Financial Woes Force Cleveland San Jose Ballet To Cancel Season - Company Business and Marketing - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2000 by Wilma Salisbury, Octavio Roca

Cleveland San Jose Ballet was preparing to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary when its trustees abruptly suspended operations, canceled the season, terminated its contract with forty-one dancers and laid off forty administrative employees. The reason: a lack of money. Shortly thereafter, San Jose moved to pick up the pieces.

On August 25, board president Bob Jones announced that the company needed to raise $1 million within two weeks in order to open the season with artistic director Dennis Nahat's Celebrations and Ode, an evening-length Beethoven ballet. Although the company could not make payroll that day, the dancers and staff were confident that the trustees would come up with the money, so the company continued to work without pay. By the deadline, however, only $60,000 had been raised.

"We are deeply saddened to make this announcement," Jones said on September 8, when the company closed its doors and postponed the opening of its school. "But the Cleveland San Jose Ballet simply does not have the resources to continue to operate."

Since 1986, the company has made its second home in San Jose, where it operates as the San Jose Cleveland Ballet. There, the ballet operates in the black on a $4.5 million annual budget. The dancers spend seven or eight weeks each year performing in San Jose, where a new production of Don Quixote was scheduled to be unveiled in the spring of 2001. But the dancers live and rehearse in Cleveland.

Both companies operate with separate boards and budgets, but share dancers and production assets. The Cleveland San Jose company, which operates on a $6 million annual budget, had been plagued with financial problems for more than a decade. In 1992, the community contributed $1 million to a Save the Ballet campaign. Since then, however, the company repeatedly has fallen short of box-office and fund-raising goals. It never established an endowment or a cash reserve. It suffered frequent cash-flow problems and was periodically late with paychecks to the administrative staff and ballet orchestra. Still, the dancers had always been paid, and the trustees had raised $1.8 million in the last year to eliminate the company's accumulated deficit and start an endowment.

At presstime, Cleveland's board had formed an oversight committee to work out how to refund its subscribers' money.

Meanwhile, as first reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, a new company called Ballet San Jose of Silicon Valley was formed in the wake of the Cleveland announcement. San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales announced that he would seek a $250,000 challenge grant from the San Jose City Council to help with start-up costs. The ballet must raise $4 for each $1 it would receive from the city.

The company debuted Oct. 12 with Balanchine's Theme and Variations, August Bournonville's Napoli and Dennis Nahat's Moments. The previously announced San Jose Cleveland Ballet world premiere of Nahat's Celebrations and Ode will be danced by Ballet San Jose later in the season. Nahat will be Ballet San Jose's artistic director. At presstime, thirty-one of the Cleveland company dancers had signed contracts to join Ballet San Jose.