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The DanceView Times, San Francisco Bay Area edition

Reburying Local Treasure
The Plight of the Oakland Ballet

By Ann Murphy
Copyright ©2003 by Ann Murphy

Few things can put arts funding in the U.S. into perspective more than an evening at the Kirov with full orchestra. And fewer things still point to the mess we're in in the performing arts than the now rickety state of Oakland Ballet, which last week postponed and shortened the run of Program 2 due to poor ticket sales. Had the company gone on with the show, the cash shortfall it would have suffered, company insiders say, could have flattened it.

Last week in Berkeley, three miles up the road from  Oakland Ballet, people were shelling out $100 a pop to see the Kirov Ballet and Orchestra, appearing for the first time since the Cold War dissolved 12 years ago (or in the case of the orchestra, for the first time ever). Ten miles west in San Francisco Smuin Ballet/SF was on the boards with the premiere of Tango Palace. In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article on the postponement, OB CFO Tony Caparelli attributed the slow ticket sales to the competition. I'd venture to say that OBs efforts to corral an audience this weekend were like a good, field-worthy minor league ball team going up against the World Series a few blocks away.

Some have suggested that Oakland Ballet could have foreseen the conflict and programmed around the Kirov, but it's easy to call for prescience in hindsight. The fact is the company makes its contractual arrangements with the Paramount Theater four years out-they are currently scheduled through 2007. There's no Bay Area master calendar that presenters and companies consult, and even if there were, who's to say the big presenters would give a damn about the smaller folks whose audiences they need and want anyway? What, exactly, is the model for that kind of collegial concern in this country? Microsoft?

So how does a mid-sized struggling ballet company compete in the heavily competitive arts scene? Or find its identity in a complex and deeply conflicted city like Oakland, which is its "mission" to represent, when it can only draw second-string dancers and inherited an agenda so multifarious that a comparable set of goals would sink most well-heeled corporations (or at least those without heavy subsidization by the feds)? To be a neo-classical ballet company with a Diaghilev revival to its fame, quaint, locally-made ballets to preserve, whether or not they merit keeping, and a large, multi-racial community to serve that previously went unserved, with no school to feed it, and dancers who don't stick around—it's enough to make you dash down your tutu, cut your pointe ribbons to shreds, and throw the leotard into the fire.

As if all that wasn't thorny enough, Oakland Ballet has recently been forced to leave its city-subsidized quarters in the Alice Arts Center in downtown Oakland, because 50% of its space was dubiously reclaimed for the charter Oakland School for the Arts highschool, while the rent for the remaining studio and office space was to double. The headlines should read: Local Treasure Reburied.

This was the weekend Oakland was to perform a mixed bill with former artistic director Ronn Guidi's pensive Trois Gymnopedies, Dwight Rhoden's wonderfully gripping Glory Fugue, local ballerina Amy Seiwerts' premiere Monopoly, and Gloria Contreras' sexy pas de deux Opus 45. Now it will be performed one night only, November 7. Program II is a better formulated program than many Guidi-era mixed bills, thanks to Rhoden's first-rate dance of transformation, which the company last year bit into with abandon, and the sultry intimacy of Opus 45. The dancers are also a more well-rounded bunch than Guidi's companies, even though this OB can be a bland, overstretched ensemble, too, with not enough expertise in any one technique to grab us.

Their limits were in plain view in Program I last month. First the trio stumbled trying to meet the technical demands of Balanchine's brutal little Glinka Pas de Trois, a situation that was nerve-wracking (will he or won't he fall?) but understandable. What was less comprehensible was how wooden they were in the insouciantly tricky Joplin Dances by Robert Garland. These require joyous sass and wit the way ragtime requires syncopation, but there was almost none in view. Yet I'd bet if they got to rehearse as much as the Kirov rehearses, or even San Francisco Ballet or Smuin Ballet/SF, such problems would fall away.

The fact of the matter is that partially retooled Oakland Ballet is a three-year-old work in progress born during a steep economic downturn and the ascendance nationally of the most radical right-wing force since the rabidly anti-Communist 1950's, whose anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-Civil Rights values deem much of the arts their enemy. If the liberals dominated funding policy for the arts in the 1960's—and they did—the right has fought tooth and nail since Ronald Reagan's presidency to hijack the discussion as well as the allocation of resources. They have succeeded both in large and small ways. By attacking the liberal establishment as ideological, and government grantmaking as a political act that is unrepresentative, the right has hidden its own fierce ideological commitment to the way things were prior to 1968, under guise of returning things to a "fair and balanced" place. The real name for this is counter-revolution.

In 1972 I took a Dance Theater of Harlem master class with Arthur Mitchell and ballerinas from the company, one year after DTH's debut. The dancers' thighs were large and overworked and their pointe work stiff. They looked awkward on stage, but that didn't stop Mitchell, who knew that in order to have a company he had to force untrained kids to bloom into dancers almost overnight, while never losing sight of what kind of company he was aiming for and soon achieved. He didn't do it in an economic vacuum, however, or in an atmosphere of defeatism, or through some kind of genius-magic of his own making. Far from it. He had the support of the deeply munificent Ford Foundation without which he might never have been able to make his vision a reality. Minus such contributions of philanthropies like the Ford Foundation, which, under McNeil Lowry was committed to dance almost as much as Henry Ford was to cars, it is fair to say that New York City dance would not have flowered as gloriously as it did in the late '6's and '70s.

So it is no surprise that Karen Brown says the issue for Oakland Ballet today, as it is for San Jose Silicon Valley Ballet, Diablo Ballet and others, is money. Money is the elephant in the room which many would like to ignore, not least because the room the elephant sits in is shaped by the political and cultural ideology of each person's view on the arts, arts funding, who gets it, and why. Money, afterall, is the primary route to power and influence.

Brown has a deep, humane vision for Oakland Ballet that embraces the spectrum of race and class in American society with an ease and optimism few artistic directors of American ballet companies can equal. Now in their new studios on Linden Street near the Port of Oakland, she envisions a school for OB that can feed the company and better bind itself to the community. She already has and will continue to bridge high and popular art through programming varied music and dance styles, preserving classical ballet while also allowing it to incorporate the vernacular. What Brown is undertaking is the preservation of high art that speaks to a community larger than the elite. While it is still unclear if she has the artistic gumption to realize her vision, her three years at the helm in an economic recession is hardly sufficient time to judge. While there is no hope for Russian-style subsidies for dance on the American horizon, let's hope there is at least enough money out there to let the Oakland Ballet project thrive.

Photo:  The Oakland Ballet in Ronn Guidi's Trois Gymnopedies.

Originally published:
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 1, Number 3
October 13, 2003
Copyright ©2003 by Ann Murphy

 

 

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This weeks' articles

 

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The Autumn DanceView is out:

New York City Ballet's Spring 2003 season reviewed by Gia Kourlas

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Reviews of San Francisco Ballet (by Rita Felciano) and Paris Opera Ballet (by Carol Pardo)

The ballet tradition at the Metropolitan Opera (by Elaine Machleder)

Reports from London (Jane Simpson) and the Bay Area (Rita Felciano).

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last updated on October 7, 2003