Music Center to Offer Joffrey 1-Year Contract : Dance: The extension, which follows resignations that rocked the company earlier this year, reflects a wait-and-see attitude by funding and booking groups.

All’s quiet on the Joffrey Ballet front. Perhaps more quiet than the local dance-going public might care to know.

At last sighting--May 27 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the closing date of a monthlong season--the Music Center resident ballet company had just come through a calamitous near-dismantling, involving the resignation of artistic director Gerald Arpino as well as key members of the joint board of directors from both New York and Los Angeles.

But by the time the bicoastal company danced its spring season’s final date, all the essentials were back in place.

Except one: Next year’s contract at the Music Center.

The Joffrey Ballet’s contract with the Music Center expired June 30. It wasn’t until July 19 that Music Center officials voted to extend it for one year. However, the agreement has not yet been signed, according to Sandra Kimberling, Music Center Operating Co. president.

“Just as soon as everyone returns from vacation (after Labor Day), we will have the signatures,” said Brad Brian, vice chairman of the executive committee of the Joffrey board in Los Angeles. “We fully expect to be the resident company next year.”

But the one-year extension, rather than the three-year term awarded the Joffrey in 1987, reflects a wait-and-see attitude by funding and booking organizations on both coasts. The short-term extension also represents a throwback to 1983-86 when the Joffrey operated year-to-year at the Music Center without a contract.

“That it is just a one-year extension comes as no surprise,” said Jim Black, vice president of administration and finance at the Music Center. “The company needs a chance to reassess its situation and get back on its feet.”

He referred to the “still-evolving changes within the Joffrey organization and its fund-raising activities in New York” as elements that need to be considered before longer-range negotiations are put on the table.

Brian declined to comment on the one-year extension.

“While all parties concur that the upcoming Music Center schedule--a “Nutcracker” season Dec. 19-30 and a spring ’91 engagement, May 6 to June 2--are firm, Black said that the Joffrey’s representatives “would like more money (from the Music Center), but this is nothing new. Basically, everyone is satisfied with the agreement as it’s been drafted.”

In addition to its residency contract with the Music Center, which funds the company, the Joffrey also is required to deal with the Music Center Operating Co., which books all Pavilion performances. That separate agreement spans a three-year term, which, coincidentally expires on June 30, 1991.

Although no one wants to acknowledge that the Joffrey’s financial health determines its residency here, dollars are very much to the point. Box-office revenues cannot offset all expenses. Performing arts organizations usually operate at a deficit; the question is how large are the deficits. Funding--private as well as public--make up the difference.

At the height of the Joffrey’s troubles in May, the company faced nearly $2 million in debts. It has now been reduced to $1.3 million, which includes a $308,000 federal tax debt and interest on penalties, according to Brian.

The monetary issue just won’t go away.

“Each season we see sales in the upper 40%,” said Kimberling. She said that the percentage “stays largely around there. And of course a record like that is of concern. It doesn’t indicate growth and it means we must re-examine our relationship with the company.”

So sensitive an issue is the relatively poor box-office showing that the Joffrey, as a Music Center resident company, voted in December to keep American Ballet Theatre from signing a contract for annual July engagements at the Pavilion, according to Kimberling.

“And they had good reason,” she said, even though ABT self-presents and needs no guarantees from the house. “The public would be confused being invited to fund-raising galas at the Pavilion for two different ballet companies. Which one would seem to be the resident? As long as ABT stayed at Shrine Auditorium--and kept a separate identity--there was no threat.”

As a result of the Joffrey’s veto power over other dance companies’ appearances at the Music Center, ABT canceled its July engagement, substituting London as a tour city and bypassing Los Angeles.

But having the Pavilion to itself has not led to the Joffrey’s audience development. It is commonly acknowledged that a company without a backbone of big spectacles like “Swan Lake” or “Giselle” has trouble wooing the mass public. And while the Joffrey has added the full-length “Romeo and Juliet” and “La Fille de Mal Gardee,” dance writers say its identity, as a whole, veers away from that of the 19th-Century tutu extravaganzas so popular at the box office.

At the moment no repertory beyond “The Nutcracker” has been announced for the Joffrey’s U.S. appearances starting this fall. For 11 days in September the company performs in Athens and Paris. After that, it begins a series of “Nutcracker” engagements: in November at New York City Center, in December in Iowa City, Iowa, and at the Pavilion.

Ironically, the final work founder Robert Joffrey created before his death in 1988 turned out to be its most valuable box-office asset. Beyond “The Nutcracker,” only the dates are listed for a Lincoln Center run at the New York State Theater (Feb. 25 to March 17) and elsewhere: Taiwan in January, Hong Kong and Singapore in February, Los Angeles again in May and a national tour “to be announced.”