Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


Looking good?
Valerie Wilder on the perception of Boston Ballet, and more

Boston Ballet: flourishing dance company of international stature or modest local outfit that can’t fill its theater? That’s the question Valerie Wilder, in her first season as executive director of Boston Ballet, is addressing in the wake of the company’s recent scaling back. Eleven administrators and teachers have been laid off, and the final four performances of the season-ending Romeo and Juliet have been cancelled. The 2003-2004 season will have just 42 subscription performances as against 60 in 2002-2003. There will be no Tuesday or Wednesday performances next year, and the Wang Theatre balcony will be closed. Wilder, however, insists that we should perceive Boston Ballet as a success, and the numbers are on her side. Here’s what she had to say last week as the company’s production of La Fille Mal Gardée finished out its universally applauded two-week run.

Q: The immediate cause of this year’s cutbacks was the Nutcracker shortfall, which has been reported at $800,000. Why do you think this happened?

A: I think a lot of companies feel that Nutcracker has plateau’d. Last year, people expected the worst post-9/11, yet almost every Nutcracker performed better than expected. This year, Thanksgiving was very late, and of course there was the general state of the economy. Added to that in Boston’s case was the fact that Beauty and the Beast was running opposite The Nutcracker. All those factors contributed to our particular shortfall, which was fairly steep.

I will say, though, that virtually every market took some decline. There were places where it was in the five percent range, and there were places like the Cleveland/San José company, which took something like a 40 percent hit and is perhaps not going to survive as a result. Because our Nutcracker is so big, it doesn’t take much of a hit to have a significant dollar effect. So that presented us with a problem for the current year, which we have to get through. But in terms of next year’s changes, and next year’s restructuring, I see that as something we needed to do anyway.

Q: How many people go to Boston Ballet exclusive of The Nutcracker?

A: I could probably talk about that more intelligently program by program. One of the things I’m trying to address is the perception that Boston Ballet has been unsuccessful at attracting dance audiences. Our Onegin attracted about 18,000 people. The last time National Ballet of Canada did Onegin in Toronto — and Onegin has been going on there since 1984 or ’85, with huge popularity — they attracted 18,000 people. Stuttgart Ballet — where they do it every year, it’s a big Cranko standard and has huge popularity there, too — attracted 18,000 people. American Ballet Theatre did it last May at the Metropolitan Opera House, and they were more like 17,000.

So what that tells me is that in a city with a reasonably respected ballet company resident, somewhere between 17,000 and 18,000 people wake up in the morning and say, " Gee, I’ve got to go see Onegin. " The difference is that National Ballet of Canada did seven performances, ABT did seven performances, and Boston Ballet did 12. So whose theater looked better, whose theater looked fuller, whose theater looked as though there was a ballet audience there that cared?

Q: Does that mean the problem is the size of the Wang Theatre?

A: Well, the Met [where ABT performs] is just under 4000, so it’s even bigger than the Wang. National Ballet of Canada has a theater that’s 3200 seats, the Wang is 3600, so it’s a little smaller, but not by much, and they did six or seven shows. We do almost double the number of shows. If we had done our 18,000 people over six shows, we would have looked more like they did rather than what we looked like [i.e., lots of empty seats]. Stuttgart Ballet did the same number of shows that we did, 12, but they have a theater of 1400, so of course it was packed.

When you look at the size of Boston, you see that we actually have done a splendid job of attracting a fine, normal ballet audience. We’re just spreading them over too many shows. No other North American company would dream of doing as many performances of each show. They may do more programs, but each program they would only for do six, seven, max eight shows. We’ve got into this pattern of doing so many shows, and we’ve talked ourselves into believing that we’ve somehow got to fill these shows or we’re not successful. That’s absolutely the wrong message.

Q: Don’t other companies perform more?

A: Houston Ballet does six performances of six productions a year. National Ballet of Canada does six productions, and they do between six and eight of each. We do 12 each of five. Do the math. We just have to make the people that do come feel that they’re part of a wonderful event that everybody wanted to come to rather than the reverse, which is what we’re doing right now. The thing too is that there are industry norms out there. You don’t need to beat yourself up and wish you had more audience when nobody else is getting more audience.

Q: Boston Lyric Opera has the reputation of being hugely successful because its shows are packed, but seven performances of each production in the 1600-seat Shubert Theatre maxes out at about 11,000 people. That’s fewer than 12 Boston Ballet performances draw even with just 1000 people in the Wang.

A: And we hardly ever drop below 1000. Usually it’s much better. I think there’s a healthy audience for ballet here in Boston, and it’s up to us to make sure that people understand that, and not to overshoot ambitions that would be normal in any market — particularly relative to the population of this city. If you look at the downtown core, it’s not huge. There’s a study that found that Boston Ballet has one of the highest market penetrations of any company when you compare attendance to population. So I think there’s a lot to be proud of.

Q: What about the changes, then? To a casual observer, the situation looks pretty grim.

A: It’s not grim — it’s addressing precisely what I’ve been talking about. The company has for a very long time done too many shows for what the demand is in this city — which as it happens matches the demand in other cities. There’s a huge cost implication if you’re doing a whole lot of half-empty shows, because every performance costs money, so the adjustment was something we were headed for and were working on long before the Nutcracker shortfall, and it had nothing to do with the current year’s difficulties — this has been in the works for quite a while. One of the most dangerous things you can have is to have a theater look that empty, because it sends a signal to the audience that they don’t need to subscribe, because it’s blatantly obvious that you can get a ticket for any show at any time at any price. So this had to be addressed. Even if the economy were cooking along in the rosiest fashion, I can assure you that all these changes would still be happening.

Q: The Boston Symphony Orchestra draws close to 200,000 people a year. Is that a level Boston Ballet could aspire to?

A: Well, I think we’re already there — if you count Nutcracker, there’s that many people coming in the door.

Q: Maybe it’s the sense that the BSO is always performing whereas Boston Ballet performs . . .

A: Sporadically. But symphonies do in general, it’s the nature of the art form. After not very many rehearsals, an orchestra can be ready to perform. Whereas it can take four to five weeks to put on a new dance program and rehearse it. A ballet company will never perform like a symphony orchestra; it’s more like an opera company. Usually opera companies give even fewer performances and rehearse more.

Q: So where does Boston Ballet rank among American ballet companies?

A: New York City Ballet is the huge giant, being quite a bit larger than the others. It’s followed by ABT and San Francisco, ABT a little bit larger than San Francisco, and then comes Boston Ballet. We are larger than Pacific Northwest and Houston Ballet.

Q: Even though they all have much larger endowments?

A: Actually, ABT are sitting at our level, if you can believe it, though they’re trying to build it up. It depends on the history of the company, the traditions, why it was that some companies built endowment and others didn’t. Obviously it’s very important in North America to have one, but for odd historical reasons some companies have been very aggressive and very resolute in building endowments and others haven’t. This is something that I think would be a very worthy objective.

Q: Boston Ballet’s 3-1 ratio of earned to contributed income is almost the reverse of what most performing companies aim for. How long will it take to turn that around?

A: To normalize, getting the right number of shows and a more even balance? Perhaps three to five years. You have to make really smart decisions. And you have to remember that many large and perceived to be stable arts organizations are having tremendous difficulties. It’s not as though we were this pathetic organization that’s having problems like no other. Many people are coming to these realizations now.

Q: What about touring?

A: Both Mikko [Nissinen, Boston Ballet’s artistic director] and I come from touring traditions, so it’s odd to be joining a company that doesn’t do much if any touring. This is something we have to get going, something we want to make sure is funded. Touring helps the home community to get profile. This company is really, really good, and we want to have it seen. When Reid Anderson and Jane Bourne were here from the Cranko estate in Stuttgart to stage Onegin, they thought — and I agreed with them, because I’d helped put it on in Toronto — " This is as good as it gets. " And I could not believe the energy level of the dancers right up to and through the last performance of The Nutcracker. It’s a tremendously willing, spirited, and resilient company. I’d love for that message to get out there.

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

And on stage . . .

The appearance of guest artist Carlos Acosta generated more-than-usual interest in the second week of Boston Ballet’s La Fille Mal Gardée: both the Globe and the Herald reviewed his performance, and the Times’ Anna Kisselgoff came up from New York. On Saturday night, Acosta kept the pyrotechnics under control (he didn’t leap any higher than Yury Yanowsky or Simon Ball), but he was a masterful mime who clarified every point of the plot, and he made young soloist Sarah Lamb’s Lise look good. Lamb’s footwork was lucid, and she was rock-solid in her ribbon-supported Maypole pirouette (in noisy pointe shoes); she did run out of gas in the fouettés that end her harvest-scene solo, but the maturity of her characterization was in evidence throughout.

Issue Date: March 6 - 13, 2003

Back to the Editors' picks table of contents.

 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group