Monday scatter: Ballet blues, theater dreams, Gypsy Rose Lee
Update: After posting this I ran into Jon Ulsh, OBT’s executive director, who pointed out that OBT isn’t cutting all live music: There’ll be some, but not the full orchestra. That’s an important distinction. Even a pair of pianists can make a huge difference, as OBT’s recent premiere of Christopher Stowell’s version of The Rite of Spring showed so satisfyingly. Cutting the full orchestra, Ulsh said, saved $300,000. That still left $1.7 million to cut elsewhere. After explaining the cuts, he excused himself. “I’ve got to go raise some money,” he said.
The news today isn’t good, and it isn’t unexpected: Oregon Ballet Theatre, faced with tumbling income because its ordinary donors don’t have the money to give anymore, is slashing its budget by 28 percent. That’s an overnight cut from $6.7 million to $4.8 million, as Grant Butler reports in The Oregonian.
These are the times we live in, and Scatter partner Barry Johnson talks about their effect on the city’s arts scene in his Portland Arts Watch column this morning on The Oregonian’s Web site, Oregon Live.
Oregon Ballet Theatre is very good: This rising company has been making a genuine mark nationally. But in today’s shell-shocked economy it’s not enough to be good. You also have to have a cushion. And that, OBT does not have. It has no endowment, and its always-thin budget is brittle to the point of breaking. Butler reports that the number of full-time dancers will drop from 28 to 25, which isn’t precipitous, although none of these dancers is exactly striking it rich, and three more high-quality artists will now be out of work.
As troubling from an artistic view is the sacrifice of live music for at least the next season. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big deal — maybe the world of contemporary dance has got you used to the idea of canned music — but they call it “canned” for a reason: It’s prepackaged, unchanging, from a dancer’s view metronomic, or at least predictable: It doesn’t have the edge that live musicians supply. Ballet thrives in the thrilling uncertainty of the moment, when conductor and musicians and dancers all respond to the others in real time and everyone’s attention is heightened. Great ballet requires live musicians. Now, the dozens of talented musicians who make up this orchestra are out of a job, too.
Live music, including full orchestration, has been one of the prime aspirations and foundations of Christopher Stowell’s vision for this company since he took over as artistic director. I’m sure he hasn’t changed that determination. But he’s had to put it on hold. Sometimes being able to establish a holding pattern is a triumph. At least for now, this is putting the brakes on a company that was going places. Now, it’s hunker down and survive.
*****
If a recession or a depression is something that we think ourselves into, maybe it’s something we think ourselves out of, too. For years it’s been obvious that both Oregon Ballet Theatre and Portland Opera need a better place to perform. Although both dip occasionally into the 900-seat Newmark Theatre, home base for both companies is the cavernous, 3,000-seat Keller Auditorium, a hall that puts performers and audiences alike at a disadvantage. It’s too big; it swallows sight and sound.
Over the past year I’ve talked a few times unofficially with the ballet’s Stowell and Portland Opera’s general dirctor, Christopher Mattaliano, about the possibilities of creating a new theater for the two companies to share — something actually designed for the art forms rather than as an all-purpose barn, which is essentially what Keller Auditorium is. Stowell and Mattaliano happen to get along very well, and for the long-term health of both companies, both men would love to see this happen.
A new hall would be as intimate as the economics of the business would allow it to be — somewhere between 1,400 and 2,400 seats, and if that seems like a wide range, it is: There’s plenty of room for honing this dream. It could also encourage other partnerships: the development of a full-time orchestra for the ballet and opera to share; combined marketing; even (and this last part is me speaking, not Stowell or Mattaliano) combined administrative and fund-raising services.
Is this a crazy time to be bringing this sort of thing up? Yes, and no. Obviously nobody’s going to start a bricks-and-mortar campaign now, with the economy circling into the sewer. Portland Center Stage is still roughly 9 million bucks short of paying off its move to the Armory, for crying out loud, and the meter seems stuck on that one.
But I keep remembering that Portland voters approved construction of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts in the midst of the city’s last bad recession, in the early 1980s, when the city’s and state’s economies weren’t as diverse as they are now. Sometimes people think biggest when things look the worst. And I know that if you don’t have goals even in the toughest of times, you won’t get anywhere. Call this one a dream deferred — temporarily.
*****
On a lighter note, a trip to North Portland for a puppet show got me thinking about the great ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee, she of the most celebrated stage mom in show business. (That would be Momma Rose, in the musical Gypsy.) You can see the results of my puppet adventures, as related in Monday’s Oregonian, here.
The puppet company Night Shade was performing at Disjecta, the warehouse-like arts space in the shadow of the Paul Bunyan statue that marks the rapidly reviving Kenton district (a revival sparked partly by the Interstate MAX light-rail line). The district does have its holdovers, which is part of its charm, and one of them is a strip club across from Disjecta called the Dancin’ Bare.
Here’s what the club’s reader board said:
Amature Night
Hot Girls Cold Beer
Well, Gypsy Rose Lee was a literary-minded stripper (note her firm familiarity with the keyboard in the photo) and I can’t imagine that in the heyday of burlesque she’d have put up with a misspelling as glaring as that, any more than she’d have put up with any amateurs horning in on her profession.
And when Gypsy Rose danced, she danced to live music.
*****
Quick links: I’ve also been hitting the galleries lately, and have a couple of reviews in this morning’s Oregonian. The print-edition reviews are briefs. You can find the longer versions online at Oregon Live:
– Photographer Paul Dahlquist’s 80th-birthday show at Gallery 114, and photos by Terry Toedtemeier from the 1970s, at Blue Sky. Review here.
– Glass art by Steve Klein and Michael Rogers at Bullseye Gallery. Review here.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
It’s a shame that Portland doesn’t have a “shovel ready” performance hall already planned for the Oregon Ballet and Portland Opera as you describe. What a great economic stimulus project that would be! But I guess we have better things to find money for; a baseball stadium ($15m) and a sign with a stag on it ($500k), for example.
Speaking of signs, perhaps you misread the typo and the Dancin’ Bear was promoting “Armature Night” — a special night for old drunks who need to be propped up for the show.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
[...] Bob Hicks put an intriguing blog post on Art Scatter » Monday scatter: Ballet blues, theater dreams, Gypsy …Here’s a quick excerptThe news today isn’t good, and it isn’t unexpected: Oregon Ballet Theatre, faced with tumbling income because its ordinary donors don’t have the money to give anymore, is slashing its budget by 28 percent. That’s an overnight cut from … [...]
April 8th, 2009 at 8:30 am
I am truly astonished by the speculative comments on OregonLive.com about the salaries of Jon Ulsh and Christopher Stowell. And no, I don’t know what they are and I don’t particularly care. We have a nasty saying in this culture: you get what you pay for. Both of these men are highly qualified for their jobs and they’re not taking anything away from what some are pleased to call the artistic “product.” Furthermore if you look at who donates to the company when you attend a performance, they both do. And all you have to do is look at the company today, vs what it looked like when Stowell came here, to know that he’s doing a terrific job. Never has it looked so well-schooled. And there is tremendous mutual respect between the dancers and the director–that’s new as well. It’s not mismanagement at OBT that’s led to its financial crisis; it’s Ponzi schemes like Mr. Madoff’s–an awful lot of foundations are hurting because of Mr. M. And individuals, too.
To put OBT’s predicament in a wider context, all ballet companies are cutting back, nationwide. New York City Ballet has let go many corps members; Peter Martins has taken a salary cut. American Ballet Theater has cut back severely. Nevada Dance Theatre, where James Canfield is now the artistic director, has let dancers go and cancelled its last concert of the season. There is a long, long list and OBT is far from being in the worst shape. It’s terrible that there won’t be live orchestra for the Nutcracker and it would be truly wonderful if someone would/could come forward to fund at least a few performances with live music, preferably matinees for the children, and yes, Bob’s suggestion that the opera and the ballet could share resources and even a theater (the Keller having all the intimacy of an airplane hangar) could potentially save some money, but in the meantime it seems to me, a long time observer of ballet in Portland in its many incarnations that Stowell and Ulsh are doing the best they can under the circumstances and those who care about this art form would do well to quit shooting the messenger.
April 8th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Thanks to Martha’s preceding comment, I made the mistake of checking the comments on the OBT story at OregonLive. Yikes! Seems to me that there are a few peevish folks with axes to grind about executive pay. I suspect part of that may be displaced disgust about outrageous Wall Street bonuses. But it also a sign of how society undervalues the arts, artists and arts administrators — the perception that these are not “real” jobs that merit real compensation. Sad.
April 8th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Thannks MTC: god forbid someone involved in the arts makes any money from it. The culture does not believe making art–of any kind–is work; we’re too puritanical for that, too utilitarian. That’s why I suspect government granting organizations, such as they are, always want to know what kind of outreach artists are doing. Art has to be FOR something, it can’t just be. And these days the newspapers make no distinction I might add between art and entertainment, not that entertainers don’t work their buns off. It’s sad all right, but it also enrages me, and now back to my “fun” job of writing for roughly 12 cents a word, if I’m lucky.