Farewell to the Prince of West 19th street.

On July 1, 2003, David White stepped down as executive director and producer of New York's Dance Theater Workshop after twenty-eight years on the job. To many people in the dance community, White is the personification of DTW, originally located in a narrow West 20th Street loft and housed for many years on New York's West 19th Street, the site long ago of Jerome Robbins's American Theater Laboratory. "People like to reduce an organization to one personality, it's easier to think about, to damn, or whatever," White said. Yet, he asserted that "I don't like these cults of personality. The issue isn't about personalities; it's about building [organizations] as platforms for the work. And the work is dynamic; it's a moving present."

In 1975, White set about building that stable platform, and the consensus is that he's done just that. "DTW has always delivered on the promises we've made," he declared. "If we couldn't deliver, we wouldn't make the promise. When we commissioned artists' work, we never took it back." And apparently, it has consistently managed to find adequate support from grant-givers, public and private--even in the ongoing cultural drought of arts funding in America.

"The [old] building was sold out from under us twice," White recalled. "When we bought the property in 1995, we had no idea about developing it. It was a defensive move: If we owned it, would it cost us less than the $125,000 a year in rent? At the time the answer was yes. With city bonding and other things, we were able to [buy] it. Then all of a sudden the art marked moved to West Chelsea, like, ten minutes later, and suddenly the value of the property grew. Air rights were sold and the new building became reality."

White--who has been commuting to St. Paul since September to be with his daughter and wife, who works there--realized that with a solid infrastructure now established and a state-of-the-art facility completed, it was time to go. "Whenever you hypothesize that there's an appropriate moment, maybe the moment comes sooner, rather than later." He'll still be consultant to new Executive Director Marion K. Dienstag and continuing Co-Artistic Directors Cathy Edwards and Craig Peterson until 2005 at least--the year he was originally set to retire.

"My job," White said, "is like being in the middle of a relay race: You receive the baton and then you hand it off. My departure is less about me than about the organization preparing itself well. The complexity of the building and the capital campaign and getting through 9/11 forced a maturation of DTW. People had to work much more as a team in more complex interactions."

White's goal has been to help establish a community of artists by giving them an ongoing structure that makes their work possible. Among other signal accomplishments, he established the annual Bessie Awards, named after choreographic mentor Bessie Schonberg and spearheaded the National Performance Network to increase touring by smaller companies.

"This idea of continuity--trying to build into the structures by which artists create, a way of their continuing forward in time--is really important. We don't have to think of everything as disposable," White said. "You want to assume that the logic of community remains, as it goes forward. It shouldn't be harder for artists to come forward in the future. It may not get easier, but it shouldn't get harder."