Ballet Theatre, Music Center in Talks : Dance: A 14-day engagement in August is being discussed. Both parties agree that costs will determine the outcome.

It happened in 1989 and again in 1990: American Ballet Theatre bypassed Los Angeles proper two consecutive years, the first such hiatus in the half-century relationship.

But if Music Center management and ABT co-director Jane Hermann have their way, the company may get back on track this August with a 14-day engagement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

It has been a decade since the Ballet Theatre last appeared at the Music Center, stopping instead at Shrine Auditorium through 1988 and for the last three years visiting the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where it is scheduled for a March engagement.

An announcement concerning the Music Center run is expected shortly.

“I am doing everything in my power to make it happen,” said Music Center Operating Company President Sandra Kimberling. “The company has always included L.A. on its tours. And since this absence a very vocal audience keeps making appeals to us.”

Hermann corroborated the ongoing negotiations. She said that costs would determine the final outcome of the talks. Because the company stops touring annually in late June, it would have to absorb reassembling expenses for the single Music Center run 3,000 miles from its New York home during a vacation period when many ticket buyers might be out of the city.

Hermann spoke about Music Center considerations to offset those expenses, declining to give specifics. But she indicated that without some assistance “of course we can’t make a case for coming.”

Kimberling said that at one time she was hoping to offer a package subscription, pairing two weeks of ABT with one week of London’s Royal Ballet. But that didn’t work out due to other invitations the company received.

“Now we’re thinking of a musical for the end of July and, with any luck, ABT coming in for the two weeks prior to Music Center Opera, which begins house rehearsals Aug. 19. There are some benefits we can get for the company--a discounted hotel rate, for instance. The bottom line, though, is that we merely rent out (the hall to touring companies). We don’t underwrite or guarantee against losses.”

Meanwhile, time is running out for the proposed August date. In order for the Music Center and ABT to launch an effective marketing campaign, plans would need to be finalized soon.

“The pivotal issue is money,” said company spokesman Robert Pontarelli. “It depends on how much ABT has to lose in order to come here. Losing money is the name of the game. Performing arts organizations don’t make profits, they just try to keep deficits down. Can we afford to come?”

ABT, which at the start of the current season had a debt of $5 million, has been under fiscal restraints, and this year has had to reduce considerably the number of tour cities. Nor was it able to offer the lucrative “Nutcracker,” since Mikhail Baryshnikov, who withholds the rights, resigned as artistic director in 1989.

Ironically, an ABT appearance at the Music Center in August would represent a flip-flop by the company; it declined to return to the Pavilion for a July, 1990, run after contract negotiations collapsed barely six months before that engagement was to begin. ABT argued for three consecutive years, while the Music Center preferred the company to appear every other year with assorted companies to be imported during intervening years.

When talks between Hermann and the Music Center collapsed, there were two main sources of consternation: The issue of the three consecutive seasons ABT said it needed to build a subscription audience and the opposition to this arrangement by the Joffrey Ballet, the resident dance company at the Music Center since 1983. Wary of losing patronage and causing an identity confusion between the two groups if both appeared at the Music Center, the Joffrey advised against the contract.

But that may have changed. Three months ago, Gerald Arpino, artistic director of the Joffrey, said: “I have no objection whatever to ABT appearing at the Pavilion and told Jane Hermann so.”