Hale and hardy: Marie Hale's Palm Beach company begins its ninth season on a firmer-than-ever footing - Ballet Florida

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1994 by Kristy Montee

First, there was a school. It was a converted carpet store in a down-at-heel West Palm Beach neighborhood. And when it rained too hard, as it always did in Florida during the summer, the students would leap across the puddles that dotted the wood floors.

In those days, during the sixties and early seventies, Marie Hale never dreamed she would someday be running a professional ballet company. She was too busy teaching the little ones about proper alignment, the older ones about the mysteries of a clean pirouette. She was too concerned about positioning the special ones for professional careers.

Now, sitting behind her antique desk in the new million-dollar home of Ballet Florida, Hale lets loose her throaty Mississippi-Marlboro laugh. "Me running a ballet company? In those days, it never occurred to me," she says. "I never thought I was capable of that. Little did I know."

Next month, as Ballet Florida opens its ninth season, Hale can look forward with confidence to the future of the company she never intended to found. Ballet Florida now has twenty-two dancers on forty-week contracts, an eclectic repertoire, a loyal subscription base, a mortgage-free home, access to a $52 million theater in which to perform, and, for the first time, a stable financial picture.

The last part comes thanks to new executive director Charles W. Surber, who, with his background in strategic and financial planning for nonprofit groups, has pledged to have Ballet Florida running in the black in two years.

"I don't doubt he can do it," says Hale. "This is the first time in nine years I've gotten a paycheck every month."

In creating Ballet Florida, Hale took the same difficult path of many regional dance companies: using a school as a springboard to create a civic-level troupe. But Ballet Florida's climb has been shorter than most.

In its inaugural year of 1986, Ballet Florida had a budget of $600,000 and a small repertoire of modest ballets tailored to the limited techniques of the twelve dancers. All were unpaid except for three men who received a $100 weekly living stipend.

To make matters worse, Ballet Florida, barely out of its recital shoes, was overshadowed by the nova-like birth of another South Florida classical company, Miami City Ballet, led by the charismatic Edward Villella.

Since then, the two companies have grown up side by side, separated philosophically be different repertoires but geographically by only a ninety-minute drive on the freeway.

The two companies perform in the same theater in West Palm Beach, the 2,200-seat Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. And both fish for subscribers and benefactors from the same Palm Beach County pool.

But where Miami City Ballet's repertoire is grounded in the Balanchine style as filtered through Villella's experience with New York City Ballet, Ballet Florida's repertoire runs the gamut from nineteenth-century story ballets to modern German expressionism.

Steven Caras, who has worked with both companies and is now Ballet Florida's photographer, explains the difference: "To oversimplify it, Miami City Ballet is New York City Ballet to Ballet Florida's American Ballet Theatre."

Hale dodges the sticky question of style by saying, "We have no style. We have the style of whatever piece we are dancing."

In fact, Ballet Florida's style is still somewhat amorphous as Hale searches to upgrade the repertoire, which in the early years, she admits, featured an underpopulated Coppeia, a threadbare Nutcracker, and some real stinker ballets.

Now the story ballets include an opulent $1 million dollar Nutcracker, a lusty Vicente Nebrada staging of Romeo and Juliet, Norbert Vesak's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a new production of Val Caniparoli's Lady of the Camellias, which Ballet Florida shares with Ballet West.

The repertoire, though still heavy with accessible ballets, also features works by John Butler, William Forsythe, and Michael Smuin, and several by Canadian choreographer Mauricio Wainrot, including a grimly expressionistic Anne Frank.

This past season, the company acquired Peter Martins's Les Petits Riens, a move that took the dancers if not into Balanchine territory then at least to its suburbs. Next season comes another Martins work, The Waltz Project, Alvin Ailey's The River, and the ballet on which young companies cut their Balanchine teeth, Allegro Brillante, staged by Elyse Borne, who recently left Miami City Ballet as ballet mistress.

On Hale's wish list for the future are more Balanchine pieces, works by David Bintley and Geoffrey Holder, and another by Forsythe, She'd love to do In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, though she's not certain Ballet Florida's audiences are ready for a full evening of the iconoclastic Frsythe.

"We have an obligation to make our audiences happy, so we offer the popular story ballets," Hale says, "but we also have a responsibility to do things that are meaningful, things that are not necessarily safe for the box office. Dancers should not be allowed to indulge themselves in various choreographic styles at the audience's expense, but it is just as important that they be challenged."