Space: The Final Frontier.

The new economy and skyrocketing rents force dancers to play the real estate game.

AFTER GRADUATING from college in 1992, Chris Black moved to San Francisco and worked as an administrative assistant thirty hours a week for ten dollars an hour. The choreographer's day job supplied enough money and time for her to take class mornings and rehearse evenings, and sometimes even pay her dancers and composer something for annual performances at small local dance venues. About the $500 studio apartment she rented, she says, "I worried I was being kind of indulgent, that if I'd spent less I could have had more time and money for dance," and lets out a big, cackly laugh at the fairy-tale absurdity of paying only $500 for an apartment in San Francisco.

If a younger Black showed up today straight out of college, she'd have to turn right around and go home--or at least give up on the experimental scene that has thrived here. Because now the Bay Area is also known for a dot.com economy that's bigger and badder than the underground it has uprooted. The same can be said to varying degrees in other metropolitan areas around the nation where artists have traditionally gravitated, particularly New York City.

"San Francisco used to be the hotbed of bohemian life, and it's suddenly become a place where bohemians can't afford to live," explains choreographer Joe Goode, whose dance theater possesses a peculiarly San Francisco sensibility. He blends athletic movement with theatrical tableaux that slip seamlessly away from plot and toward idea; he enacts hungry-hearted spiritual quests with whisky-swilling camp cowboys and an evocation of Lillian Gish. Goode often chooses San Francisco as the setting for his works. The Bessie-award-winning musical Deeply There (1998)--about the lover, brother, friend, nephew, neighbors, and dog who become an unlikely family for an unseen man dying of AIDS--is subtitled "stories of a neighborhood," the very neighborhood (the Castro) where Black's studio apartment is now renting for $1,200 a month. Deeply There's family would be scattered across Oakland or maybe even the San Joaquin Valley by now.

When Internet, biotech, and multimedia companies move up from the South Bay to take over buildings in once-scuzzy San Francisco neighborhoods, their young employees move with them, easily paying $1,200 for studio apartments and $600,000 for repackaged lofts where choreographers once lived and worked. Dancers just arriving in town (or just evicted) are forced to pay double the rents of even a few years ago; the vacancy rate hovers at around one percent. Outlying areas like Oakland are somewhat more reasonable, but not for long. Unless they secured a home before rents skyrocketed, dancemakers have to commit to long hours at serious, decently paying jobs to stay afloat. They're left little time for study or rehearsal.

"Artists love what they're doing so much they're willing to do it no matter what," says Pam Hagen, executive director of Lines Contemporary Ballet and the San Francisco Dance Center, the Bay Area's largest clearinghouse for dance classes. "But the `no matter what' gets worse and worse. I can't tell you how many dancers wonder out loud what they're doing here."

So what are they doing--in San Francisco and New York, the two major pools of fermentation for dance, and around the country? How is dance--labor-rich and profit-poor--faring in the lengthiest boom America has experienced in decades? We spoke to choreographers of big, mid-sized, and pickup companies, and (when they had them) their managing directors. We talked with funders, presenters, directors of performance spaces and studios, city commissioners, housing advocates, and presidents of nonprofit corporations. They complained, strategized, fumed, exulted, and explained until we saw the complex, interdependent ecosystem--from the rent a dancer pays for a shaky room under the Manhattan Bridge to the city of San Francisco's fourteen percent Hotel Tax Fund--that is the promise and problem of contemporary American dance.

A SPACE TO CALL HOME

"It's place-based," Brenda Way says, when asked what holds the dance world together. Way is artistic director and a founding member of the modern dance company ODC San Francisco, one of the only dance organizations in San Francisco to own its own stomping grounds. Purchased in 1980, the converted loft in a former light industrial neighborhood functions as rehearsal studio and modern dance school during the day and 185-seat theater at night. The ODC Theater and School is a self-sustaining entity that depends on low mortgage payments. Dancers can afford to take class from choreographers, who, in turn, get a reasonable enough percentage of the class income to pay for rehearsals with the dancers they've met in class.

David White, executive director of Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) in Manhattan for twenty-five of its thirty-five years, insists the dance community's relation to buildings goes deeper even than economics. Venues transform a random set of isolated occasions into a cohesive and recognized body of work. "Dance is no longer an art form created by individuals for their small cult of acolytes. It is made by a community in community settings. Yes, individuals are the choreographers and the dancers and the audience. But the art form is defined by the streaming activity of makers and performers and audience members, and depends on the come and go through spaces. Venues provide an ongoing, consistent visibility and give dance what political heft it might have."

"There's an American tradition of land ownership," says Way. "Once you pitch your tent, people believe you're going to follow through." If you build it, they will come--the dancers, the choreographers, the audience, the funders, the dollars, the muse. A building stands as irrefutable testament to ephemeral acts, endowing the dancemaker with a legitimacy that her nomadic activity of touring and teaching away from home to earn her and her company's keep constantly undermines. Which means, as Way puts it, "When the venues go, the jig is up."

UNITED WE BUY, DIVIDED WE FALL

In San Francisco, the venues are going. With only five years remaining on its lease and innumerable code violations to be addressed if it were to remain a performance space, Brady Street Dance Center was sold to an architectural firm in June, 1999. A rehearsal and class space for years, Brady Street was later a very popular theater.

A ten-minute bus ride down Mission Street from Brady Street, Dancers' Group Studio Theater offers low-cost rentals and the no-cost Bread and Butter performance series in its sixty-seat studio; it also serves as the fiscal sponsor to unincorporated companies and small choreographers otherwise ineligible for most public and private grants. The resident company, Joe Goode Performance Group, rehearses, holds workshops and classes, performs its winter Side Effects Series, and maintains offices in the building. The theater's lease was up in January. The owner is negotiating a sale.

Fifty Oak Street, the dilapidated building that houses San Francisco Dance Center, is being sold for nine million dollars, an increase of 900 percent over the asking price five years ago. The owners are in negotiation with a prospective buyer. Once the sale is final, current tenants will have a year to relocate. The Dance Center offers nearly one hundred classes a week in ballet, hip-hop, flamenco, modern, jazz, and Feldenkrais in its five funky studios, and is home to Alonzo King's gorgeously unorthodox Lines Contemporary Ballet.

With hundreds of dancers, performers, and choreographers dependent on their survival, Dancers' Group, the Dance Center, Lines, and Joe Goode plan to buy a building together. Specifics concerning which building, how it will be funded, and under what organizational structure have yet to be worked out. But members of the consortium have no doubt that they need to buy, not rent. After scouring the city, the cheapest spaces-to-lease they could find went for two to four times their current rent. "You're trying to fund the arts and what are you doing--paying the landlords? It starts to cannibalize the whole process," says Pam Hagen. "We need a building identified as a dance center and bought outright, an island separate from the market forces around it."

They've assembled a national committee of developers, funders, donors, arts administrators, and urban planners to advise them on the intricacies and complications of such a high-risk move. When you deal in a labor-intensive and unquantifiable product like dance, it's hard enough to raise the month's rent, much less bank on the future and the bullish movement of the real estate market. But with property values speeding ever upward, the consortium must take action soon.

IF YOU CAN'T MAKE IT HERE, THERE'S ALWAYS EUROPE

In New York, the land grab is old news. SoHo, which used to guarantee rent-controlled lofts to artists, seems to have forgotten all about them. "Rents have tripled," says Nancy Umanoff, managing director of the Mark Morris Dance Group. "When we moved here ten years ago, most of the shops in the area were textile merchants. And there were some places for lunch. Now it's all Armani Exchange, Banana Republic, Pottery Barn, Balthazar. You can't get down Spring Street at night without running into a line of limousines."

"Artists are still coming," says Aaron Landsman, development director of the Field, a combined laboratory and support service for choreographers. "But you have to wonder, who are these people paying $900 to share an apartment above a motorcycle cafe?" The residential vacancy rate is about three percent, and rent-controlled apartments are a thing of the past. Rehearsal studios have also become precious commodities.

"The young generation is up against the wall," observes Mark Russell, executive director of P.S. 122 in the East Village. "With $15 to $30 an hour for a proper rehearsal space, it's a luxury for an artist to go to a large room by herself. Choreographers are dancing in their heads; the work is becoming more theatrical, more interior." Or it's going abroad. "The cream of our young choreographers are making work in Europe--in Dutch, German, Belgian festivals. It's where they're able to get the resources. Right now, we're leaning on Europe to save the core of American dance."

THE CURATOR CURE

Nevertheless, dance organizations and venues like P.S. 122 are doing what they can to keep artists from leaving. New York's economy may be bouncing along as fearsomely as San Francisco's, and its dancers are up against equally extreme cost-of-living increases. The venues, however, are in a better--not ideal, but better--position to shelter them against these assaults. Especially, they've been able to soften the effects of funding losses and shifts.

New York State allocations for the arts haven't recovered from a sixty percent cut ten years ago; NEA grants have been minimal for a long time. Private funders make up the bulk of dance support, and they've come to favor organizations over individuals. Foundations used to give hundreds of small grants to small performing groups. But program officers felt that without a firmer grasp or a wider view of the field, their decisions to favor one tiny troupe over many others were too arbitrary. They also worried that the few dance funders would all end up supporting the same artists. Because venues that present independent choreographers--DTW, P.S. 122, the Kitchen, Dixon Place, Joyce SoHo--were already making curatorial decisions, it seemed more efficient and foolproof to give them funds to pass on to artists in the form of stipends and services. The venues were less likely to present the same performers because their own success as theaters depended on distinct, if complementary, identities. Furthermore, foundations could avoid the relatively high cost of administering a small grant: The venues were better set up for that transaction. Downtown performance spaces have responded to these shifts in funding priorities by increasing their own presenting and producing, and limiting uncurated, unsubsidized rentals to a few weekends a year.

Such tight institutional control can be dangerous; San Francisco has resisted it. "The pioneer spirit, the spirit of adventure and risk-taking," as Joe Goode describes it, that characterizes West Coast dance translates to a hands-off policy once it's running the venues. With the recent and partial exception of ODC Theater, SF performance spaces rarely curate, much less produce, work. Most of the year, they rent out their spaces to whoever can pay, letting the artists, who are producing themselves, decide whether they've got something to offer. But this disinterested approach compromises venues' capacity to develop a strong and recognizable presence on the performance scene and thus weakens the case they might make to funders for future producing and presenting.

Bean, program officer of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, which until recently only funded companies with a budget of at least $100,000, says she's now eager to support smaller troupes but is handicapped by lack of organizational leadership. Making a case at the foundation for changes and increases in funding, she needs to present "a portrait of a landscape"--how many companies there are, what size they are, which ones are doing the work that other professionals in the field want to get behind, and what level of support they need. If each venue in town were willing to make choices--to decide that particular artists were doing courageous, thoughtful work--collectively they would be in the best position to draw such a portrait.

"San Francisco has the second-largest dance community in the country," notes New York impresario David White, whose position as NEA panelist and founder of the National Performance Network has made him an expert on dance organizations nationwide. "So why doesn't it act like it?" With the cost of living rising and the overflowing coffers of funders nearly inaccessible to independent choreographers, it just might have to.

BABY BUILDING BOOM

Meanwhile, in New York, established organizations have begun to acquire and build new spaces as smaller, more informal sites are lost to offices and condo-lofts. A few years ago, the Joyce Theater established

RELATED ARTICLE: Boulder Struggles With Space Gap

BY JANINE GASTINEAU

In Boulder, Colorado, you can study Hawaiian dance, Ghanaian dance, or traditional West African, at least two forms of Middle Eastern dance, hip-hop or capoeira, jazz, tap, several forms of modern, ballroom and swing, and of course, ballet. Several studios across town plus two local colleges--University of Colorado and Naropa University--offer dance degrees. Summers in Boulder are dance-rich too: the Boulder Jazz Dance Workshop has met at CU for more than two decades; the acclaimed Colorado Dance Festival has brought in dance artists of all stripes from around the world since 1982, and summer 1999 saw the arrival of a new annual intensive, choreographer Nancy Smith's Aerial Dance Festival.

But just try finding a place for your dance company to perform. Currently, as Boulder's housing and commercial real estate prices skyrocket and businesses boom, nonprofit dance organizations are straggling for survival. There just isn't enough affordable space to go around, and existing studios and theaters are filled to capacity. Just as problematic is the huge size gap among Boulder theaters: there are several houses that seat 100-150, and two that seat 900-1000.

Colorado Dance Festival made the jump in recent seasons from the 150-seat Irey Theatre at the University of Colorado-Boulder to the 900-seat Boulder Theatre. Despite aggressive promoting, ticket sales did not meet expectations and CDF faced shortfalls. CDF has been struggling since then; other factors include decreased corporate and individual support, shrinking federal funding and no permanent endowment. After the 1999 season, there was no money for a support staff, so former artistic director Michelle Heffner Hayes, who managed to clear the festival's remaining debts before resigning last November, managed the office alone for several months.

And despite its optimistic name, Space For Dance, an arm of the service organization Boulder Dance Alliance, has been dogged by the need for a permanent home almost from the beginning. Opened in 1990 to serve the Boulder dance community, BDA/SFD offered affordable studio, rehearsal, and performance space for artists on a first-come first-served basis. Its numbers are more than respectable: 32,000 people participated in SFD programs as teachers, students, choreographers, dancers, and audience members in its first year, which grew to over 50,000 in 1998, nearly half the population of Boulder. But as SFD director Rebekah West puts it, "We've searched long and hard, but can't find a place large enough that's affordable that meets zoning regulations anywhere in Boulder County." After serving its community for nearly a decade, SFD has suspended operations indefinitely.

At press time, the future looked hopeful for CDF. Founder Marda Kirn has returned as interim artistic director. "We've cut 50 percent of our budget and are looking at different strategies for survival," she said, "but we're alive!" Kirn confirms CDF's plans to hold. a mini-festival July 6-23, offering a range of dance classes from experimental post-modern dance to traditional African. The board has also hired a new artistic director, Katherine MacDiarmid, who assumed her post in February. CDF will also co-produce this summer's Boulder Aerial Dance Festival with Smith's Frequent Flyers Productions July 23-30. For SFD, however, things remain as they were--on hold.

RELATED ARTICLE: In Chicago, Dance Groups Compete With Developers

BY HEDY WEISS 

A couple of months ago, when a large, old-fashioned Chicago restaurant announced it was closing its doors, Fred Solari, one of the most devoted producers of contemporary dance in the city, made some quick phone calls. A co-director of the Athenaeum Theatre, one of the busiest dance venues in Chicago, Solari thought the restaurant, with its several large banquet hall spaces, would be an ideal place to convert to rehearsal studios. And best of all, it was just across the street from his theater, in the North Side's Lakeview area, which has one of the highest concentrations of dance, theater, and other performing arts activities in the city.

"I should have known better," said Solari, half laughing. "There is no way to compete with the insatiable desire to build high-priced town homes and condos that has been gripping Chicago for the past five years or so. The restaurant had already been grabbed up by a real estate developer at a price we could never afford."

It is these developers, rather than high-tech or e-commerce type businesses that are making it tough for dance companies and many other arts organizations to find good working spaces here these days. Even a decade ago, real estate was considerably more affordable in Chicago than in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. But all that has changed. And ironically, the change has come at the very moment that the dance scene in Chicago has taken off. The city that for many decades seemed unable to sustain a world-class company now has two of them--the Joffrey Ballet, which put down roots here five years ago in the midst of a financial crisis and the native-born Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, with its wide-ranging contemporary repertory, which has earned an international reputation.

Hubbard Street is the envy of the dance world here. In a recent capital campaign it raised $6.5 million, a portion of which helped underwrite its new state-of-the-art home in a former car showroom in the West Loop. Hubbard Street's complex, with great, airy studios that accommodate company rehearsals and a full schedule of classes, is in a newly trendy neighborhood that is still the site of a sprawling wholesale market center, but is now also the home of dozens of chic restaurants and loft conversions. The company's board acted just in time; had it procrastinated, the cost of the building would have been prohibitive.

The Joffrey Ballet currently works out of crowded, rundown, rented studios in the North Loop area, the heart of downtown Chicago. But it appears that the company may get a new home in the next few years as the result of a creative deal worked out with the city and the Commonwealth Edison company, which no longer needs a small, centrally located building it owns in the area. Chicago's Mayor Daley has made the redevelopment of a downtown entertainment district a major priority. Now, after the restoration and construction of several large theaters, there is an interest in supporting the presence of other activities. A variety of tax incentives will make the Com Ed building available to the Joffrey, which intends to embark on a capital campaign to help subsidize the renovation of the space.

Although the mayor can be helpful when big institutions are at issue, Matthew Brockmeier, interim executive director of Chicago's Dance Coalition, a service organization with forty-one members, says, "The city's interest in space issues is haphazard at best." But he pointed to the creation of a new facility for the Dance Center of Columbia College (a school and presenting organization with a campus in the newly trendy South Loop area) and the planned, but still uncertain, Music and Dance Theatre in the vast Millennium Park now under construction in the center of the city, as positive developments. Joyce SoHo, a heavily subsidized performance and studio space for underfunded choreographers. One of the three studios doubles as a seventy-seat theater. Dance Theater Workshop will tear down its two-floor home this summer and build a three-floor complex with additional studios and a theater twice the size of the current space. Mark Morris Dance Group has bought an abandoned hotel across from the Brooklyn Academy of Music that it will renovate into a three-floor, state-of-the-art dance center. Its small theater and studios will be available at foundation-sponsored rates when not in use by the company, which tours thirty weeks a year.

What's new about all this building, besides the buildings themselves, is the deployment of tactics that even five years ago would have made a nonprofit blush. Projecting themselves beyond their present needs toward a future they want to grow into, dance organizations are finally beginning to think like the developers and businessmen who have been displacing them. Or at least they're making for-profit forces work on their own behalf. When New 42nd St. president Cora Cahan took over nine buildings on Broadway and secured three for nonprofit uses, New York arts administrators (along with many other New Yorkers) complained that she was turning Broadway into a Disney theme park. Indeed, she counted on Disney to settle on the strip, because its profits were subsidizing her non-profits. Catapulting 42nd Street from pornographic slumber into name-brand fun, she introduced strategies that downtown organizations are now trying out for their own higher-brow projects.

Dance Theater Workshop has sold the air rights over its head to private developers for $3.2 million: half of the capital it needs to fund its own expansion. P.S. 122 supports its dance habit by renting to off-Broadway producers. It also relies more than ever on strong marketing: The box office supplies fifty-five percent of its income. The mezzanine of Morris's building will house retail tenants; more important, the building itself is part of an expansive development plan that former BAM director Harvey Lichtenstein is orchestrating for the depressed Fort Greene area of Brooklyn.

A DISTRICT IS BORN

After stepping down last year as president of BAM, where, via the Next Wave Festival, he transformed a crumbling building with a forgotten history into an illustrious multiplex-haven for avant-garde performances attended by hundreds of thousands a year, Lichtenstein formed the BAM Local Development Corporation. He wants the performance center to "spread its wings." While there are new office buildings and a shopping district a few blocks from the old opera house, the BAM neighborhood itself has remained moribund. Audiences come out to Fort Greene, watch a performance, and go home. Lichtenstein wants them to stay: to eat at local restaurants, go to galleries, watch passers-by from well-lit park benches, enjoy some jazz. Which means getting restaurants and galleries and jazz clubs to move in.

Essential to his plan for the mixed-use district are lofts for artists, who have always been the first to settle in depressed or dangerous neighborhoods. "It's historically true that artists are pioneers," Umanoff, of the Morris troupe, points out. "They move into areas that are more affordable, that are less developed, and eventually they get thrown out as the areas improve." Lichtenstein's thinking is that since this pattern has repeated itself in neighborhood after neighborhood--Greenwich Village, SoHo, Chelsea, the East Village, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, and on and on--why not bank on it? Why shouldn't artists and their allies take advantage of what developers have known all along, that they are themselves a real estate asset? Why not get the artists in to spur development but put legal protections in place so that the artists can enjoy the improvements they've begun and can remain in the neighborhood?

As master planner of his "cultural district," Lichtenstein has expanded the usual purview of arts administrator beyond spaces and dances to full-on community planning. Like other arts administrators, he's using the logic of the marketplace for non-profit purposes. And he's also controlling the logic, reining in a hungry and willful economy so that it doesn't devour the fruits of its affluence, the dancer and the dance. "It's a complicated business," Lichtenstein says matter-of-factly, "but we're going to make something happen here."

Apollinaire Scherr writes on the arts and culture. She lives in San Francisco.