San Francisco Ballet has a vibrant new creative director: the celebrated Spanish dancer Tamara Rojo. And the corporate has had a comparatively sturdy restoration from the pandemic, with ticket gross sales just lately approaching pre-Covid ranges.
Now San Francisco Ballet has acquired a groundbreaking reward: It introduced on Thursday that it had secured a $60 million contribution from an nameless donor, the biggest within the firm’s 91-year historical past and one of many largest ever to an American dance firm.
“It was, for me, an infinite shock,” Rojo, who joined the corporate in 2022, mentioned in an interview. “The influence is immeasurable.”
The overwhelming majority of the reward, $50 million, can be used to bolster the corporate’s endowment, at the moment valued at about $108 million, and to assist finance the creation and acquisition of recent works. The remaining $10 million can be used to assist cowl working prices in Rojo’s first few seasons.
Rojo mentioned the donation would permit the corporate to attain its goal of making trendy classics.
“It’s a present of recent creativity — a present of the lifeblood of what a ballet firm is and has at all times been,” she mentioned.
San Francisco Ballet, with a finances of about $55 million, hopes the reward will assist the corporate transfer past a sequence of challenges. The pandemic introduced monetary strains — ticket gross sales fell to about $18 million within the fiscal 12 months that led to June 2022, down from about $22 million within the 12 months that led to June 2019. Gross sales have recovered extra just lately, reaching about $21 million within the fiscal 12 months that led to June.
And subscriptions, which have historically been an essential income, have continued to say no, as they’ve for a lot of cultural organizations, to six,118 to this point this 12 months from 7,784 in 2019. Whereas favorites like “The Nutcracker” proceed to attract crowds, and story ballets have been fashionable, some mixed-repertory packages have struggled to surpass 50 % attendance. (The corporate performs on the Conflict Memorial Opera Home in San Francisco, which has greater than 3,100 seats.)
The troupe has additionally been grappling with management churn. Final 12 months, San Francisco Ballet’s govt director, Danielle St.Germain, stepped down after solely a 12 months within the place. She was changed by Arturo Jacobus, who’s serving on an interim foundation. The corporate hopes to call a everlasting chief by the autumn.
Alison Mauzé, chair of San Francisco Ballet’s board, mentioned in an interview that the reward, which got here collectively during the last two months, can be transformational for the corporate. Nonetheless, she mentioned it will not “totally defend the corporate from the challenges of the day.”
“It stays essential that we increase our viewers and be certain that the which means and significance of ballet change into clear to the following technology,” Mauzé mentioned. “Tamara Rojo’s management and imaginative and prescient are good, however this can even require more and more sturdy help from our group and severe funding throughout the operations of the corporate.”
San Francisco Ballet hopes it could possibly expertise a revival underneath Rojo, who beforehand served because the creative director of the English Nationwide Ballet, serving to to lift that firm’s worldwide profile. (She was a principal for English Nationwide Ballet and earlier than {that a} star on the Royal Ballet.) Rojo mentioned she wished to fee extra works that hook up with social points and to “proceed to complement the artwork type and to proceed to make it an alive artwork type.”
This season is the primary she has programmed. Its opener, “Mere Mortals,” a meditation on synthetic intelligence, was a collaboration between the choreographer Aszure Barton and the digital music producer Floating Factors. The work, a world premiere, garnered essential acclaim and almost bought out, drawing a lot of new viewers members. Encore performances are deliberate for April.
Rojo mentioned the reward was an funding in her targets.
“I felt an infinite wave of gratitude that there can be a lot belief already in my imaginative and prescient and my ambitions that I’ve on behalf of San Francisco Ballet,” she mentioned. “For me personally it’s an enormous encouragement that I’m going in the best course, that my imaginative and prescient is the best imaginative and prescient.”
