Dance Festival Calling It Quits

After 13 years of presenting an annual citywide summer dance festival, the board of directors of Dance Kaleidoscope has decided to dissolve the organization.

Dance Kaleidoscope will donate the $5,000 remaining in its coffers to Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.

Lee Werbel, one of Dance Kaleidoscope’s three current board members, said that the organization decided to fold because discussions with local arts groups failed to lead to a suitable replacement for artistic director Don Hewitt, 66, who stepped down approximately a year ago.

Although Hewitt received a small stipend for his work, he was not paid a salary. He supported himself with teaching posts and other activities. Hewitt, who has moved to Portland, Ore., and Werbel said it would be impossible to find a new director without offering a competitive salary.

Werbel said that the festival’s annual production expenses, about $90,000, were covered by funding from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and California Arts Council, ticket sales and individual and corporate donations. According to Hewitt, during his 13-year tenure, Dance Kaleidoscope operated in the black. Still, that budget did not provide for a salary attractive enough to lure a qualified artistic director.

Dance Kaleidoscope was founded in the late 1970s by Betty Empey, formerly executive director of the now-defunct Los Angeles Ballet. Empey, who also worked for virtually no salary, produced the series annually at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood through the Los Angeles Area Dance Alliance, a service organization for the dance community. The idea was to give local dance companies of a wide range of styles a chance to perform on a large stage under professional concert conditions.

The series lapsed in 1984 when Empey moved to the Bay Area. In 1987, Hewitt, a ballet-trained educator and former dancer, stepped in, operating the festival independent of the dance alliance through a new foundation. Hewitt kept some festival events at the Ford but also expanded to other venues, including the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles--where Hewitt taught dance and presented other dance programs.

In its heyday, Dance Kaleidoscope was the city’s premier showcase for local dance, presenting a multi-week festival of modern, classical and world dance performances. In summer 2000, the event included five performances of nearly 30 artists or groups in four locations over three weekends. In February 2001, in the wake of Hewitt’s announcement that he would step down later that year, the company’s board said it planned to restructure and cut back still further, presenting at most “a program or two” for summer 2001.

As it happened, the only event Dance Kaleidoscope presented in 2001 was a July 21 tribute to Hewitt, with just a handful of performances, at the Japan America Theatre, making the 2000 festival the last Dance Kaleidoscope.

Hewitt said by phone from Portland that he chose to step down last year partly because of the difficulty of producing the festival at retirement age and partly because he began to be “worn out” by negative press on the series in the last couple of years. “They seemed to jump on anything we did. If we took a risk, we shouldn’t have taken a risk. That got somewhat discouraging,” he said.

“I think we accomplished a great deal with a very moderate amount of money,” Hewitt added. “The thing about L.A. is, there is so much richness to draw from--I became practically an addict of flamenco dance, and East Indian dance by doing the festival. Dance K brought one community to another community.”

Highways artistic director Danielle Brazell said the arts center has no specific plans for the donated money but may use it for capital improvements and that the gift may help leverage other funds. “We are ecstatic,” she said.