Even star power can't guarantee a full house

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 12, 2000

Tampa Bay has little dance tradition, if you don't count The Nutcracker. As a result, even legendary stars like Mikhail Baryshnikov sometimes play to paltry attendance.

A pair of top-level modern dance companies are here in the next few days. On Saturday, Doug Varone and Dancers perform at the University of South Florida. Tuesday and Wednesday, the White Oak Dance Project, with Baryshnikov in the lead, has two shows at Ruth Eckerd Hall.

Both companies could have trouble drawing a crowd. That's perhaps understandable with Varone, an innovative choreographer who is not well-known outside of dance circles, but Baryshnikov is as big as it gets. His name is virtually synonymous with ballet -- though White Oak is decidedly not a ballet company -- and his modern dance troupe has excelled in bringing cutting-edge work to a wide audience.

Yet even with Baryshnikov's celebrity appeal, sales have been sluggish for White Oak's engagement in the 2,100-seat hall. Earlier this week, 1,400 tickets had been sold for the first show, 1,100 for the second.

Lagging ticket sales are not uncommon when touring dance troupes play the bay area. In October, when Clearwater native Donald Byrd's company, the Group, gave the Florida premiere of his widely publicized Jazz Train, fewer than 1,000 people paid to see it at Ruth Eckerd Hall. The Mark Morris Dance Group had to cancel one of two shows last year at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center because of poor sales.

Not every dance company struggles to find an audience. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater sold out two shows this season at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Ditto for that perennial blockbuster, Miami City Ballet's Nutcracker, for four shows in December.

And promoters continue to put their eggs in the dance basket. Mahaffey Theater, as part of its revived commitment to presenting an ambitious season, has four dance companies in the 2000-01 lineup.

Touring dance has plenty of inherent problems -- No. 1 is the shortsighted cost-saving achieved by cutting live music (give White Oak credit for fighting the good fight on this front by using chamber musicians when it can) -- but the real issue behind spotty attendance is the shortage of home-grown dance in the bay area. When people have relatively little grass-roots exposure to dance, they can't be expected to appreciate the exotic likes of Byrd or Morris.

It's true that a few local dance companies and schools give regular performances, such as Sean Musselman's Ballet Society (formerly Dance Theatre of Florida) or the modern dance collective Moving Current, but they've never managed to develop a growing audience. For the most part, dance is the black hole of the performing arts in Tampa Bay.

Consider the dreary litany of professional ballet, which is probably the benchmark for the health of dance in any community, though there are some arts centers -- Minneapolis-St. Paul, for one -- that don't have major ballet companies. Tampa Bay has never supported a company of its own.

In 1990, the Tampa Ballet departed when Martin Fredmann, the artistic director, said he couldn't make a go of it anymore on lackluster turnouts for all but the annual Nutcracker. Fredmann relocated the company to Denver, where it has enjoyed artistic and commercial success as the Colorado Ballet.

Then came the bizarre reign of Bay Ballet Theatre, which folded midway through its third season in 1995. Bay Ballet is mainly remembered for the scandal surrounding its executive director, the late John Charles "Skip" Guggenheim, who posed as a member of the prominent Guggenheim family. When his false claim became known, the company got caught up in a media soap opera that tarnished the image of dance in the area.

For several years, Orlando's Southern Ballet Theatre tried to fill the ballet breech by putting on a season at Mahaffey, but it never caught on.

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin came in 1997, when the Florida Dance Festival decamped for Miami. Every June for almost 20 years, the festival had brought as many as 700 dance students, professional dancers, choreographers and teachers to the University of South Florida campus in Tampa. But the festival outgrew the school's aging dance and theater facilities. It didn't help that attendance from the public was light for the fine troupes that performed at TBPAC as part of the festival.

Dance has always been the most fragile of the fine arts, compared with the more accessible theater and music, and it has tough going in other communities, too. An article in the April issue of Dance magazine lamented the failure of modern dance companies to make much impact in Los Angeles.

"People in L.A. have no experience with modern dance," said Laura Gorenstein-Miller, head of an all-woman troupe called Helios. "When I meet someone new and tell them I'm a dancer, they think I'm a stripper."

Sadly, the same thing could be said about being a dancer in Tampa Bay.