Chicago’s spring festival of dance is both an annual fixture and a godsend, a reliable beacon on our arts calendar for nearlyy two decades now.
During its early years, the festival provided a sometimes rare opportunity to view medium-sized troupes, some of them struggling or brashly experimental. Now there’s a lot more going on year-round in dance in Chicago. But the spring fest remains an important cornerstone, providing the main downtown outing for such Chicago companies as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Muntu Dance Theatre, Ballet Chicago and lately the Joffrey Ballet, whose engagement, beginning Wednesday, launches the 1998 Spring Festival of Dance at the Auditorium Theatre.
Each festival, thanks to such sponsors as the Dance Center of Columbia College and Performing Arts Chicago, also offers a tasty sampling of important troupes from beyond our city, including visits this year by the Alvin Ailey troupe, Bill T. Jones and the National Ballet of Spain.
But underlying the consistent programming year after year has been an ever-shifting, sometimes uncertain infrastructure. The fest began as a project to keep the Civic Opera House and its smaller Civic Theatre busy during the Lyric Opera’s off-season back in the 1980s. But, following the Lyric’s takeover of that complex in 1993, the smaller theater closed. The fest continued with the Shubert Theatre as its base for the last four years, run and partially financed by an organization working to build a new permanent home for these companies: the proposed, long-delayed Music and Dance Theatre Chicago.
But that sponsorship was always intended as a holding pattern. The organization behind M.A.D., as the proposed theater project is often called, expected to have its new theater up and operating by now. One serious proposal called for an opening last fall. Not only did various deadlines come and go, but organizers gave up on their original Cityfront Center site at 465 N. Park Drive a year ago after a complicated real estate shuffle; now M.A.D. is trying to nail down a second site. Meanwhile, spring fests keep coming and going.
The M.A.D. organization helped manage and support the fest through last year and then warned the Chicago participants that its resources were needed to try to finalize the ever-elusive theater. “Frankly, we’re a staff of two people,” says Joyce Moffatt, general manager of the Music and Dance Theatre Chicago. “After the board voted to give up the old site last year, we knew we had to devote our energy into finding a new one and to fundraising.”
M.A.D. broke the news last spring to the companies, who then faced a crucial choice. Should they stay together and try to run the fest on their own, forming a new consortium? Or should they do the more practical thing and go their separate ways? After all, the fest had outlasted many other regimes and programs in Chicago arts already.
The companies decided to stick it out, and so far, they say, their loosely knit, unusual partnership has worked remarkably well.
Togetherness pays off
“Two reasons kept us together,” says Gail Kalver, executive director of Hubbard Street. “Staying together allows us to go to a theater, in this case, the Auditorium, and rent eight weeks as a block. That’s more attractive to the theater than Hubbard asking for only two weeks all by ourselves — the theater might be more tempted to look for a longer, theatrical engagement instead.
“Secondly, we’re able to mount a subscription ticket campaign for the whole festival in addition to our own individual ticket sales,” she adds. “We’ve tracked those subscription sales over the years, and we think it’s worth it. And by staying together, we encourage a certain amount of crossover audiences. We all want to diversify our base, and some of us play to more mainstream audiences, some of us play to niche groups. This encourages audiences to sample alternatives.”
“There’s no question this was born of necessity,” says Daniel Duell, artistic director of Ballet Chicago. “But that doesn’t make it any less extraordinary a collaboration.”
In truth, the festival had slowly evolved to a point where the groups were providing a lot of their own sponsorship anyway. In 1994, after Lyric took over the Opera House and its building, the Civic Center for the Performing Arts, the organizational arm that had administered the fest gave what remained of its funds to the Chicago Community Trust for the festival that year: $225,000. Beginning in 1995, funds were raised each year by the Trust and M.A.D. to mount subsequent festivals, though the totals gradually declined, from $152,000 that year to only $119,000 in 1997.
The dance groups or presenters such as the Dance Center of Columbia College and Performing Arts Chicago were paying their own weekly rental as well as backstage and front-of-house costs by the time the fest moved into the Shubert. Last year’s joint budget covered mainly legal fees and some marketing, including 70,000 subscription brochures.
This year, for a fest located mostly at the Auditorium, the companies raised $70,000 in pooled donations of their own to fund the brochures (and upped the mailing to 125,000). That has been a pretty daunting enterprise for groups who sometimes struggle financially. “We all agreed we didn’t want this to interfere with our own individual fundraising,” Duell says. “So one step we took was hiring a fundraiser, and we’ve been pleased with the results.”
A wealth of talent
Though the budget is leaner and the dozen or so company heads have been forced to improvise their effort, acting as an ad hoc committee without a formal chairman, the lineup is as rich as ever artistically. After the Joffrey, which plays through March 15, the schedule includes the National Ballet of Spain (sponsored by the Auditorium Theatre Council) on March 19-22, Belgium’s Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez March 19-21 (at the Merle Reskin Theatre), Alvin April 2-5 (at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theater), Muntu April 7-10, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company April 8-9 (at Arie Crown Theater), Garth Fagan Dance April 11-12, Hubbard Street April 14 to May 3, and Beppie Blankert and Dansers Studio April 16-19 (at the Museum of Contemporary Art).
Meanwhile, the fate of a 1,500-seat M.A.D. theater meant to provide many of these groups with a permanent annual home remains up in the air. Moffatt insists the project is moving forward, with talks continuing with the city about funding and a new site downtown, either in the North Loop area or on a plot at the southeast corner of State Street and Congress Parkway. Thanks to delays, the price tag has gone up from $28 million to an estimated $35 million — mainly because of inflation — while M.A.D.’s own promised funds so far remain at only $18 million.
“We don’t want to start the final phases of fundraising until we have a firm groundbreaking date,” Moffatt said. “Sure, this is taking longer than we’d hoped. And we all have days when we think, `Gosh, we’ve been through this so many times before.’ But that isn’t the overall feeling. There is still a need for this theater, and we hope to have a site selected sometime before summer begins.”
The dance, in the meantime, goes on. “I’ve really enjoyed the process of working with these other organizations,” Duell said. “We hope we’re building up an equity in the public consciousness with the uniqueness of the festival, and it has certainly given us a leg up on what we feel we can do together.”
