MANHATTAN RENT HIKES PUT THE SQUEEZE ON DOWNTOWN DANCE.

Is it time to draw a new map of America's dance capital? In years past, dancers in Manhattan could identify their style by the neighborhood in which they rehearsed and performed. Downtown was downtown, and ballet and musical theater were uptown. "Downtown" is now moving all over town, however, as soaring real estate prices force Manhattan studios to close.

Closings have affected all facets of the dance community, as many studios not only offered daily classes, but also rehearsal and performance spaces. Zvi Gotheiner's studio, 550 Broadway, held ballet, modern, and martial arts classes, and a biannual choreographer's showcase. When the landlord tripled the rent last fall (from $3,750 to $11,200 per month), the studio, opened by Daniel Nagrin thirty years ago, closed. Soundance Studio, at 385 Broadway, which over the last twelve years has initiated a rehearsal space subsidy program and an annual Choreographer's Showcase, closed last summer. Free Range Arts in Chelsea lost its studio on November 1. In seven years, Free Range provided 21,700 hours of rehearsal space to more than 650 choreographers, from David Dorfman to the New York Baroque Dance Company. Pentacle, an artist services organization, lost its joint office/studio space in Tribeca and moved to an office on 38th Street. The Dance Space Center, offering 100 classes to 3,000 students per week, was forced to move from 622 Broadway during the summer of 1999. Though it has reopened at 451 Broadway, the new lease will be up in a little over a year, leaving them, according to Betsy Hallerman, director of public relations, "stuck in the same nightmare as everybody else." Nevertheless they are actively pursuing other plans in anticipation of their next move--looking into real estate in Manhattan and Brooklyn and exploring the possibility of buying or renting with other dance organizations.

Some good news is that Movement Research, having lost its space at Context Studios last fall, found a new home at Eden's Expressway in SoHo in January. The Trisha Brown Company plans to open their new facility at 625 West 55th Street in July and will rent out two of their studios for dance rehearsals. Dance Theater Workshop is demolishing its old space on West 19th Street and rebuilding a larger facility in its place. The new DTW, to be completed by March 2002, will house a larger theater, two studios available for rental at subsidized rates, and space for artist services.

DTW also initiated Outer/Space, a program to assist studios in the outer boroughs. Noting the exodus from Manhattan, David White, Executive Director of DTW, comments, "Hubs of culture have always been so Manhattan-centric, but nothing says that hubs of culture can't and shouldn't exist elsewhere. This is a city of five boroughs, with excellent twenty-four-hour transportation. Once we understand `the city' as a whole city, then neighborhoods become neighborhoods, not Balkanized states."

One of the hottest neighborhoods for new dance spaces is the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. The newly opened Williamsburg Art Nexus (WAX) features a new 30' x 36' theater, available for rehearsal and performance rental. A few blocks away is Triskelion Arts, with a sprung floor, mirrors, and windows facing Manhattan, available for rental twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week since December. And Galapagos, a four-year-old multi-arts performance venue with a new sprung floor.

In the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, Eva Dean has opened Union Street Dance, which reserves prime evening hours for outside renters. Other Park Slope centers include Spoke the Hub Dancing, active since 1979, and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. BAX houses two available studios (one of which doubles as a theater) in its main location on Fifth Avenue and recently opened the Annex, a third available rehearsal space about six blocks away.

Relatively new spaces are also doing well in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. On the Upper West Side, the Bridge, with two studios for rental (one of which can be converted into a 70-seat performance space), has been open for three years. Arthur Aviles Typical Theater is resident at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, which opened in 1998. BAAD is the sister space of The Point CDC, which has contained a dance studio and 150seat black box theater since 1995.

Movement toward the outer boroughs seems inevitable, given the current real estate climate. But, as David White says, "The real estate crunch might not be such a terrible thing. It leads us to build bridges to places we hadn't before imagined could be laboratories."