Two Companies in Transition - Cleveland San Jose Ballet and Ohio Ballet companies survive financial strife

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1998 by Wilma Salisbury

Cleveland San Jose Ballet and Ohio Ballet remain afloat after tossing in seas of financial troubles.

One cold day last February, when the dancers of Cleveland San Jose Ballet showed up for class in downtown Cleveland, they found the doors chained shut and the electricity turned off. The company had fallen $75,000 behind on rent for its studios and offices. CSJB's landlord had accepted delayed payments in the past. This time he was unwilling to wait. For the next few days, the staff scrambled to remove leased office equipment from the building and find temporary rehearsal space for the company and its school. "It was the worst time of my professional career," said school administrator June De Phillips, one of several staff members who went into the building with flashlights to clean out the dark and unheated quarters.

Meanwhile, forty miles down the road in Akron, the dancers of Ohio Ballet were facing a crisis of their own. With only eleven women and seven men in its ensemble, the hardworking company had barely enough bodies to dance a tour repertory that featured large-scale ballets by Kurt Jooss and Ruthanna Boris. Because of injuries, illness, and irresponsible behavior, some of the dancers were unable to perform on tour at the Joyce Theater in New York City. The company got through the engagement by drafting former dancers and students from the University of Akron, where Ohio Ballet is in residence. But by the end of the season, three other dancers had been fired and nine others had decided to go to other companies or different careers. In addition, general manager Howard Parr left to join the Akron Civic Theater. And to the shock of the community, founding artistic director Heinz Poll announced his decision to retire at the end of the 1998-99 season. "This is the right time," he said. "I can help the company in transition. It's much better if it's a slow transition." Poll's long service to Ohio Ballet will be saluted with a gala in May 1999.

Since its inception as a student company in 1968, Ohio Ballet has projected the clear vision of Poll and associate director Thomas R. Skelton, the world-renowned lighting designer who died in 1994. The polished chamber ensemble, with its eclectic repertory of neoclassical ballets, mainstream modern dance, and contemporary choreography, was the perfect foil for the grand theatricality of Cleveland Ballet, the classical company that was founded in 1976 under the leadership of artistic director Dennis Nahat and the late Ian Horvath. (The merger with San Jose occurred nine years later.) While the Cleveland company mounted razzle-dazzle spectacles that wowed the public with lavish costumes and scenery and exciting performances by an international roster of dancers, Ohio Ballet stayed true to the pared-down ideal that stemmed from Poll's roots in German expressionism. Dancing on a bare stage in simple costumes, the company glowed under Skelton's magical lighting.

With Poll stepping down, an era ends for Ohio Ballet. And with CSJB forced to reconsider its mission because of severe financial problems, the larger company also enters a period of change. "The situation in ballet is horrendous," says Barbara Robinson, chairwoman of the Ohio Arts Council and of Cleveland San Jose Ballet. "It's very important to have a complete infrastructure and a wide choice of dance for the community. You have to give companies time to make the right decisions."

Ohio Ballet, currently in the black on a $1.5-million budget, expects to have a new artistic director by January. Poll, seventy-two, has willed seventeen of his ballets to past and present members of the company, and he has planned the 1998-99 season, which features the premiere of a work to Duke Ellington, commissioned from Donald Byrd, and revivals of works by Poll, Boris, and Laura Dean. The challenge to Poll's successor is not only the maintenance of high artistic standards but also the booking of tours needed to keep the dancers adequately employed. Each season the company performs a three-concert series on its home stages in Akron and Cleveland. It also presents a six-week summer festival of free outdoor shows in parks throughout northeast Ohio. To fulfill its contract with the dancers, the company depends on touting.

During the dance boom of the 1970s, Ohio Ballet became a favorite on the national circuit. It also traveled through South America and made its European debut at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. For more than a decade, the dancers were employed thirty-six weeks a year. But they took pay cuts in the 1980s and early 1990s, and a long-range plan to increase the size of the nonunion company to twenty-four dancers was never realized. In the last few years, the board has been strengthened with new trustees from Cleveland and Akron, and the dancers' weekly salary has been brought up to an average of $558 a week.

Despite the loss of significant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the company has managed to operate within its budget, thanks largely to the efficiency of its bare-bones administration, the frequent substitution of recordings for live music, the spartan but rent-free facilities the company shares with the dance department at the University of Akron, and Poll's realistic view of the limited support available to an Ohio company that does not mount classical story ballets.