Harlem Dance Theatre to Suspend Operations

The Dance Theatre of Harlem will suspend operations beginning in April, announced artistic director Arthur Mitchell. The company’s New York season beginning in May has been canceled and dancers, technical personnel and some administrative staff will be laid off, following the company’s Kennedy Center engagement in March. Mitchell said the company plans to resume full operations in the fall.

Now in the midst of a one-week run at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, the Dance Theatre of Harlem is projecting a deficit of $1.7 million. With the cancellation and the layoffs, Mitchell told The Times on Wednesday, the organization’s fiscal 1990 deficit can be reduced to only “half a million dollars.”

Citing the cancellation of a scheduled January engagement in San Diego and cancellation of scheduled summer festival dates in England (London, Leeds and Coventry), Mitchell said: “When these things happen, there is a domino effect. With the English dates gone, we had to cancel other European engagements in Italy and Spain, engagements scheduled before and after the British tour.”

The layoffs--of 53 dancers and an unspecified number of support personnel--would last six or seven months, “at least,” Mitchell said from his Pasadena hotel.

One of the reasons for this course of action now, Mitchell--who founded DTH in 1969--said, “is that we are commited, not only to artistic excellence and the training of the young, but also to fiscal responsibility. I refuse to continue to barrel into the future with a deficit that is growing.”

Dance Theatre of Harlem appears in Pasadena through Sunday under sponsorship of the Ambassador Foundation (which has presented the American company almost annually for more than a decade).

Saying that the company’s annual budget, for both performance and educational activities--DTH runs a dance school year-round--is $7.3 million, Mitchell pointed out that that is not a large budget “considering all we do. I can’t believe that there are not a lot of people who consider our mission important enough to want to help us survive.” But, he said, private donations and foundation and corporate support, “are down, not only in dance, but in all the arts.”

Mitchell said he would announce a major fund-raising campaign soon, to be launched with the annual spring gala benefit.

The school (with 500 to 600 students) will stay open until the end of the spring semester, Mitchell announced, but would close down in the summer, “When we usually bring in students from all over the country and the world to study with our teachers. This is a terrible setback for the continuity of our educational activities.”

Mitchell stressed that present plans are to reopen the school in the fall, and to present, as it has annually for more than two decades, a New York season in 1991.