THE TURNING POINT

Anyone in North Texas who knows his back yard from a ballet has a fundamental question: Why does Fort Worth have a good-looking, professional $2 million ballet company while Dallas has only a small and limited company budgeted at under $500,000?

But try to get an answer and suddenly it’s as if the State Department donned tutus. You’d think we were breaching national security by simply bringing the question up. Arts leaders immediately turn into deep throats: They’ll discuss the topic only on condition of strict anonymity. Fine. But the fact remains that Fort Worth is beating the tights off Dallas in the ballet bowl.

In practical terms, if we ever build the Arts District’s last major component-a large, multipurpose performing arts center to counterbalance the Meyerson-we simply must have a ballet company to use it. The Dallas Opera can’t be expected to perform mere enough nights each year to war-

rant the hall. This is perfectly common. In Houston, for example, The Wortham Center is the main performance venue for both the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Ballet.

But that’s the bricks-and-mortar argument for the ballet company Dallas deserves. Such a construction rationale is almost moot in this economy, when arts funding is a thing you’ve only heard about from your grandparents. For now. the more viable debate involves the ballet-impoverishment of our cultural life. We’re too big a city not to have our own major dance force, especially with a jewel like the Houston Ballet to the south and a rising, worldclass company like the Fort Worth Ballet just next door. Two things are operating here: Neglect. Our citizens are not by nature given to crying fits about the lack of full-scale classical dance. Indeed, they seem as

nonchalant about it as they are about the struggle for existence and lack of quality among our other arts. Only a few gutsy visionaries are scratching away at this problem, and then only behind the scenes. Everyone else seems to wish they’d go take a grand jete.

Trauma. Dallas once had a huge ballet company, an internationally noted company. But the Dallas Ballet upended and sank in a spectacular example of non-profit arts disaster. It was deeply embarrassing to the city, a crippling blow to the arts. Asking Dallas how it feels about ballet companies today is like asking Hong Kong how it felt about ocean liners after Cunard’s HMS Queen Elizabeth burned in its harbor.

Note that the Dallas Black Dance Theatre is not at issue here, although its playbill rightly points out that “Dallas is the only major city in the United States where the primary professional dance services are provided by a predominately black company.” While proudly past its 16th birthday and expanding its touring presence each season, founding artistic director Ann Williams’ DBDT is an 11-performer modern-dance company. It’s made in the image of the great Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, not a classical ballet organization, and it has some tough decisions to make about its own eclectic repertoire.

Also not at issue is The International Theatrical Arts Society, or TITAS, that healthily aggressive presenter of imported, important dance events in Dallas. Fortunately, TITAS director Tom Adams loves newer, less-traditional dance.

Nor are we talking about the Anita N. Martinez Ballet Folklorico, a company that serves Dallas with interpretations of the folk-based dance traditions of Mexico.

What is our primary focus here is ballet, both classical and contemporary. We’re talking about an expensive kind of dance, a codified and difficult form of the art. It includes everything from the Russian-based Vaganova technique and hoary 19th-century grand ballets to the sexiness of Jiri Kylian’s mid-1980s works for The Netherlands Dance Theatre and the more recent, heaven-bent spinning choreography of The Joffrey Ballet’s Edward Stierle, who recently died with AIDS.

We’ve been a long time in not getting such dance for Dallas.



Dance/USA, the Washington-based service organization for non-profit professional American dance, published a final profile of the Dallas Ballet in its 1988 Membership Directory.

The Dallas Ballet, before its 1988 death, reported that in fiscal-year 1987 it would have had an operating budget of $3.7 million. It had an 80-member board. It hired 27 dancers on full-time, 34-week contracts each year. It danced at the 1,589-seat Majestic Theatre, giving 47 performances with live accompaniment to a total audience of 75,000 people. It had 3,171 subscribers. It earned 56 percent of its income through ticket sales, a handsome percentage among non-profit arts groups in this country. The other 44 percent came in donations.

But the Dallas Ballet’s budget deficit,says Thorn Clower, was “right at $2 million” at the time of the company’s demise. Clower, who had been with the Dallas Ballet since 1978, started as a dancer, became rehearsal assistant, then assistant ballet master to the late Robert Gladstein, only to watch in horror as Gladstein’s and others’ frantic fund-raising efforts failed. As early as March 1987, The Dallas Morning News has reported, the company couldn’t meet payroll. Gladstein took the dancers to such venues as Mavericks games’ halftimes to raise money. Though the dancers amassed $557,000, enough to finish the season, the company was deep in the throes of what Clower now calls “the death that never happened. All of us were re-hired for the 1988-89 season,” When the dancers arrived in the early fall to start rehearsals, they were told the company was kaput. “And it was too late then,” Clower says, “to get work anywhere else.” The country’s other major companies had hired all the dancers they needed and were starting their own rehearsals. Dallas’ dancers were stranded.

Clower was owed $37,000 at the end. “I got $35,” he says.



The Dallas Ballet was hatched 35 years ago. in 1957, as the Dallas Civic Ballet Society. It gave rise to the Dallas Ballet Academy, organized by choreographer George Skibine in 1969. A year later, the Dallas Civic Ballet Company staged its first performances as an outgrowth of the school’s program. And in 1975, the company went professional under the name of the Dallas Ballet. Recognized as a capable company, it nevertheless had no particular personality to call its own. It needed a specialty. It got one.

In 1981, the Copenhagen-born Flem-ming Flindt, then 45. arrived with his ballerina-wife Vivi to take over the artistic direction of the Dallas Ballet. Flindt, a renowned former ballet master and artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet, brought with him the sort of cachet that could immediately slam our ballet company onto the world’s dance map: He was a celebrated keeper of the Bournonville flame, the style and technique of ballet that trademarks classical dance in Denmark. Boumonville ballet is one of the world’s handful of main variants on classical ballet, a beloved dialect, if you will, of the balletic language.

In retrospect, it seems almost the stuff of a bad, esoteric situation comedy. It’s amazing that anyone might have thought the canon of August Boumonville’s 19th-century ballets would make sense to the general Dallas audience of the late 20th century. Although revered by balletomanes for its demands of ballon, Bournonville dance, even on a good day, is going to look to unprepared Southwestern Americans like so much frilly romanticism for the girls and an awful lot of jumping around in knee britches for the boys. It’s a light, airy, busy idiom of dance, said to have resulted from Bournonville’s need to hide his own brittle landings with an elastic, bouncing flurry of footwork.

All too predictably, the whole thing at last came down with a profound thud. “What we did immediately,” Clower says, “was keep the company’s school going, under a different charter and name. We knew we’d have to have the school if we were ever to have professional dance here again.”

And in September of 1989, a year after the dancers were told they’d been hired by a non-existent company, Clower staged the first performance of something called Ballet Dallas. Today, it’s Dallas’ only standing classical-ballet ensemble. Clower, its artistic director, says its budget is just under $500,000. Ballet Dallas has 16 dancers on 28-week contracts. Tour appearances may expand those contracts to 32 weeks annually. Each dancer, Clower says, is paid about $300 weekly. The company has a 15-member board and earns about 60 percent of its money in sales. About 40 percent is contributed. The Meadows Foundation for the Arts gave Ballet Dallas one of its $250,000 challenge grants. In principle, a company must match the full $250,000 to get the grant. Clower says Ballet Dallas couldn’t make the match but that the Meadows matched the $ 190,000 the ballet was able to raise.

Clower is cited on all sides for keeping Ballet Dallas in the black. In the long term, he says, he’d like to get the dancers’ pay higher and mount five productions, not the current three, per year. In the short term, he’s meeting this fall with artistic director Oleg Uzakov of the Uzbekistan Ballet about a proposed exchange that would send Ballet Dallas there in February and bring the Uzbekistaners here in the spring.

Jeffrey Plourde, the 26-year-old lead male dancer of Ballet Dallas, met Uzakov at a dance competition in the former Soviet Union and hooked him up with Clower.

“We’re talking about a true cultural exchange,” an excited Clower says. “There’s no telling where this could lead.”

True. But some would say that a search for new thrills in Dallas dance should lead to a much closer destination than Uzbekistan-go west, they’d tell you, not east.



In 1961, just four years after the Dallas Ballet’s inception, the Fort Worth Ballet began a similarly modest existence. When Tom Adams-now the TITAS director-took charge as its general manager in 1975, it had grown to no more than what he terms “an extension of the TCU dance department.” Adams’ clever approach, which presaged the program he now operates for TITAS, was to present professional dancers and companies from the nation’s dance centers. It’s of some irony now that long before Flindt came to Dallas, Adams booked guest performances in Fort Worth by the late Erik Bruhn, the modem era’s most famed danseur noble of the Bournonville camp.

Adams manipulated with artful dexterity-as he still does at TITAS today-the proverbial regional-American reverence for anything “direct from” somewhere else. By 1982, when Adams departed, “the company’s own performances,” he says, “outnumbered those of the guest dance companies. I left almost $200,000 in the bank.” And he had pulled off a well-choreographed switcheroo for which Fort Worth can always be grateful: He wooed audiences with the promise of something “direct from,” kept sneaking in more and more local work and eventually trained his audience to support homegrown dance.

That dance was good enough to attract the patronage of Ann Bass, whose donations soon boosted the company to professional level from “civic” status, which in the industry generally defines a non-professional training-based company. Bass eventually would move to New York. A year and a half ago, she donated her for-profit Fort Worth School of Ballet to the non-profit Fort Worth Ballet, after having set the company resolutely on the ribbon-and-resin path to becoming a repository of George Balanchine ballets, much as the Dallas Ballet had been made a “Bourn-onville company.” To that end, former Balanchine protege Paul Mejia-husband to Suzanne Farrell, who was a Balanchine muse herself-was installed in 1987 as Fort Worth Ballet’s artistic director. It’s under Mejia’s leadership that the company has, in just five years, developed into the powerhouse it is today.

Particularly in the past two years, under David Mallette’s incisive executive direction, the Fort Worth Ballet has bounded to sometimes astonishing levels of artistry and deficit-free financial success. Its 28 rigorously trained and rehearsed dancers are paid some $400 weekly for 34 weeks of dancing before a total annual audience of 75,000. Some of that audience will see the ensemble during five weeks of touring around Texas-“We have a real commitment to bringing top dance to rural areas that won’t see it otherwise,” Mallette says. The company has 3,500 subscribers, which is more man the Dallas Ballet was reporting in its 1987 fiscal year. Fort Worth has a 64-member board, In the 1986-87 season, Mallette says, his company earned only 27 percent of its budget in ticket sales. The rest had to be found in donations. Then Mejia arrived. And today, the Fort Worth Ballet earns 51 percent of its revenue, on par with the national 50:50 ratio of earned-to-contributed income for non-profit arts organizations.

If there’s a problem with the Fort Worth Ballet-though some say it’s the company’s glory–it’s the organization’s repertoire. Mejia stages only works that he choreographs himself or ballets by Balanchine, the Russian emigre who revolutionized American ballet with the neoclassical style that gave rise to the New York City Ballet.

Fort Worth company leaders haven’t always been as candid about this as they are today. Just 16 months ago, while the Fort Worth Ballet was performing at the Kennedy Center’s Texas Festival. Mallette sat at breakfast in Washington and assured a critic from the Dallas Times Herald that as soon as more donations came in, Mejia would jump at the chance to go outside the Mejia-Balanchine repertoire and commission new work from other choreographers-the donations were needed, logically, for the creation of new costumes, sets, lighting designs, the choreography itself and rehearsal time. Nowadays, Mallette admits that as long as Mejia is (he man in charge, the dancers are going to be toeing the line of his own or Balanchine’s work, period-and with the blessing of the board. After all. the popular Balanchine dances have been very, very good to the Fort Worth Ballet.

And certainly, as such a specialist company. Fort Worth is a model: These are meticulously chosen and prepared dancers who know their Balanchine. The feisty, angular power of Benjamin G. Bowman can be channeled with devastating effect into the elegiac requirements of Balan-ehine’s prophetic The Four Temperaments. When it comes to Mejia’s penchant for the kind of show-dance crowd-pleasers that have fueled the mass appeal of Chicago’s Hubbard Street Dance Company. Bowman is a wonder of high-kicking bravura. Todd Edson, by contrast, is the quintessential stage-center blond Balanchine partner, the sturdy Peter Martins of this troupe, offering the steadying hand to such regal ballerinas as the company’s “two Marias”-marvelous, moody Maria Terezia Balogh and sassy, svelte Maria Thomas. Audiences also have come to know and care for the darkly severe Angela Amort, the spritely Maura McKenna. the Russian-born Mikhail Gadamakin. the dependable Margo McCann and the constant William Earle Smith III.

The dancers who live and grow in Mejia’s company have made a conscious choice to stay and toil in a sort of Mejia-Balanchine ghetto. The pretty, witty, sleek, abstract ballets Balanchine left us are as accessible and fun for audiences as his most grinding hokum like the Western Symphony. But will the crowds watch them forever? And. with or without so tight a repertoire, how can any company based in Fort Worth expand beyond a certain ceiling of dance interest in its own market?



SO, HERE WE HAVE:

1. the small and uneven Ballet Dallas, which is the energetic remnant of the lost Dallas Ballet, and…

2. the big and beautiful Fort Worth Ballet, ready for new territory.

Isn’t it logical to expect a lot of the Fort Worth Ballet in Dallas?

This is where the cloak-and-dagger stuff stalls happening. Donors, movers and shakers dart onto the stage of inquiry, whisper one strategy or another, then scamper out of sight again before they can be seen taking sides. They go off-record or they don’t go at all. A perfect example is a diligent, determined dance booster who currently has an eye on four or Five possible routes to big dance in Dallas, but who speaks this way: “You can write mat I said this, but you can’t say who I am: Thorn Clower will not be able to bring Ballet Dallas, even if you give him $2 million, up to the quality of Fort Worth Ballet, Miami Ballet, Boston Ballet or Cleveland Ballet. He just doesn’t have enough experience. I can praise Thorn to the skies because he has handled the finances of his little company so well. But he’s not the artistic director Dallas needs to have great dance.”

Clower, disarmingly, lays no claims to such artistic-directorial greatness. “Our most important goal” at Ballet Dallas, he says, “will always be the betterment of the arts in Dallas. I think if anybody looks at what we’ve done with the amount of money we had to spend on it, they’ll see that we are a part of the arts community here. We’re working hard to be a helpful part of the arts community here.”

But is that all we should get from dance in Dallas? It seems not. The press-shy culture-pushers don’t talk of waiting while Ballet Dallas matures. Instead, they enumerate these options:

Import an existing company, such as the fabulous Joffrey Ballet, which ended its split-city existence between New York and Los Angeles last year in a catastrophe of bad blood and heavy deficits.

2. Start up a completely new company using the dancers of a major ensemble that has been destabilized by financial and leadership upheavals, such as the venerable American Ballet Theatre in New York, still staggering to find its identity post-Baryshnikov.

3. Make the Fort Worth Ballet a shared, two-city company.

4. Seek a merger of the Port Worth Ballet and Ballet Dalla.

Both the first and second options would cost at least $2 million potential donors say. Talks have been had with Joffrey, which needs a home and has made it known that Dallas might make a dandy second venue to New York, Board members of Ballet Dallas say that not only is the price tag too steep, but Clower is threatened by the idea of a worldclass company coining onto his territory. Clower says insecurity is not the problem. “We’ve actually talked about Ballet Dallas acquiring the Joffrey Ballet,” he says, “but the business people said ’no way’ ” to such a high-risk financial undertaking.

The third option, making the Fort Worth Ballet a shared company between Dallas and Fort Worth, is scary to anyone who has followed American dance in the last decade. Bi-city ballet hookups such as Joffrey’s New York and Los Angeles deal, and the shared companies of New Orleans and Cincinnati or Tampa and Denver, all have proved unwieldy and impractical, ending with each community feeling underserved and overtaxed by “that other city’s” ballet. Proponents of a DFW sharing of the Fort Worth Ballet argue forcefully, however, that this would be the first such effort between two such geographically close cities-transportation costs would be comparatively negligible and the Metroplex proximity of the two communities sharing the ballet might prevent either side from feeling neglected.

The fourth option, a merger of the Fort Worth company and Ballet Dallas, yields two stories. One is that Clower at Ballet Dallas has been willing to talk about a merger and that Fort Worth’s board has been, too-but that Paul Mejia looked at Ballet Dallas’ Carmina Burana on stage last season and decided that Ballet Dallas simply wasn’t up to the standards of the Fort Worth Ballet.

Although it would be perfectly all right for one artistic director to feel that the quality of another company’s talent wasn’t what he wanted to work with, it isn’t the sort of sentiment to be spoken in the hush-hush dance world. So Mallette insists that the story of Mejia’s rejection of Ballet Dallas is false. Mejia, Mallette says, is hardly so autocratic. (He’s also away on travels and totally unreachable for comment-that may be some of Mejia’s best choreography yet.) Mallette goes on to say that a merger simply isn’t practical because he doesn’t see Dallas coming up with its part of the necessary contributions for a company named “Fort Worth.” And if the name were changed to something more neutral-say, the “Texas Ballet”- wouldn’t Fort Worth donors feel cheated and start withdrawing their support?

Dancer Plourde, who was with the Fort Worth Ballet before coming to Ballet Dallas for its more eclectic repertoire, nails the fear of merger from the Dallas vantage point: “Essentially, it would be Fort Worth Ballet taking over Ballet Dallas.”

But Clower says he sees the drawbacks in terms of practical problems, not ego. “Paul [Mejia] and we have, in a fashion, discussed a merger,” Clower says. “The concept isn’t a bad one. But nobody can figure out if it will be a Balanchine company or a mixed company. The budget would be a lot bigger. Where’s it going to come from? We have a really large program for kids and minorities, to educate the public about dance-one two-city company would not be able to service an entire metropolitan area [with such educational programs]. Dallas won’t want to give money to a Fort Worth company. Fort Worth won’t want to give money to a Dallas company. And where is the school going to be, who’ll run it and what’s it going to teach?”

Pay special attention to one leading arts proponent who’s willing to speak, if only briefly, on the record. Henry S. Miller Jr. is a former Dallas Ballet board member. Now, he’s a key board member of the Fort Worth Ballet. He’s also an example of the kind of influential Dallas intelligentsia who have has already crossed over to support Fort Worth’s company. Miller says that in recent attempts to bring Fort Worth Ballet and Ballet Dallas heads together to discuss possible cooperative efforts, “There didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm on the part of the professionals in either company. I think some of the supporters of both ballets are interested, but I guess it’s hard to get some of the professionals to give up what they see as their turf.”

And Fort Worth’s Mallette has an arresting question to offer: “With whom or with what might we merge?” He points out that his Fort Worth Ballet might consider a merger with a non-dance company or other entity-to gain the infrastructure of a box office system and hall administration, but not necessarily to blend forces with another company.



IT’S IMPORTANT TO PAY SPECIAL AT-tention to what Mallette is saying. Plain old evolution may be waltzing us all much closer to a resolution of this dance standoff than we realize.

Last Christmas, the Fort Worth Ballet’s staging of The Nutcracker was efficiently presented, as it had been in the past, by the Dallas Opera at Fair Park’s Music Hall in Dallas. Fort Worth’s dancers drew a knockout 16,000 Dallasites to the show. That’s actually a few more tickets than the company sold to its home-town performances of The Nutcracker.

“We have been performing in Dallas for five years” with Cinderella and The Nutcracker, Mallette hammers his point home. “Dallas is important to the Fort Worth Ballet. We haven’t made any secret mat we want to be performing in Dallas. I’m very proud of the fact that the Fort Worth Ballet, more than any other performing arts organization, has been pro-active in crossing the Trinity. It all just comes back to the ownership issue. Can an organization raise money in another city?”

Mallette estimates it would cost somewhere between $350,000 and $500,000 to have the Fort Worth Ballet stage its own three-production season, including The Nutcracker, in Dallas. Compare that to the $2 million Dallas would need to create a new, major ballet company from scratch or to bring in an existing company like the Joffrey, and suddenly $500,000 looks like a bargain. But wouldn’t it be a smart one considering that the payoff would be having Fort Worth’s dance artists on our own stages for three productions?

Ballet Dallas might continue to work at its own pace, without company-eating mergers. Fort Worth Ballet board president Joseph A. Monteleone takes great pains to assert that his company took no pleasure in the 1988 demise of the Dallas Ballet and that his ballet should not be seen as predatory. Monteleone and Mallette are anxious that the Fort Worth Ballet be seen as our friendly neighbor, not as an aggressor.

So what’s it going to take to seize the chance to have large-scale, superbly rendered Fort Worth Ballet performances in Dallas?

Everybody simply has to drop the secretive thing and enter into frank and honest discussion.

Jo Ann Robertson, past president and current chairman of the board of the Dallas Dance Council, wouldn’t speak on the record for this story. Tauna Hunter, current president of the council, wouldn’t speak on the record. Patsy Swank, one of Dallas’ most valuable longtime arts journalists and an assistant director at the city of Dallas’ International Affairs office, felt she couldn’t go on record either. Henry S. Miller Jr., so closely involved for so long with the good fight to bring dance to the area, would speak only guardedly. Sheila Grant, an arts patron and an immensely knowledgeable observer of the national dance scene, has a keen perspective on the situation and is soulfully committed to bettering our dance situation-but she felt compelled to keep her ideas separate from her name. TITAS’ well-respected Tom Adams went on and off the record during our interview, hedging his comments about Dallas’ current dance community. David Mallette did the same. By contrast. Thom Clower and Jeffrey Plourde of Ballet Dallas were relatively forthright. Many others wouldn’t even have their names brought into the debate.

In the eternal ballet Giselle, callous young men whose rejected girlfriends died of broken hearts meet an awful fate; They’re danced to death in midnight woodland glades by creatures called the wilis-the spirits of those jilted girls, Giselle comes back from the grave, a wili herself, to protect her beloved Albrecht until the dawn’s light scatters the wilis who menace him.

Giselle is, actually, one of the most ridiculous of old-world ballets in terms of its preposterous and melodramatic theme. But it holds a lesson for us: It’s time we conjured up the spirit of the Dallas Ballet just long enough to rearm ourselves with the inspiration that big-time company once offered our city. We need to remember less the nightmare of that organization’s loss and more the glory of its best evenings of dance. And then, with a last kiss to that Giselle of a memory, we need to step into the light of day and start speaking aloud exactly what we want and what we’re willing to do to get it.

If we worry about whose toes we step on, we’ll all end up cordial but timid dancers-and Dallas will remain a city that gets the wilis, not a ballet company.