1. Incorporate as a nonprofit.
2. Recruit a board of directors.
3. Hire professional dancers.
4. Start fundraising and grant writing.
5. Locate rehearsal space and performance venues.
6. Choreograph new dances.
7. Market aggressively and systematically.
How do you build a ballet company from scratch in tough economic times?
Erika Overturff has been wrestling with that question since last September, when the Rose Theater announced that it would discontinue its Omaha Theater Ballet and School at the end of the 2009-10 season because of a shortage of funds.
“None of us saw the end coming,” said Overturff, who was one of the Omaha Theater Ballet's 10 professional dancers. “But none of us wasted time feeling sorry for ourselves, either.”
Overturff and the other dancers have banded together to form a new professional company called Ballet Nebraska.
Omaha Theater Ballet wasn't the only performing arts company in America to feel the sting of the recent economic recession. Groups such as the Baltimore Opera and Milwaukee Shakespeare Company also shut their doors.
But so far, Omaha's ballet company is one of the few defunct groups to have succeeded in launching a new organization.
Performing arts experts attribute the success partly to luck. Ballet Nebraska has also been diligent in following the steps necessary to start a performing arts company, they said.
Luck began at home for Overturff, the 28-year-old dancer who will serve as the new company's artistic director and choreographer.
She's married to Brandon Dickerson, an attorney with the Omaha law firm Cline, Williams, Wright, Johnson and Oldfather. From the start, Overturff was in constant proximity to people who knew a thing or two about incorporating a nonprofit arts group.
“Incorporation is the first step because it's necessary just to do basic things like fundraising,” said Edward Truitt, an associate professor and director of dance at West Texas A&M University. Truitt has been advising Overturff on starting the new company.
Board recruitment is the next key step. There again, contacts paid off.
Rochelle Mullen, another attorney at Cline Williams, will serve as board chairwoman of Ballet Nebraska. She's had significant experience serving as a board director for nonprofit groups such as the Heartland Regional Chapter of the American Red Cross.
Other board members will include two other Cline Williams attorneys, Overturff's husband and Trenten Bausch; Gayla Fletcher, the vice president for law and compliance for Union Pacific; and Dr. Michael Thompson, an orthopedic surgeon with OrthoWest.
The board will be built-in boosters for the dancers. “These dancers didn't have a board of directors to look out for them at the Rose, where they were just employees,” Mullen said. “They now have a board that will help them raise funds and eventually an endowment that will secure their future.”
Funding had become a big challenge for the Omaha Theater Ballet. The company had income last year of about $300,000 but expenses of $550,000, which forced the Rose to shut it down.
Ballet Nebraska will be a smaller, more streamlined company. Unlike its predecessor, the new company will not have a school and will also not produce an extravagant annual production of “The Nutcracker.” The company, therefore, will cost less Overturff said her new board has set a fundraising goal of $195,000 for the first year, of which $40,000 has already been raised.
The company will control expenses by rehearsing at Motion 41 Dance in west Omaha. “They're donating that rehearsal space to us,” said Overturff, who added that the rehearsal space and other in-kind contributions the ballet has received so far amount to about $120,000.
“We still need to raise $150,000 in cash, but in terms of overall funding we feel like we're well on our way,” Overturff said.
The most important asset for a professional ballet company, of course, is its dancers. And Omaha stood to lose all of its professional dancers en masse following the shuttering of Omaha Theater Ballet.
“Ballet Nebraska couldn't hesitate,” Truitt said. “If Erika had waited to get things started, she would have lost Omaha's veteran dancers. That would have made it more difficult to launch a company.”
All of Omaha Theater Ballet's former dancers have agreed to stay with the new company in some capacity. A few will have several jobs. In addition to being artistic director and choreographer, Overturff will also dance.
Ballerina Sarah Maloney will dance and serve as administrative director.
Again, luck played a role in securing all of these veterans. Many of the dancers are in their late 20s and early 30s and had established lives in Omaha. Overturff didn't have to twist their arms much to get them to stay.
“Most of us have families and houses here,” said lead male dancer Avram Gold, who is married to ballerina Carrie Wanamaker-Gold. “But I honestly think the main reason we all joined the new company is that we believe Omaha needs to have a great ballet company.”
Another ingredient of a great ballet company is original and innovative choreography. Ballet Nebraska had some luck in that area as well.
Over the last few months, choreographers from around the country contacted the new group to volunteer their help. One was Harrison McEldowney, a choreographer with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Omaha Theater Ballet performed his dance “Swing, Swing, Swing” last season, and it proved to be one of the company's most successful and well-attended shows.
McEldowney donated “Swing, Swing, Swing” to Ballet Nebraska, meaning the company can perform it without having to pay any fees. The show is one of four announced last week for Ballet Nebraska's inaugural 2010-11 season. Tickets for that show are $19 to $70 and are on sale at www.ticketomaha.com.
Other nationally known choreographers have also volunteered their works and services.
Oskar Antunez, the former resident choreographer for the Montgomery (Ala.) Ballet, will work with the dancers next season on a performance of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” at the Rose Theater.
Truitt, the West Texas A&M professor and choreographer, traveled to Omaha on his own last month to attend Ballet Nebraska's first fundraiser at Iowa Western Community College.
Truitt danced in a company called Omaha Ballet in the late '70s. “I care about what happens to dance in Omaha,” he said.
Successful arts companies need one other thing besides great art, said Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and author of “The Art of the Turnaround”: aggressive, systematic marketing.
Ballet Nebraska's marketing, for now, is more simple than systematic. The company has a Web site, www.balletnebraska.org, and a company photographer, Jim Williams. It also has an advisory board that includes marketing guru Lex Poppins, a vice president of the Omaha Symphony.
Perhaps most important, the company has a small, fiercely loyal squad of volunteers who are eager to get out the good word. Rebecca Liu, whose children have studied dance at the Omaha Theater Ballet School, has recently formed a ballet guild that now has 10 members.
“We're going to do everything we can to keep professional ballet in Omaha,” Liu said. “Our kids deserve nothing less.”
Contact the writer:
444-1076, john.pitcher@owh.com
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
