Doyenne of City Center - New York City's City Center for the Performing Arts president and executive director Judith Daykin

Dance Magazine, Nov, 1998 by Hilary Ostlere

As the new season unfolds at City Center, Judith Daykin sits in her headquarters backstage, busily planning programs for the next three years. "The Center is having a revival," she says happily. "People come to enjoy this building and what's in it. Our season is virtually packed from Labor Day to Memorial Day."

For years the historic auditorium had a long and honorable association with such companies as New York City Ballet (before it moved to Lincoln Center), American Ballet Theatre, and the Joffrey Ballet, which made the theater its headquarters before moving to Chicago. But when Daykin joined City Center as president and executive director four years ago, its reputation as a dance center was sustained mostly by bookings of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Paul Taylor Dance Company. "When I arrived here we had merely thirteen weeks of dance booked," she says. "This past year we had thirty-five. I would like to see as many as forty to forty-four. Dance is 70 percent of our bookings."

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, back in 1943, designated City Center "the people's theater," with high-quality entertainment, including musicals, opera, drama, Shakespeare, and dance, at reasonable prices. In that spirit, Daykin this year booked the Ontario-based Stratford Festival for two and a half weeks, copresenting their productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Moliere's The Miser. She has continued the highly successful "Encores!" series, musicals re-created in concert form, which has been hailed for reviving shows that deserve repeating but don't necessarily merit new full-scale productions. (Chicago, of course, is the triumphant exception that went on to conquer Broadway again.) Daykin also oversees "Education at City Center," a comprehensive outreach program with New York City public schools, run by Jannas Zalesky. "Everything that appears onstage should have an educational component," Daykin says.

These days, you could do a Cook's tour of dance at City Center without ever leaving these shores, with Greece, Turkey, Argentina, Canada, Russia, and Monte Carlo represented by companies in the current season. There's also a variety of American dance, including San Francisco Ballet, Lar Lubovitch, the Ailey and Taylor companies, and a special collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Jessye Norman.

ABT's decision to have a mini-season, featuring works such as Frederick Ashton's Les Patineurs and Agnes de Mille's Rodeo that can benefit from a more intimate setting than the Metropolitan Opera House, is particularly gratifying for Daykin: "Joanne Woodward, a City Center board member and great dance enthusiast, was ecstatic. She said, `I can really see who people are. I've finally been able to see the sets in detail!'"

City Center doesn't act as presenter or underwriter. Says Daykin, "What we do is try to provide a first-class venue at the lowest possible cost. Companies come in at their own risk, presenting themselves, but they take all the box office with them. We work hard with them to determine the best dates, put together a budget, and recommend advertising and press agencies. We also do a great deal of marketing on their behalf, including a detailed seasonal calendar for people to refer to. We try in every way possible to make [a dance company's] appearance here successful, whether it's a couple of performances or a couple of weeks."

Still, City Center has 2,684 seats to fill. Sometimes smaller performing groups choose to close off the upper balcony. "If you bring a lot of sets, like ABT, obviously costs are high," says Daykin. "But if you're a middle-sized modem, like David Parsons, you come in with essentially a bare stage, a lot of lighting, some minor set pieces, and costumes. You're just paying the rent, around $30,000 a week, plus your front house costs for ushers, tickettakers, and So on."

Occasionally City Center does program and produce. "We like to see the remaining open time filled with corporate bookings," says Daykin. "It's the way many arts organizations are now going to help pay bills. We've had American Express, the Rainforest Gala, Windows '98, and fashion shows at higher rentals than the not-for-profits. It helps underwrite our arts events. The operating costs for a building like this are humongous. The city gives us support, but it's only about 20 percent of our total budget. But we're increasingly profiting from private givers. Donations, some as little as five or ten dollars, others much bigger, are up to the tune of $175,000. People now feel an affinity for various companies; whereas before they may have been unsure what they were supporting."

In the future, Daykin would like to see more indigenous American work. "We've had some conversations with the Concordia Orchestra, which specializes in American music," says Daykin, "and we hoped to bring back Leonard Bemstein's Mass with the Concordia playing for it. I consider the whole area of gospel, jazz, and country music targets of opportunity. But I don't want to stick our neck out too far. When I got here, we owed a good deal of money. It was very difficult to get vendors to do business with us. That's no longer true, but I don't want to put this staff in jeopardy."