Full-length ballets.

The full-length ballet is now filling the bill, and the till, as many a company's cash cow.

Listen closely the next time you attend a performance of Swan Lake or The Sleeping Beauty, and you might very well hear, amid all those gorgeous Tchaikovsky melodies, the sound of money jingling in the box office. It is a fact of ballet life in this country - and in most European countries as well - that audiences prefer lavish, full-length, dramatic works, particularly the classics, to mixed bills. Attendance figures bear this out from coast to coast and points in between.

"I won't say audiences prefer full-lengths," says Bruce Marks, artistic director of Boston Ballet. "It's that there is a larger audience for full-lengths. It's what people think they should be going to see." Gary Dunning, executive director of American Ballet Theatre, adds, "The audience for repertory evenings is not declining. It's just that the full-lengths bring in a broader audience."

As ballet companies everywhere struggle to stay afloat in these economically troubled times, artistic directors are faced with a dilemma, a choice between pragmatism and idealism: whether to play it safe and present mostly full-length works that will generate bigger bucks, or program diverse evenings of repertoire with the understanding that there will be too many empty seats. "We have to be more conscious of box office than ever in this country," says John Hart, artistic director of Ballet West, "because the grants are running out and there's very little private patronage anymore. I've always been very practical in the sense that you are dependent on audiences. It's no good being the most creative if you're playing to an empty house."

No one is minimizing the importance of these ballets, or overlooking what they mean to dancers and to the life of a company. "We did Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Romeo and Juliet because I felt each of them would help the company grow," says Helgi Tomasson, artistic director of San Francisco Ballet. "To be considered a major company, you must be able to do these works, and do them well."

"The classics are the touchstone of who we are," says Dunning. "Ballet technique was defined and formed in the nineteenth-century classics." Ben Stevenson, artistic director of Houston Ballet, adds, "That style helps your corps de ballet grow into soloists and your soloists grow into principals."

According to Kevin McKenzie, artistic director of ABT, "Full-lengths are the ultimate challenge for choreographers as well as dancers. It's one thing to do a twenty-minute piece; it's quite another to hold an audience's attention and carry them through an entire evening."

But the emphasis on familiar classics means less variety, less experimentation, which is antithetical to the history of ballet in America. Although ABT is known for its dramatic works, these ballets were a very small part of the company's original profile. ABT was founded in 1940 as a repertory company; until 1967, the only full-lengths the company performed were Giselle, Coppelia, and La Fille Mal Gardee.

Ballet in Europe and Russia originated with such works, but there was no such tradition in the United States. The country's initial exposure to dance, via tours by Anna Pavlova, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and, later, the various incarnations of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and ABT, was of mixed bills. And George Balanchine was revolutionizing the art form with his spare, abstract, neo-classic dances. The rise and popularity of the story ballet in America is a phenomenon of the past twenty years.

That there was an audience for this kind of work became apparent in 1949, when Margot Fonteyn and Sadler's Wells (later Royal) Ballet created a sensation at the Metropolitan Opera House in the full-length Sleeping Beauty. Demand for the work did not diminish in subsequent American tours; if anything, when Fonteyn was paired with Rudolf Nureyev in the sixties, they generated even more interest in the classics.

"That was the absolute turning point," ABT's Dunning says. "Until then the audience for dance was small and intellectually based. The tour exposed ballet to a larger audience. Sleeping Beauty had a broader appeal, was more accessible theatrically, and visually stunning."

ABT mounted its first complete Swan Lake in 1967. Between 1975 and 1985 the company staged Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, La Bayadere, Cinderella, and Romeo and Juliet. Most of these ballets were presented on tour as well as in New York City. Meanwhile, regional companies that had been founded in the sixties and seventies began mounting narrative ballets. "At first a lot of them adapted smaller versions of the full-lengths," says Dunning. "By the mid-eighties they were doing large-scale, full-sized, fully designed, lavish productions." Marks adds, "The full-length is the product of a growing ballet company's need to sustain itself."

There are, of course, companies that only occasionally do classics: New York City Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Miami City Ballet, and Joffrey Ballet spring instantly to mind. NYCB staged Sleeping Beauty in 1991, however, in the hope that it would be the company's spring equivalent of Nutcracker, another perennial moneymaking machine. But that didn't happen: No ballet has the seasonal appeal of Nutcracker (which rules it out of this discussion). Sleeping Beauty did extremely well its first three seasons, then tapered off considerably in its fourth. NYCB gave it a rest this spring.

But the demand for such works continues. McKenzie estimates that the ratio at ABT of full-lengths to repertoire programs is two to one, in New York and on the road. "I'd prefer it to be half-and-half," he says. "More repertory allows you to give more people opportunities. But it's not only my decision. Presenters who are paying the bills want the full-lengths, and they know their audiences. In the end, it's as much about fiscal responsibility as it is about creativity. I can't just say, 'This is a good idea, so we'll do it and figure out how to pay for it.' Those days are gone."

Boston Ballet does five programs each season, and at least three are full-lengths. "We used to do two full-lengths a year," says Marks. "Now we sometimes do four, because they enable me to commission new works."

Houston Ballet performs four full-lengths and three mixed bills this season, while Ballet West dances three full-lengths and one repertoire program. During the 1993-94 season, Hart programmed all full-lengths in order to increase revenue. But from now on, he says, audiences are "going to get a rep program once a year whether they like it or not."

Audiences of San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet have learned to like it, as those two companies offer more repertory evenings than full-lengths. Although SFB produced the first complete Swan Lake, Coppelia, and Nutcracker in the country, the emphasis has been on repertory evenings throughout the company's sixty-two-year history. Tomasson staunchly adheres to that policy. This season, SFB dances two full-lengths and five repertory evenings (in addition to an international dance festival featuring a week of new one-act ballets); most seasons, the company dances just one full-length.

At PNB, which has the highest per capita attendance of ballet in the country, Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, the company's co-artistic directors, are equally adamant that mixed bills predominate. "Each time we've added another series over the years, we've always added a mixed rep," says Stowell. "When we came here we were doing only four series a year, three performances each. We've added two more series, and five more performances to each series, and our audience has come along with us. We try to open and close each season with a full-length, which seems to bookend audience's expectations and gets them to become subscribers. All the goodies are in-between.

"We've deviated from that a couple of times: When we marked the tenth anniversary of Balanchine's death, we did a whole season of mixed rep as a tribute to him. That season did very well. Maybe we would find that we could sell a lot more tickets if we did three full-lengths each year. It would make our marketing department and our board very happy. But then two years later they'd say, 'Why don't you try four full-lengths?' It's like eating peanuts: where do you stop? So we decided where to stop, and everybody has to cope."

Companies have also discovered that even though virtually any full-length will outsell most rep programs, there is no guarantee that they will bring in numbers comparable to Swan Lake. Name recognition is very important: Cinderella, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Alice in Wonderland are among the ballets that generally do very well because the titles are so famous. The Red Shoes, a one-act ballet choreographed by Lar Lubovitch for the ill-fated Broadway musical of the same name, proved to be an extremely savvy acquisition for ABT last season. The company was well aware that, aside from any artistic merit, the ballet had a title that meant something to a lot of people. Programs featuring The Red Shoes outsold some of the company's full-lengths. Conversely, Manon was a tough sell for ABT and Houston Ballet, and Eugene Onegin did not do well in Boston.

"I have always believed that if they can't say it, they're not going to come see it," says Marks. "You don't want to phone for tickets and be told that you're saying Onegin wrong. But I'm doing the ballet again next year, because whoever saw it adored it. I'm willing to budget for a smaller take, rather than do a well-known classic, because the dancers loved dancing it, and our regular patrons want to see it again."

Stevenson adds, "Ballets like Onegin and Manon have to be marketed in a very special way. When you're doing Manon in a city that doesn't really know the ballet, it's more difficult to sell. By the time we got to the last performances it was doing very well because word of mouth was strong." The general consensus is that a ballet that lacks an instantly recognizable name needs a season to take off at the box office; if it's any good, it will find its audience the next time around.

All these artistic directors agree that part of the appeal of full-length story ballets is that they tend to be sumptuous. "People are very cautious about how they spend the few extra dollars they have," says Tomasson. "There's so much to choose from, and that includes staying home and renting videos. How do we get them out of the house? How do we make it so attractive to them that they're willing to pay high ticket prices? I think when they come in and see costumes and sets and big productions, they feel, 'Oh, I'm getting my money's worth.'"

Says Dunning, "Touring companies of musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Les Miz have raised the production standards of almost every city in the country. There's no doubt that ballet companies staging full-lengths must be keenly aware that the visual impact they create is being compared by a broad-based audience to the visual impact of these shows."

"There is a longing for the grandeur of grand theater," says Marks. "And sometimes you have to fulfill that longing, satisfy the need for [something] bigger than life. But not everything should be like that."

And it can't be; companies don't have the money to stage a new, eye-catching, opulent narrative ballet each season, even if they desire to do so, which they don't. Directors must find more resourceful ways to introduce new audiences to ballet, and keep them coming back for more.

Joffrey Ballet had one solution: Billboards, the four-part extravaganza set to music by Prince, that blatantly pandered to the MTV audience. It packed houses, but few would call it ballet. Billboards generated interest in Billboards; it's unlikely that it generated interest in classical dance.

Most directors are anxious to explore new full-lengths or new ways of doing such works which they hope will be artistically stimulating and fill theaters. In Houston, Stevenson has choreographed many pieces with children in mind, ballets such as Alice in Wonderland. "It's a way of bringing new audiences to the ballet," he says.

Ballet West has danced two new full-lengths in the past two seasons. A few months ago it offered the world premiere of Andre Prokovsky's Queen of Spades. Last season the company performed Val Caniparoli's Lady of the Camellias, which has a very streamlined, twentieth-century American sensibility.

"Audience reaction to Lady of the Camellias was the best from the regulars that I've had since I've been here," says Hart. "It worked because of its visual simplicity, and the complex movement. The nineteenth-century way of doing things has to change; not on the old ballets, but on the new. Getting away from the weight of scenery and costumes, and giving a ballet a more contemporary look with the emphasis on the choreography, as we did here, is the future of full-lengths. I think we can do those that have never been done before in a way that is entertaining and less costly. And they will give us our own identity."

Marks also believes that inventive full-lengths can be done in economically sound ways, without sacrificing anything artistically. "In fact, it would make a lot of sense not to spend huge sums of money," he says. "I did a full-length anthology ballet called Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, which is really three one-act ballets unified by the author. The set is a surround: it uses projections and has a contemporary feel. Right now I'm talking to a young choreographer about doing a new full-length ballet without heavy, built scenery. Imagination is the answer."

McKenzie, like Marks, believes that an evening need not necessarily be devoted to only one ballet. "I think we can market theme evenings as full-lengths," McKenzie says. "You can do a program featuring work by one choreographer, or a repertory program that shares a common thread. In 1996 we're planning an evening of Shakespeare ballets. I'm also interested in developing new full-lengths, but that will take time."

It will also take time, say all the artistic directors, to educate wider audiences to appreciate repertory programs. This is an ongoing process for every company, and comes in different forms: lectures, curtain raisers, program notes, newsletters. But most of their tactics are more subtle. In Houston, for instance, where Balanchine's name is not instantly recognizable, the company performs at least one of his ballets each season. Many artistic directors will program an audience favorite (Carmina Burana is frequently mentioned) with a more classical or less accessible work.

In general, artistic directors believe the best way to invigorate ballet is by nurturing choreographers. Marks speaks for several of his colleagues when he says, "There are choreographers out there, but they need some help; they need a chance to work. When it wasn't so expensive and so 'dangerous,' they did. I want to make a commitment to some young choreographers."

No one can say whether the balance will ever shift, whether repertory programs can one day achieve the popularity of full-lengths. "I think the single title on the billboard - say, Romeo and Juliet or whatever - will always have the edge," says Hart. "When you have three names there, the audience loses interest."

Stevenson puts it this way: "I would love to be able to do three world premieres by three choreographers on three rep programs each season and see them sell out because people love dance so much. That's the goal, that's the dream.

"But that doesn't happen. If you are directing a ballet company, you have to program thinking, What can I do that will pay people's salaries, that will keep the company going? That's as much a part of the job as 'Dream, baby, dream.'"

Sheryl Flatow, a contributing editor of Dance Magazine, frequently writes about the performing arts for several publications.