MONEY & THE ARTS : Cutting In on L.A.’s Dance : The recession, shrinking subsidies and the rise of other venues are keeping major companies away and making the city a wallflower

Blame it on the economy. Blame it on the Japanese economy. Blame it on major theaters being overbooked. Or the shrinking number of local sponsors willing to subsidize dance. Or the emergence of the Orange County Performing Arts Center as a major force in dance presentation.

Whatever the reasons, some of the most important and familiar companies are bypassing Los Angeles--dropping the city from their tour schedules or coming far less often.

Consider some of the evidence:

* Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre used to perform in L.A. every other year, but last year the company played Irvine instead and it won’t be in L.A. again until 1993--three years since it last danced here.

* Seen at OCPAC last January and, before that, not locally since a 1988 UCLA engagement, the Martha Graham Dance Company plays only San Jose, Palm Desert (Tuesday), San Diego (Friday-Saturday) and Sacramento (March 17) on its current California visit--the company’s first American tour since Graham’s death.

* Dance Theatre of Harlem used to appear in L.A. annually, but skipped 1991 because of its fiscal crisis and subsequent layoff. Talks with at least three local sponsors fell through this year, and the company ended up playing Berkeley twice as well as Fresno and Sacramento on its recent five-week Western tour.

* American Ballet Theatre went from annual L.A. seasons to a three-year absence from the city. It managed to self-produce five performances at the Wiltern Theatre a month ago before its engagement at OCPAC, but right now there are no plans for a return to L.A. in 1993.

* Grand Kabuki of Japan intended to appear at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in May, 1993, but recently decided to say sayonara to its entire American tour.

What’s going on here?

Mostly recessionary cutbacks in one form or another. Wayne Ebata, managing director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (co-sponsor of the Kabuki engagement) explains that “the tour was canceled because of the economic situation in Japan--partly because of the lack of public support needed to mount any international tour, not only to the U.S., but also to Europe and Australia.”

Other companies have found that sponsors now offer only half the number of performances that used to be possible.

“We’re not presenting ballet (this season) because we perceived it was difficult to make ends meet when most companies require five, six or seven days,” says David Hulme, director of performing arts at Pasadena’s Ambassador Foundation.

“It’s not my experience that you could sustain that level of ticket-buying at the moment.”

From the dance companies’ viewpoint, shorter runs force them to seek more engagements in an area. “It’s expensive to tour in America,” explains Ron Protas, general director of the Martha Graham company. “In order to make a viable package in terms of air costs, you have to have many dates in a region. There aren’t that many presenters, and I don’t think it helped us when the National Endowment for the Arts discontinued the Dance Touring Program (in 1983).”

ICM Artists, which books the Graham company, says flatly that no offer was ever made by any L.A. presenter for the company’s available dates. “We’d love to be seen in L.A.,” Protas says. “If someone wanted to present us or give us a second home in Los Angeles, we’d be on the next plane.

“However, our board will not let us tour unless there is a guarantee that our basic fee will be met.”

Like Protas, Dance Theatre of Harlem Artistic Director Arthur Mitchell has opted for more international touring in a period when “in the U.S., the money is down and the arts are suffering.”

“Normally we are presented by a not-for-profit organization, a college or university or maybe another ballet company,” Mitchell says. “Those sponsors offer us a weekly fee, a guarantee that we wouldn’t have if we presented ourselves.”

This guarantee becomes a safety net, ensuring the maintenance and ultimately the survival of a company.

“Subsidy is mandatory for dance companies,” declares Tom Kendrick, president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center. “The venue pays a fee to the company and it may include transportation, housing, stagehands, the orchestra--just about everything--and then the risk of the engagement shifts to the venue.

“If not--if the venue kicks in a little or nothing--then the company is self-presenting at its own risk. Generally speaking, in the field of ballet, you’re lucky if you can cover 75% of the costs of an engagement (through the box office). You can lose very large amounts of money.”

OCPAC dance subscriptions number “roughly 10,000,” Kendrick says--close to 50% of his theater’s capacity for a seven-performance engagement. More than 1,500 of those subscriptions come from L.A. County. And though he says that single-ticket sales from L.A. County always vary, depending on whether an engagement is exclusive to OCPAC, increasingly the L.A. dance community looks to Costa Mesa for world-class dance attractions that used to appear downtown.

Kendrick acknowledges that the recession has curtailed the length of some OCPAC dance engagements “in this very difficult year.” For example, in 1989 the Kirov Ballet danced two weeks at OCPAC; this year, the company returns May 19-24 (and dances May 26-31 at Shrine Auditorium under other sponsorship).

“The risk would have been substantially greater on the attendance side,” Kendrick says of a two-week engagement. “And even if attendance had been maintained at a high level for both weeks, the subsidy needed would have nearly doubled because of the company’s exceptionally high weekly fee.”

But Kendrick has still committed up to $1 million in subsidy for the center’s five dance attractions--partly “as an investment in preventing erosion of our subscription base,” he says.

“The impact of the recession is cumulative, and the decline is becoming more and more rapid and steep,” he says. “Corporate grants are down because profits are down, and government grants are the least reliable of all.

“The number of venues willing or able to support touring dance companies is rapidly shrinking, as are the investment capabilities of companies to mount new productions. Those conditions are going to remain long after the economy turns up.”

Over in Pasadena, David Hulme says that the greatest effect of the recession has been on the Ambassador’s subscription sales (“More people are opting for single-ticket purchases”), and that Dance Theatre of Harlem wasn’t booked there this season because “we felt that some of the programming they had to offer was not going to break even.”

“You can handle some experimental work within a week of classical or popular work, but this was too experimental for our audiences.”

Both the Music Center and UCLA discussed booking Dance Theatre of Harlem this season but were previously committed on the dates the company wanted. Other issues were “marketing costs and their fee to some extent,” says Michael Blachly, acting director of UCLA’s Center for the Performing Arts. “We wanted very much to present the company. It could have happened. . . .”

Blachly and William Ferry, general manager of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, attribute that company’s local absence to a break in its touring cycle, which usually brings it west in odd-numbered years.

However, after its 1989 visit, the company attempted to come back in 1990 with its acclaimed, elaborate “Magic of Katherine Dunham” program. “Unfortunately, the extra funding needed (for that production) wasn’t available, and the company was presented in other repertory,” Blachly says.

“We had basically fallen out of our cycle and UCLA didn’t want to present us for a third consecutive year in ‘91, “ Ferry says, “so we agreed to skip that year and be back in the spring of ’93 when we have our next West Coast tour.”

Blachly sees his recessionary pressures in terms of cost control: “Bringing companies in at a fee similar to that of three or four years ago, holding expenses down on the technical end (by scheduling and programming choices) or in marketing. Part of it is also realizing the university doesn’t have the luxury of using an off-campus facility such as the Wiltern when there’s one available on campus.

“For the upcoming (March 20-21) dates with David Parsons, we elected to go with one program on both Friday and Saturday with live music by the Turtle Island String Quartet instead of two separate programs,” he says.

The recession has proven especially cruel to the Music Center Unified Fund, which supports a family of resident performing companies that, until last March, included the Joffrey Ballet. (The Joffrey’s engagement at the Wiltern Theatre, May 8-June 7, is its first repertory season since the Music Center relationship ended.) This year, a Unified Fund shortfall of $3 million has caused across-the-board cutbacks for the resident companies.

The Music Center Operating Co., which manages and books the complex, helped mute the recession’s effect by lessening rents for the current fiscal year. At the same time, it moved back into dance presentation, working with a brand-new dance board to match a $75,000 company grant bringing the Houston Ballet to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the last week in June.

“We’re also talking to the Joffrey about a long-term commitment for ‘The Nutcracker,’ ” says Sandra Kimberling, operating company president. “I have every intention of it happening.”

Further down the line: a possible two-week engagement by San Francisco Ballet in June, 1993. However, theater dates weren’t available for either DTH or the new Mikhail Baryshnikov/Twyla Tharp project scheduled to reach the West Coast late this year.

Moreover, the Music Center’s relationship with American Ballet Theatre remains impenetrably murky. Kimberling says the Music Center came up with “some of the money, a partial guarantee” of $150,000 for a two-week Pavilion engagement last August. However, after brochures were mailed, ABT Co-Director Jane Hermann canceled--skeptical, Kimberling says, about potential ticket sales for a crucial gala benefit that would be competing for attention with the Royal Ballet in Costa Mesa.

“I still look forward to them coming back,” Kimberling says. “They belong here.”

Hermann remembers the situation differently. “The Music Center was asking ABT to self-present,” she says. “They do not give you a fee against which you can play, and you bear the brunt of the burden of very high advertising costs. You’re looking at a half-million a week to present a major ballet company with orchestra--that’s a very ballpark figure, but it gives you some idea of the risk.

“Somebody has to subsidize that. If you have a heavy sellout you can realize that at the box office--but very few boards of directors are willing to take on that kind of gamble, especially in a recession.”

Nevertheless, the ABT board did just that--this February at the Wiltern, a theater that Hermann describes as “a four-wall rental house with specific limitations. But it has the advantage of being an intimate house and a beautiful theater.”

“The Music Center has more of a built-in dance audience, but the Wiltern (engagement) came in just about where we expected: It covered the costs we wanted to cover.” She declines to be more specific.

Hermann says she feels the recession most acutely both in new limitations on repertory acquisitions (especially full-length works) and a tighter rehearsal schedule.

“Part of the loss is the luxury of almost infinite numbers of weeks of rehearsal,” she says. “Because of the economic pinch, the dancers can’t rehearse until they’re comfortable--back in the comfort of dancing together. That’s hard on them.”

She says that ABT would be happy to have “a good solid season every year in L.A.,” but that “the future depends on how the Music Center changes after Disney Hall opens and how much audience interest there is.”

In the meantime, there’s the Orange County Performing Arts Center, “one of the last theaters in America that is a true presenter,” in Hermann’s words.

Once again the issue is subsidy. As Ron Protas says about the Graham company’s L.A. prospects: “People there want the company. It’s a question of whether they can afford it.”