Houston’s Darwinians of Dance : Ballet: Good planning gives troupe an arts rarity--a solid footing. It plays L.A. beginning Wednesday.

Clearly, the folks of the Houston Ballet know what they’re doing, carefully budgeting just one out-of-town trip this year, and that to Los Angeles, the city where dance companies come to die.

And people say this is the year not to underestimate anyone from Texas?

The Houstonians, however, have evolved as Darwinians of dance, fit and hip survivors.

A financial plan has done for the Houston Ballet what certain politicians seem only to promise for the rest of us: a growing work force, year-around employment, benefits, a balanced, economically correct budget.

The plan is also bringing the company an opportunity to show off in Los Angeles Wednesday through June 28 at the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, its first downtown visit.

What is it about this company that allows it to flourish when other arts endeavors and enterprises all about the country are cutting back or fading to black?

One part of the answer might be found in programming, the Andrews Sisters-meets-”The Sleeping Beauty” strategy, Tchaikovsy and choreographer Paul Taylor. Both the classic, trademark “Sleeping Beauty” and the new “Company B” will be staged in next week’s six-performance schedule. Big, labor-intensive, classic dances first helped spread the word about Houston in the ‘80s, winning audiences at home and a reputation away. Taylor’s jazz-inspired “Company B” may do the same for the company in the ‘90s.

But it’s more than a dance mix. Houston has something that other performance groups are now only trying to establish: a bountiful economic base, a multimillion-dollar home-grown endowment fund.

When Ben Stevenson became artistic director of the then 21-year-old Houston Ballet in 1976 after a career as a dancer and choreographer in Britain and the United States, he came to a regional company with 26 dancers, a 32-week season “and a much smaller budget,” he says. Today, the company has 56 dancers who are guaranteed a generally unheard-of 46-week season and annual employment, an $11-million budget (up from $7.6 million four years ago and fourth behind the longer-established New York City Ballet’s $30 million), an endowment fund that provides the company at least $1 million a year, a hall for contemporary dance that opens this fall, and an expanding academy program.

The $16-million endowment fund makes the difference. Established just five years ago largely through a citywide contribution campaign headed by the company’s board of directors, it provides what few dance or performance companies have: a solid economic base for operations, a base that literally guarantees a future.

“Other dance companies are beginning to explore endowments,” says Bonnie Brooks, executive director of Dance USA, a national service agency for nonprofit dance organizations. “Houston is a major exception with its endowment. Most companies have been so busy just doing their day-to-day things that they haven’t had a chance to do something like that. But it’s definitely what many are considering trying to do.”

Endowment funding has become a hot subject in other areas. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis recently completed a five-year campaign to establish a $26-million endowment fund for future programs, renovations and educational projects. The Guthrie’s campaign went communitywide, attracting more than 4,500 individual gifts.

At a recent national conference of symphony associations, many arts administrators indicated they had campaigns under way for endowments, but they also expressed a caution. In hard times, some boards have had to dip into endowments in an emergency operation to maintain operational funds.

So far that’s not a worry in Houston. But the Texans did do something else. They thought big in another department, setting up a 148-member board of directors. Most boards number 20 to 30 and assemble in a conference room to bless budgets. Houston Ballet’s board could book the Astrodome. The 148 became a source of grants, endowment gifts, ticket sales, fund-raising and volunteer work.

Houston is a boosterish town, its citizens having earlier heaped money and buildings on its symphony and opera companies. “Fly the Houston banner” is more than just civic cheerleading, it means that world-class musicians and dancers and performers bring recognition at home and recognition brings visitors and new residents and new businesses and potential new contributors to that endowment fund.

Recognition becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Which brings us back to “Company B.” That year-old dance tribute to American jazz and the music of World War II was introduced to the world by Houston Ballet at the Kennedy Center last year. While bringing major recognition to the company, it also reveals another side to the growing need for creative financing in the arts.

It has become to dance what co-production financing has become to Hollywood, a sharing way to finance big-ticket productions.

Most choreographers receive a fee from dance companies to perform their works for a certain contracted period. It can be a major budget item. Commissioning new and exclusive works can be a budget breaker along with the cost of developing and staging a new work.

With “Company B,” the Kennedy Center Commissioning Project began to raise funds to develop new American dances exclusively and those in turn would be shared with six companies with the premieres performed at the Kennedy Center. The center, in effect, takes care of the commissioning outlay, the dancers take care of the dancing. The company gets a new dance and bragging rights.

But even with someone else paying the commission, and being the owner of a large endowment with a large, supportive board, the Houston company, like most ballet companies, can’t live on box office alone. Less than 60% of the company’s revenues comes from ticket sales.

Contributed income, according to Dance USA’s Brooks, has become the minefield of performing companies. Private grants, government grants and donations have been going down. Half of the 46 companies surveyed by her organization may report deficits this year, she said.

When the Houston Ballet, still flush with its “Company B” success last year in the East Coast, heard that there were open dates at the Chandler Pavilion, it decided to fly its banner farther west, going for coast-to-coast recognition. Houston asked for a $100,000-plus guarantee against expenses. The guarantee is a customary practice for touring companies. The Music Center balked, faced as it was with its own, unaccustomed money problems. The two met each other halfway, the Music Center kicking in some, the Houstonians took care of the rest.

Another victory for new, creative arts financing, a bigger victory for big endowment funding. And a bit of unusual recognition for the “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B).”