Hometown Ballet? Dream On

Since dreams always prove more seductive than reality, it’s no surprise that John Clifford’s wildly unrealistic plans to form a new Los Angeles Ballet generated major excitement in the national and local dance communities a year ago.

At a time when just about every ballet organization in America was scrambling for funds, Clifford announced an $11-million budget for his first year of operation--unprecedented for a new ballet company in America. It sounded like a dream come true, and even those experienced in the grim realities of dance subsidy grew enthusiastic.

“We all got our adrenaline up, hoping,” says Don Hewitt, director of the annual Dance Kaleidoscope series. “We needed something positive to happen.”

However, no major funding for Los Angeles Ballet ever materialized, no performances took place and a legal action by the dancers’ union late last month resulted in a judgment against Clifford for more than $1 million in unpaid salaries and benefits.

There’s no evidence that the L.A. Ballet debacle changed the landscape of local classicism--a landscape in which performances are few and far between, usually in small venues, often for a core audience of friends and colleagues. But Clifford’s failure does help dramatize key problems facing our struggling ensembles: a decline in arts support from both the government and private sectors, a shrinking audience base for ballet and the inability of the companies themselves to generate enough public interest to change the picture significantly.

Obviously, mere survival can be considered heroic under these circumstances. Raiford Rogers, who directs the 14-year-old Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, says that keeping his company in “a holding pattern” represents a victory in the current financial environment. He blames what he calls “the Clifford fiasco” and the media (including this newspaper) for supporting “the general perception out there that there’s not much happening with ballet in this city.”

In response to both the funding crisis and the search for new audiences, Cynthia Young, head of the 21-year-old Pasadena Dance Theater, is changing the direction of that company to focus on educational projects and community outreach rather than performances. She wishes Clifford had succeeded: “His company would have developed audiences for everybody,” she says.

Veteran impresario James A. Doolittle, who currently produces dance at the Music Center, believes “there are many people out there who would like to support [local] dance but they want to know there’s responsibility and stability to the organization in question. There’s no organization right now that people have enough confidence in. They haven’t been operated or managed properly.”

But he also raises the larger issue of audience base: “Each season I bring in the best-known companies in the world and can only play them for a week here,” he says. “How could you sustain a resident company with that small an audience?”

Points of comparison: The 63-year-old San Francisco Ballet typically sells enough tickets to justify 10 or 11 weeks a year in its home city. In Southern California, it seems that no dance attraction besides “The Nutcracker” can sustain itself for even two full weeks.

Late last month, American Ballet Theatre returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for six performances of a rep program featuring a new Twyla Tharp ballet plus a newly restaged “Don Quixote.” “Ticket sales were just under 70% of capacity,” Doolittle says, “with a lot of discount tickets in there.” He estimates he’ll lose roughly $175,000 on the engagement.

He takes no pleasure in his conclusion: “We don’t have the dance audience at this point to support a major [resident ballet] company. There isn’t the demand.”

Others in the community agree with him: Hewitt, for instance, who faults lack of education in the arts. And veteran ballet teacher and Royal Ballet alumnus Stanley Holden.

“The public itself is to blame,” Holden says. “Our audiences want [star] names--it’s part of Hollywood. If they don’t recognize the names, forget it.”

It can also be argued that shifting cultural demographics have taken the spotlight off ballet--that most of the residents of Southern California are linked by birth or heritage to other traditional dance forms.

Some of those forms are older than ballet and have an equal claim to be called “classical.” Many are preserved far from their places of origin by companies popular in our minority communities and increasingly visible to everyone else in such series as “Dance Kaleidoscope,” which showcased 12 such groups earlier this month--nearly a third of the companies participating.

Indeed, Southern California has always welcomed dance troupes that brought the world to our stages--from Denishawn 80 years ago through the creation in our midst of Danza Floricanto/U.S.A. (the city’s oldest Mexican-American company), American Indian Dance Theatre and all the new Filipino ensembles that have appeared recently. Meanwhile, the local ballet audience ages, shrinks or stays home waiting for lower ticket prices and the next Nureyev.

Obviously, the funding crisis curtails the aspirations of all companies, whether classical, contemporary or folkloric. But roots in a supportive local community can definitely be an advantage.

Anthony Shay calls the local world dance scene “probably the healthiest that’s going right now,” because of such continuing support. He co-founded the Aman Folk Ensemble in 1963 but left in 1977 to form Avaz Dance Theater--a company increasingly identified in this decade with the local Iranian-American community.

“That community turned out to be our saviors,” Shay says, “and we went to considerable trouble to adapt ourselves to its needs. For us, it was a matter of survival.”

Not long ago, the dance department at UCLA was redefined as the department of world arts and cultures to reflect multicultural realities. We might even think of the Southland these days as a testing ground for a proposition considered shocking in academic circles not long ago: the idea that the Franco-Russian ballet heritage on our stages is merely another form of ethnic dance, as culture-specific as Bharata Natyam in India or Bugaku in Japan.

Notions of ballet as some sort of “universal” dance language accompanied the spread of European and American power in the world, but the realities at home are considerably different in 1996. “The last time I sat on a [L.A. County grants] panel, half of the 40 groups applying were performing traditional folkloric dance,” Shay says. In theory, the audiences for such companies might also enjoy ballet, but ticket prices prevent access for some of them just as the cost of lessons keeps their children from making ballet a do-it-yourself art form.

Subsidies, scholarships, free community performances, student rush tickets and ballet on cable seem hopeful remedies for helping ballet diversify its dancer and audience base. However, if they existed on a large enough scale to matter, wouldn’t our ballet companies and audiences look as multicultural as America itself by now?

The dream of resident ballet dies hard, of course, and it’s currently being born again through Raiford Rogers’ determination, along with David Wilcox’s plans for expanding the activities of his 13-year-old Los Angeles Classical Ballet. Wilcox’s long-term goal: seeing his company become the resident dance entity at the Music Center if and when Disney Hall is built and the Los Angeles Philharmonic moves out of the Pavilion.

Meanwhile, Nadezhda Kalmanovskaya and her husband, Golden Koscuik, of Ballet Ecarte work to realize their dream of turning a Culver City ballet school into a Russian-style company in a converted Westside movie palace. However, the ultimate lesson of John Clifford’s big adventure may be that such dreamers are outnumbered or their moment has passed.

As we stumble toward the end of this decade and century, ballet enjoys no primacy in Los Angeles dance. It’s one dance form, not the dance form, and however desperately some of us may dream of resident swans, sylphides, dryads and wilis, we’d have to be asleep not to notice that much of the greatest energy and excitement around these parts reflects other dreams entirely.