base of strength, but we still have a commitment to bring in some avant-garde events.”

Fayman is convinced the dance scene has reached its saturation point.

“I think it’s too much to expect the community to absorb all this dance,” she said. “We’re going to cut back to four events next year, and only two of them will be dance. I love dance and I always have, but the main idea of the foundation is to expand the picture here.

“At the time we started, there was a big hole. No one was bringing in dance. We want to introduce new things, quality things, that aren’t being brought into San Diego, and we’ll continue to do that. They just may not all be dance.”

Though Townsend expects her 1989-90 season to be down to six events from eight, she blames logistics not economics.

“I’m cutting back a little next season, but it won’t be a major cutback,” she assured. “We still want to bring in things that should be seen in San Diego on an annual basis, like the Joffrey and the ABT.

“It’s rare when you have this much dance available,” she said. “You’re at the mercy of the marketplace, and this year every company we wanted was touring. Some only do the West Coast every other year, so you have to take them when they’re available.”

“I think we went too far too fast,” said California Ballet’s Maxine Mahon. “The ticket-buying public can’t afford to attend everything, and they don’t have time for it all, either. We did OK with our ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ but we had to spend a lot more money promoting it. We knew it would be a busy spring, so we concentrated more on pre-sale (subscriptions). The door sales were not as good.”

At Sushi, the dance calendar will continue to expand next season, according to director Lynne Schuette.

“We’ve had very good attendance for our dance events, and we’re getting more dance proposals for this year. Since we’re happy with the work and the audiences are responding, we’ll keep at it.

“It seems we’ve had better dance audiences than ever this year,” she continued. “All the publicity for other dance concerts hasn’t hurt us. If they like dance, people are trying (Sushi). We have several dancers booked already for the fall season.

“But there’s a gap between the really big presenters and the really small--like us,” she noted. “We need more medium-sized presenters. We’re doing Stephen Petronio (in association with the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art), but I don’t know how much of that we can do on our budget.”

Though the two big budget powerhouses, Townsend and Fayman, have different philosophies as presenters, both agree that their ultimate survival depends on prudent business practices.

“We have to operate in a cold-blooded, business-like manner,” Fayman said. “I believe you can slip in a couple of (esoterics), but you can’t keep asking for charitable support when attendance is low. We may do more commercial programming to help pay for the others. Although we actually raised more money this year than ever, people were reacting to the emergency. We don’t want to be in that position again.”

“It’s an uphill battle all the way,” Townsend said. “Dance tends to be the least subscribed compared to the symphony or the opera. You have to have the name brands to introduce them to dance.”

In an effort to cut costs, the foundation and San Diego Performances have begun to try different approaches. The foundation collaborated with UCSD’s University Events program to sponsor Gordon’s Pick Up Company, and that alliance may be repeated again next year.

“This is an experiment,” Colby said. “We’ll find out how we can cooperate in the future. But we definitely complement each other. We substantially reduced our administrative budget, because UCSD helped with the promotional side.”

As Lynne Peterson of University Events pointed out, “it enabled us to get a big project on campus. Since we don’t have the resources to fund anything like David Gordon on our own budget, it’s a nice merger. As presenters, we try to bring audiences and companies together, so I was tickled to death with this arrangement. We’re always looking for new projects.”

Townsend is toying with the idea of joint-producing with the university next season as well. But her organization is already part of a major network designed to reduce the cost of presenting internationally known dance troupes.

“We’ve had a lot of encouragement (from major grant-givers) for collaborative work,” she said. “As a member of the International Presenting Network, we share the expense of bringing in touring companies with other presenters. It’s a lot more work and a lot of negotiations that way, but you get a good fee, and the overall cost is much lower.”

One of the ongoing problems plaguing local and imported dance alike, is the programming overlap that puts presenters in direct competition with each other for the same audiences. Though the San Diego Area Dance Alliance acts as a clearing house for dance events, conflicts continue to cause concern for audiences and promoters.

Tom Corcoran, executive director of the alliance, acknowledges the need for more monitoring of dance schedules, but noted, “There wasn’t much interest from members in clearing dates through the alliance.”

When availability of space and artists is on a catch-as-catch-can basis--as it so often is in San Diego--clearing dates with the competition is often a luxury presenters can’t afford, as Fayman pointed out.

“There are already very few dates left in the Civic and Symphony Hall,” she said, referring to the fall season. “And there just aren’t enough theaters for dance, so we won’t have much choice by the time we get our season ready.”