Treading Lightly

On a mid-April afternoon in Santa Barbara, tourists on their way to the trendy shops of State Street stroll by a recessed storefront studio, unaware that inside, the perpetually adversarial Montague and Capulet men are battling it out once again in one of ballet’s most action-packed scenes. Nestled between a bike shop and a boxing club, this is Santa Barbara’s resident State Street Ballet, brushing up its scaled-down version of “Romeo and Juliet.”

Directing the rehearsal is ex-American Ballet Theatre soloist Rodney Gustafson, who founded the company in 1993. As the “Romeo and Juliet” fight scene progresses, Gustafson explains that many of the dancers tossing off expert pirouettes and buoyant leaps have come from prestigious training institutions and much larger companies, with whom some of them still perform. “But more and more of our dancers are making their homes here in Santa Barbara, because this is such a great place to live,” he says. “I wouldn’t have started a dance company just anywhere--you have to be in a good spot to attract quality people. And it’s close to Los Angeles, where we’d eventually like to have a base as well.”

And there it is--the dream that the Los Angeles area might at last home-grow its own world-class ballet company, where dancers can make a living and audiences can get to know a classical company for more than one touring week a year. But, if you want to set eyes rolling in the Southern California dance community, just mention that a new ballet company is trying to get established. In a dance landscape littered with carcasses of failed ballet ventures, it’s a bit like saying there’s this great new unsinkable ocean liner everyone’s booked passage on, and its name starts with a T.

The pervasive skepticism is perhaps summed up best by Stanley Holden--the internationally known dance teacher who has served as advisor to umpteen budding ballets since coming here from London’s Royal Ballet.

Another Southland ballet? “I feel sorry for them,” he says. “Everybody thinks they can do it, but they can’t. I wish them luck, but this has gone on for the last 30 years!”

Holden’s frustration has increased with the last decade’s disappointments--after the Joffrey’s failure to establish a second home at the Music Center through the ‘80s, there was the demise of the Los Angeles Classical Ballet in Long Beach in early 1998, and, perhaps most notably, John Clifford’s 1996 ill-starred attempt to raise $11 million to fund his L.A. Ballet. The latter debacle left an especially bitter taste after stranded dancers took a devastating financial loss.

“If I was a [ballet] dancer now, I wouldn’t touch L.A.,” Holden says resolutely. “I really push my students to get out of here by the time they’re 16. We have to send them where there are opportunities.”

In fact, Los Angeles remains perhaps the sole major North American city without its own large classical company. Nevertheless, ballet companies continue to be born here, gasp for breath and occasionally survive. Three such companies--the burgeoning State Street, Irvine’s 37-year-old Ballet Pacifica and the fledgling Inland Pacific Ballet in Montclair--are hoping that a sense of proportion may prevail where more inflated ventures fail. No trumpeted announcements of big stars, no promises of costly, lush sets and costumes, no projected budgets in the gazillions (or the inevitable concomitant debt). Instead, the idea is to sink roots in a community, find a niche and develop in due time.

“I think one of the traps that people fall into is that they try to start at a level that’s far too high,” Gustafson says over coffee between rehearsal and a company board meeting. “But just because that’s happened in the past doesn’t mean a ballet company can’t succeed now.”

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State Street Ballet may have come the furthest of any recent regional start-up in the small-is-beautiful mold. In addition to performing in its hometown Granada Theatre, the company has also performed in Santa Rosa, San Jose and, closer to home, Thousand Oaks, Redlands and Palos Verdes. Last summer, the company made an auspicious Los Angeles debut with Johan Renvall’s spirited “Tango” on a Dance Kaleidoscope program at the Ford Amphitheatre. Today, it returns to L.A. with Robert Sund’s “Carmen” and Gustafson’s “Bolero” on a program shared with Inland Pacific Ballet at the Luckman Theatre.

The sandy-haired Gustafson, 47, has an affable manner and a combination of credentials rare among artistic directors--experience as a dancer during the ‘80s heyday of American Ballet Theatre; a teaching background at the University of Arizona, as well as his own studio in Tucson; and perhaps most importantly, a master’s of business administration.

Management skills, he points out, haven’t always matched local ballet ambitions. “Companies bank on money that’s not there. Sometimes they just didn’t have the business sense to manage what money they did have. I think we’re past the point when artistic directors don’t have to think about the business end.”

Working last year with an annual budget of almost $400,000, Gustafson says about 2% came from a government grant (from the city of Santa Barbara), 42% was earned income from performance fees and box-office receipts, and the rest was from an enthusiastic group of private and corporate donors.

“It’s really starting to take hold as people see that we’re doing well and getting good reviews. We have a ballet guild with 50 people on it, working away 10 hours a day for no money. They seem to really feel a part of it.” It no doubt helps that Gustafson regularly polls his contributors personally, calling them up to get feedback or chatting with audience members.

Gustafson is aware that it will be a long road to a secure, full-time company. With his dancers making an average of $450 a week for 30 weeks of the year, he hopes to increase both those figures in the next few years. Since dancers often work for low salaries, or, as Gustafson puts it, “take it in the shorts” when companies go bust, his commitment to providing for his performers pays off in loyalty and guest artists’ return trips. Other strategies: Raise 70% of a ballet’s budget before mounting it, woo high-quality dancers to Santa Barbara (he rents company townhouses to make living arrangements easier) and choose ballets with familiar themes that can be successfully marketed.

So far, the company’s repertory, some of it by Gustafson, has included a few condensed versions of classics, a two-act Robert Sund “Beauty and the Beast” and a series of what he calls “sexy, energetic” shorter ballets such as “Patsy and Hank” (by Sund to Patsy Cline songs). Upcoming works also all have a popular hook--one piece to Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland songs; another, about Van Gogh, by choreographer William Soleau.

Gustafson’s philosophy of the popular is giving him ideas about how to do the company’s first “Nutcracker” this year. “Why not modernize it and have it set in Hollywood,” he says. “We can make it very theatrical--that’s fun to do sometimes. I mean we’re here in California, surrounded by movie people, why not?’

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While Gustafson sees State Street as a “South Coast ballet” serving a wide area, with especially strong ties to Los Angeles, Molly Lynch, artistic director of Irvine’s Ballet Pacifica since 1988, has scaled down her expectations in that regard.

“At first, I wanted to be part of the Greater L.A. area, but it seemed that wasn’t going to work. There’s a real stigma about people not wanting to drive to Orange County for performances,” she says on a break from rehearsals of Rick McCullough’s “In the Ruins.” This 1997 ballet, to straining violins of an Arvo Part score, resulted from the company’s annual choreographic workshop, as have others among the mostly American ballets that dominate Ballet Pacifica’s repertory.

That kind of repertory and the company’s size make up Ballet Pacifica’s strategy for survival.

“Before I came here, the company concentrated on traditional ballets,” Lynch says, “but I figured that the [Orange County] Performing Arts Center can afford to bring in world-class companies to do those ballets the way they should be done--with million-dollar budgets. I felt that our niche was to be a chamber-size company that develops new works.” More than 40 new ballets have been premiered over the last decade.

But attracting audiences to unfamiliar modern ballets is often a difficult task, and Ballet Pacifica also tries to include familiar titles, especially for school matinees. They do suite versions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Our Town,” always offering a pre-performance talk with choreographers.

It’s a plan that has resulted in steady growth. During Lynch’s tenure, Ballet Pacifica’s annual budget has increased from $187,000 a year to its current $980,000. About half is box office and performance fees, plus donations or grants. The company is also working toward more secure employment for the dancers; in past years, most of the dancers had to have full-time “day” jobs, but now 10 dancers are employed full time (at $500 to $600 a week), and six part-time.

Like Gustafson, Lynch emphasizes the importance of “growing a company from the ground up,” giving people in the community “a feeling of ownership”--a challenging assignment, Lynch found, in Orange County.

“A big part of the problem here is that the area is relatively young and people haven’t really put their roots down,” she says. “So there’s not as much feeling of ‘this is my home and I’m going to be involved in my community.’ But it’s getting better now, and the company has a lot of loyal supporters who know the dancers and look forward to seeing new ballets.”

David Allen, an internationally known choreographer whose works have boosted the reputation of the company, describes Ballet Pacifica as “planting a seed in the community--and the more ballet that happens really helps keep ballet alive.”

Ironically, the devastating loss of Ballet Pacifica sets, costumes and dance floor in the Laguna fires of October 1993 resulted in a big boost for the company when volunteers rallied around, and insurance money and donations helped them secure a new facility.

“We’re going from semiprofessional to professional,” Lynch says, “but I see no reason why we couldn’t be a world-class company over time; that’s what we have to strive for. But I don’t see it being a world-class big company. I think the beauty of being a chamber-size company is that you have more flexibility and creativity about how you work. You don’t get too institutionalized, too held down by rules. You can have the quality but stay sort of lean and mean.”

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On the other hand, some emerging ballet companies have a bit more opulence in mind, even though they believe in starting small and nestling into a community. Victoria Koenig, artistic director of Inland Pacific Ballet in Montclair, likes the idea of “establishing a ballet culture out here” (30 miles east of L.A.) and sees the whimsically elegant Bridges Theatre in nearby Claremont as a key part of the equation. Seating 2,500, it features a sky-blue ceiling painted with gold stars.

“It feels imposing, like going into a marvelous cathedral,” Koenig says. “I think it gives people that sense of awe about theater.”

Koenig has a lot of experience in the small-company world of L.A. With Raiford Rogers, she co-founded and danced in L.A. Chamber Ballet, which has survived since 1982, but strictly on an ad-hoc, project by project, basis. When Koenig left L.A. Chamber, she didn’t have in mind creating another company; it “just sort of happened” because of the dearth of classical ballet in Montclair, where she established a school in 1991. And now, after five successful “Nutcracker” seasons (last year’s audiences totaled more than 20,000 people), her company of three principal dancers, two soloists and a corps de ballet of teenage students is rehearsing for its first performances of “Giselle” on May 22 and 23 at the Bridges. Now dancing to tape, Koenig is determined to add an orchestra in the next few years.

Co-founded by associate director Kevin Myers, Inland Pacific Ballet is in a transition period between amateur and semi-professional status, relying heavily on student dancers. The small core of adult dancers, who make a modest wage for 36 weeks a year, appear on today’s Luckman matinee in a suite from Balanchine’s “Who Cares?” and Choo San Goh’s “Beginnings.” The shared program with State Street Ballet marks Inland Pacific’s L.A. debut, but Koenig does not see the company ever shifting its base into the big city.

“I grew up in Los Angeles and saw every kind of ballet company--from minor success to failure. But this is a place where it feels that it could happen--a major ballet company--the way it happened in Seattle, for instance, with Pacific Northwest Ballet. Where there’s a tight enough community and there’s enough money and sophistication about art--it feels possible.

“I’m not used to working this slowly, and I don’t know how far we can go--all I know is it’s going well now. We’re just starting to formalize our board and looking to add more salaried dancers and support staff.”

What has impressed Koenig most is the lack of cynicism and the level of dedication on the part of local volunteers. “The spirit here is amazing, the excitement people have about being part of something they feel is going someplace,” she says. “A lot of it is the parents--there isn’t anything they wouldn’t do for their kids. You get a real feeling that it matters that their kids get this opportunity, that dancing really affects the quality of their lives. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.”

At the end of the day, Rodney Gustafson also finds himself thinking about what makes it all worthwhile, and he tells a story that clearly touches him, about a new board member who was inspired by performances of State Street Ballet as she was battling cancer. For Molly Lynch, a critical moment in her process was seeing the outpouring of support after the Laguna fires threatened to destroy Ballet Pacifica. And for Victoria Koenig, it’s the way her youngest students get starry-eyed watching Sarah Spradlin, Inland Pacific’s first Giselle, who has been trained right there in the studio where they rehearse.

“The hardest part is getting kids here to believe they can do it, because they think, ‘We’re just little Montclair,’ ” Koenig says. “And it’s always somebody else who succeeds in ballet, somewhere else. And then there are all those 12,000 kids who are bused in to see ‘The Nutcracker’--they feel so special. They don’t have to drive 60 miles and pay $60 to see the ballet--our top ticket is $20. I think it matters that we’re here in their community. They have to know that it can happen here.” *

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* State Street Ballet and Inland Pacific Ballet, Luckman Theatre, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive. Today, 3 p.m. $12.50-$25. (323) 343-6600.