Boom at the Box Office

When the box office opened for the American Ballet Theater's New York spring season, $52,000 worth of tickets were snapped up on the first day--a record for A.B.T.'s Manhattan home, the Metropolitan Opera House. The allure of Mikhail Baryshnikov's new Don Q certainly helped, and the presence of stars like Gelsey Kirkland in A.B.T.'s galaxy did no harm. But other U.S. dance companies are also enjoying a boom. Indeed by almost any measure, dance has become the fastest-growing of all the performing arts.

Audiences? Nationwide, annual attendance at all dance events (ballet, modern jazz, ethnic) now stands at about 15 million, a threefold increase in just five years. Ballet schools? There are thousands of them, from small outfits run by a single proprietor-instructor to big operations affiliated with the major professional companies. The highly-rated A.B.T. school, where the parents of an aspiring dancer may pay $700 a year for nine hours of classes a week, now has 1,000 students, an increase of 25% in five years. But that is no big deal: the schools run by the San Francisco Ballet (587 students), the Minnesota Dance Theater (950) and the Ballet West in Salt Lake City (1,000) have doubled in size. Male students, once rare, are becoming more common. Says Charles Fischl, general manager of the Atlanta Ballet: "Americans are more interested in motion and fitness. Ballet is grueling, and people have always admired athletic ability." The success of the film The Turning Point will doubtless bring more recruits; one Chicago school reported a 25% rise in applications after the movie opened there.

As for dance companies, the U.S. now has about 850 in all, compared with some 450 only five years ago. But the key to ballet's future is the growth of professional companies, which not only train new talent but also new teachers. There are now 55 such companies, v. 35 five years ago, and two of the fastest-growing new entries are in middle-sized cities.

One is the Cleveland Ballet. General Manager Gerald Ketelaar concedes that his city used to be "a desert for dance." But that was before 1972, when two former dancers, Ian Horvath and Dennis Nahat, decided that a town that supported a first-rate museum and symphony orchestra could handle ballet as well. They launched a school, and a company followed four years later. With an annual budget now approaching $1 million, the ballet has 28 dancers under contract and will stage 27 performances this season; attendance regularly runs to 70% to 80% of the city's 1,500-seat Hanna Theater. The company attempts few full-length classical works and emphasizes American choreographers.

The other comer is Atlanta. Although the city has had an amateur dance company since 1929, it was nearly defunct in 1972. Then Chuck Fischl, an energetic New Yorker with a theatrical background, was brought in as general manager. He and Artistic Director Robert Barnett decided that the company should turn professional and expand. Fischl, now only 28, began promoting ballet throughout Georgia. Result: the company, which once had to venture as far as Alaska to find audiences, now runs two summer schools in Georgia and has established homes away from home in Savannah, Athens and Augusta.

With a budget of $1.1 million, the company has built a solid repertory of 41 works, but it still finds that educating an audience can be difficult. A Swan Lake fills Atlanta's 4,400-seat Fox Theater, but modern works at the 856-seat Alliance Theater play to half a house. Yet Fischl sees signs of growing sophistication: "We still get people who giggle at the tights, but the number is dropping, and people are accepting them as just another uniform."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.