Late for the dance

Two seasons ago, the locally based Avaz International Dance Theatre spent more than $189,000 in earned and donated income (including $69,600 from the California Arts Council) on staging, rehearsing and performing “Guran,” an ambitious full-evening dance drama that helped move the company out of the realm of folkloric vaudeville and onto a new creative plateau.

Now, however, it looks like curtains for the award-winning, 28-year-old ensemble. With the slashing of the California Arts Council budget from a peak of more than $30 million (2000-01) to the current $3.1 million, the state now ranks last in the nation for per capita arts funding: just 9 cents per citizen compared with the U.S. average of $1.15. As a result, Avaz and a number of other companies that rely on government funding are on the verge of extinction.

With only $12,000 in grant support confirmed for 2004-05, the co-directors of Avaz have canceled all performances (though one may be possible down the line), called for the resignation of most of the company’s board members and implemented plans to keep rehearsing with a small cadre of dancers (perhaps six of the 14 to 20 the company formerly used) in a donated rehearsal space until the situation resolves itself one way or the other.

Artistic director Jamal hopes that three possible grants totaling as much as $55,000 will come through, along with community support, enabling the company to resume its ambitious, aborted schedule of activities.

“The sadness is that I’m starting to blossom, to deeply enjoy the process of making dances,” he says. But founder Anthony Shay speaks darkly of moving away from the company, dance -- and Los Angeles.

He’d be leaving a dance community now and forever passionate, fragmented, experimental, self-indulgent, ready to embrace the Next Big Thing, determined to find its own way, on the verge of breakthrough achievements and always criminally underfunded.

Avaz’s paralysis is thus the latest example of a fiscal crisis that has left much of the local dance community in suspended animation: barely able to afford renting rehearsal space -- which typically costs $35 to $45 an hour -- and utterly incapable of coming up with the high rentals, crew fees and marketing costs needed for performances at major local dance venues. Think $12,000 to $15,000 upfront for a couple of weekend nights at such places as the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood or the Japan America Theatre downtown.

In the recent past, grants and donations gave companies access to that kind of venue. But the current economy offers only low-interest investments for wealthy individuals and institutions -- bad bets for contributions to the arts. Moreover, our governor’s attitude toward arts funding is reflected less by the catchphrase “I’ll be back” than by “Hasta la vista, baby,” leaving dance companies scavenging for places to perform.

Last year, for example, choreographer and company leader Terry Beeman staged one of his visionary, Jungian abstractions at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. This April, he rented the small Lillian Theatre in Hollywood on the midweek nights unused by the theater production then performing in the space.

Also in April, choreographer Kitty McNamee staged a 19-part, multicompany benefit at the FOCUSfish studios in Hollywood. Without the $2,200 she made from that event (minus the studio rental), there would have been no local 2004 season for her Hysterica Dance Company, she says, no premiere of her high-energy, full-evening “Victorious,” which recently played two weekends at the 99-seat Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood.

Far from mitigating the pain of the crisis and providing leadership, the Dance Resource Center -- the Southland service organization that produces the annual Lester Horton Dance Awards -- nearly collapsed during “a year when there was no grant money whatsoever,” explains Arianne MacBean, a choreographer, festival producer and until recently president of the organization.

Passing the hat to members and laying off the organization’s two paid employees (the administrative director and financial officer) helped the DRC make it through June, MacBean says. But even with the prospect of grants, she doesn’t expect to regain the “comfortable” $50,000 budget of two years ago.

Nevertheless, she takes pride in the dance community’s rallying to help prevent the destruction of the downsized L.A. Cultural Affairs Department, a planned budgetary action averted in May. “Survival for the DRC is a victory,” MacBean emphasizes. “Survival for Cultural Affairs is a victory. It’s pathetic, but it’s all we can hope for.”

Besides scuttling the plans and crippling the growth of small companies and institutions, the budgetary crisis has caused diminishing or outright cancellation of many large-scale Southland dance projects. They include the Grand Performances series at California Plaza downtown, BalletFest at Cal State L.A., the New World Flamenco Festival at the Irvine Barclay Theatre and Summerdance in Santa Barbara. Yet the greatest signs of hope in the present and for the future also exist on this scale, starting with REDCAT at the back end of Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown.

Administered by CalArts, REDCAT has in its first season balanced the presentation of visiting troupes with opportunities for the local community to develop and showcase its prowess. “We are committed to making the REDCAT a major dance space,” says CalArts President Steven Lavine, though he admits that -- contrary to widespread rumors (see accompanying story) -- “we’ll have to scramble to find the support to do it.”

The new Lula Washington Dance Theatre headquarters on Crenshaw Boulevard (with a studio that converts to an informal 200-seat theater), along with state-of-the-art dance facilities being completed at UCLA, have inspired the same kind of community excitement and expectations, largely because Los Angeles has no center for dance and performance art akin to the long-established alternative spaces in other major cities. Those spaces provide a laboratory, a testing ground, a meeting place and a mirror in which artists see themselves and their link to one another.

Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica has taken on some of this badly needed function -- though it has other priorities and is not ideal for dance. But arguably the best and best-funded equivalent right now is L.A. County’s outdoor summer performance series at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood. The Ford is presenting more dance than ever this season: 14 companies, most of them local, including the Jazz Tap Ensemble, Danza Floricanto/USA, Viver Brasil Dance Company, the Rejina Klenjoski Dance Company, Rei Aoo’s Dance Planet, the Rangoli Foundation for Art and Culture, and the Kim, Eung Hwa Korea Dance Academy.

Where state arts funding is now negligible and the city can provide only token grants that make no real difference in a company’s chances for survival, county arts spending is up by $115,000 this year, says Laura Zucker, executive director of the L.A. County Arts Commission. She estimates the commission’s budget for the year at $4.76 million. (Compare the state’s.)

Zucker is directly involved with programming at the Ford and says that companies selected to perform there must come up only with enough money to pay their own crews and similar expenses -- something like $2,000 to $4,000 (a figure confirmed by several past Ford choreographers). The county takes a cut of ticket sales but provides services (including series marketing) that she believes are worth $20,000 per event.

She acknowledges that in Los Angeles “the situation is extremely fragile for dance right now,” but finds the crisis rooted not only in funding shortfalls but also a declining audience base. “Dance is the least taught of the arts in kindergarten to 12th grade in L.A. County,” she says, “and that situation impacts the development of future audiences.”

Zucker believes that even after problems of teacher accreditation, training and staffing are resolved, it will take 10 years before what she calls “a substantial population that understands dance comes out of our schools.”

She may be right, and that’s cold comfort to Avaz, Hysterica and the other locally based companies struggling to define themselves and make a difference in the development of dance right here, right now.

“It feels that you have to keep fighting your whole life,” says MacBean. “I have to rely on those moments when the wind is at my back to take steps forward as an artist. And I have to hope that persistence and longevity will get me there.”

“The environment, the struggle, all of it feeds the work,” says Kitty McNamee. “Perhaps the ferocity you feel in our dancing comes from how hard we have to fight to get it onstage here.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

10 myths about L.A. concert dance

1.CalArts and its REDCAT at Disney Hall are rolling in Mickey Mouse money and could buy the whole L.A. dance community out of petty cash.

“Totally untrue,” says CalArts President Steven Lavine. “Disney has been a consistent supporter of CalArts but provides only around 1% of the total budget. In terms of REDCAT, we have an endowment that produces about $200,000 a year -- and that goes toward a budget of $1.4 million. Everything else must come from fundraising and ticket sales.”

2.Public broadcasting station KCET Channel 28 is a strong supporter of local artists.

Certainly not when it comes to dance. San Francisco and San Diego PBS stations each maintain mutually useful relationships with their dance communities, but even tokenism is hard to come by in the Big Orange. Check their programming guides for yourself and remember what you find during the next pledge drive.

3.UCLA’s reconceived and upgraded Glorya Kaufman Hall (a.k.a. the Dance Building) will immediately change the dance landscape when it opens this year by providing the community with abundant rehearsal and performing opportunities.

Perhaps eventually, says Chris Waterman, dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture. But no endowment for programming Kaufman Hall exists, and it might take a year to determine how community needs could be integrated with what he calls “the space-time issues” of faculty/student use of the building. “We want to continue our long-term interaction and collaboration with the community,” Waterman emphasizes, “but of course our primary mission is to serve our students.”

4.Safe, affordable rehearsal and performance spaces for dance exist within the Los Angeles city limits.

Sheer fantasy. And though a few dance-community wombats say we’re wrong, nearly all of them seem to have cut special deals to teach or provide other services in exchange for access to theater or educational spaces. But who knows? Maybe we didn’t do enough research. So enlighten us....

5.The Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Culver City gets all the moola it could ever need from the Hollywood high rollers so prominently displayed on its board’s masthead.

“Oh, God, I wish that were true,” Allen exclaims. “We are so desperate for support, there’s no end. I can’t turn children away, and I find myself giving scholarships that we just don’t have funded. The need is huge.”

6.L.A. dancers are a happy-go-lucky lot: beautiful children who love working for free, even when they end up with Third World incomes.

That attitude is “criminal,” comments Stephanie Gilliland, director of the high-energy Tongue ensemble. “Asking dancers to do a show for no money is something we just don’t do anymore.” However, she says she won’t walk away from dance simply because “things are grim right now. No matter what, you still have to make the work.”

7.After four years, the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood is being demolished -- to be replaced by a venue offering at least minimally acceptable sightlines and acoustics for dance and the other performing arts.

Untrue, unfortunately.

8.The local Iranian American community generously funds Avaz International Dance Theatre.

“Nah! (‘no’ in Farsi)” insists company founder Anthony Shay. “They’ll buy tickets, but they come from a country with no philanthropic tradition whatsoever. Over the past 28 years, one individual has given the company about $10,000, but no other [Iranian American] individual or institution has given us anything.”

9.Local audiences don’t wonder or care who specifically is dancing which role in a performance -- except when ballet stars are involved.

Nonsense. Alphabetical cast listings perpetuate this myth -- but it’s rooted in union power. If you’re playing the Third Butterfly in an Actors’ Equity theater production, you must be identified as such. But professional dance companies are covered by the American Guild of Musical Artists, and that union says it’s OK to dance a 10-minute solo in an ensemble piece without being individually credited.

10.David Sefton, impresario of the incomparably daring UCLA Live contemporary performance series, is God: the Lightbringer, Master of Creation, Lord of the Dance, whatever.

Stay tuned. We’re still fact-checking this one.

Lewis Segal, The Times’ dance

critic, can be contacted at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.