By Grit and Grace
Amidst failing infrastructure, arts organizations in Silicon Valley are fighting back.
More than a year after the folding of Silicon Valley Ballet in March of 2016, the lights in the company’s former flagship venue, the San Jose Performing Arts Center in San Jose, California, remain dark again this Nutcracker season.
“The ballet really was our only source of accessible culture,” said Claire You, a San Jose resident who attended the company’s performances growing up. “I’m really sad.”
The company, founded in 1986, was once the second largest in the state. When the technology boom of the late 1990s transformed the region into the renowned “Silicon Valley,” a conglomerate of high-tech cities south of San Francisco, the ballet began to struggle, however. A last attempt to remain open, the 2015 “Bridge to the Future” campaign, exceeded all goals, raising $680,000 from the community in under 10 days. Still, it was not enough, and shock of the company’s closure reverberated throughout the region.
“I had eight people in class the next day looking for work,” recalled Lisa Shiveley, executive director of Menlowe Ballet, a company based 20 miles north of San Jose in the city of Menlo Park.
Shiveley hired several of the auditioning dancers that day, despite budgetary concerns.
“I felt so unconscionable that they were left without their contracts being fulfilled,” she said.
Founded in 2011, the company offers some of the only dance programming in the immediate area, staging three contemporary and classical productions each year. Despite a lack of competition, however, turnover remains high: today, all but one of the hired dancers has since left the region.
“We haven’t built an infrastructure that can support them,” Shiveley continued.
Forty miles north in San Francisco, support for dance has anything but crumbled. Recognized as one the birthplaces of modern dance, the city sustains a wealth of contemporary and classical companies, notably the country’s oldest ballet troupe, San Francisco Ballet, founded in 1933. In Silicon Valley, now regarded as the heart of technological innovation, dance and other arts, by virtue, are not given similar priority. Even at a secondary level, however, survival is a struggle, despite a surrounding community ubiquitous in concentrated wealth, investment and ingenuity.
“When I tell people that I have $10,000 worth of pointe shoes in my office, they say, ‘are you kidding me,’” Shiveley said. “No, it actually costs money to do this.”
Now in its sixth year, Menlowe Ballet is surviving where predecessors have not. Survival is no means of subsistence, however. The company breaks even on its budget each year, yielding minimal profit and leaving little room for overhead costs the following season.
“It’s always like that ‘hail Mary’ pass at the very end, where finally someone catches it, and you have to trust that it’s always going to be there, but you can’t rely on it,” Shiveley continued. “You’re always in this highly anxious state.”
Silicon Valley’s visual art museums, like Stanford University’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center and Menlo Park’s Pace Art and Technology gallery, maintain notable support where other arts in the area do not. The output model for visual art is similar to that of the region’s pervasive industries, in which the “product” is reproduced at low cost and presented, or “distributed,” with minimal labor expense. The model for the performing arts, however, is fundamentally different.
“Shows happen in theaters with seating capacities that range from ten people to a few thousand people, most of which are incredibly expensive to run,” said Alexander Thompson, arts economist and funding consultant at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. “And unlike film, where you only need the performers on set during the shoot, after which you can distribute the product to theaters or license it to Netflix, the performers and crew and front of house staff need to be on site for every performance.”
Such a model somewhat insulates dance from Silicon Valley’s labor economics, and helps to explain why companies, like the ill-fated Silicon Valley Ballet, met instability at the onset of the region’s technology boom.
“You can’t replace human labor with technology,” Thompson continued. “Generally speaking, it requires the same amount of time, effort, and human beings to mount a theater production or perform a piece of music today as it did one hundred, two hundred years ago: productivity gains haven’t offset labor costs.”
Menlowe Ballet’s ticket sales, at best, account for only 35 to 40 percent of production costs, leaving more than half of all yearly expenses at the mercy of fundraising. Grants, a staple of larger arts organizations, provide the company with an unreliable source of income.
“The return is so miniscule,” Shiveley said. “And long strategic planning of five years out is just very hard for small arts organizations to be able to do.”
The San Mateo County Arts Commission, the federal organization of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest counties, allocates only three to five cents per resident to its fund. Last year, Shiveley received $4,500.
“One of the most affluent counties in the country,” she said. “And I was considered ‘lucky.’”
Despite the prevalence of big name corporations in the region, underwriting and sponsorships have also proven unsuccessful for Menlowe Ballet. Mass companies, like those in Silicon Valley, often seek out marketing and publicity perks favoring larger organizations.
“Benefits are very hard to measure beyond impressions and brand recognition,” Thompson said. “You really only see corporations sponsoring major venues and festivals with demonstrably high attendance.”
As a result, the majority of Shiveley’s fundraising efforts concern individual donors, most of who have had limited exposure to dance. Having worked previously for Silicon Valley mega corporation, Oracle, as well as regional branches of nonprofits Habitat for Humanity and the YMCA, she is experienced in pitching causes to potential supporters. Pitching a ballet, however, has proven different, she said.
“This whole entrepreneurial creativity thing,” she said, “that’s what we’re doing.”
Imaginative, young, and highly volatile, the company’s position is not unlike that of the region’s pervasive startups. While residents are eager to invest in the “next big thing,” their interest rarely falls far from the technology sector.
“Water filtration systems are super sexy to people down here,” Shiveley said. “Ballet is not sexy.”
Adults under 44 comprise over half of the region’s work force, and earned an average household income of $103,373 in 2016, according to a report by the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. San Francisco, by contrast, contains a markedly lower concentration of “young money,” characterized instead by older donor families, many with long histories of giving.
“San Francisco-based money, they are very interested in seeing their names on things,” Shiveley said. “Whereas Silicon Valley, I feel, is very anti-society, and […] they’ll find ways to let people know how much money they have, but they aren’t going to slap their name enlarged on a building or underwrite a ballet season.”
While giving to startups holds potential for monetary return on investment, supporting dance yields no tangible benefit to investors themselves. Cajoling the area’s product-driven donors into the theater is one Shiveley’s most difficult jobs.
“People do tend to gravitate towards things they can see and touch, and ballet is an experience,” she said.
But can it be just as sleek, shiny and appealing? A trip to the theater, the very experiential factor that makes dance a hard initial sell, ultimately draws checkbooks out of pockets, she continued.
“What a charge that gives the person solving the problem or developing the product, when they can actually see the flow of the steps involved,” she said. “I think of choreography like a computer program or the most complicated math problem, and how beautiful it is when one step leads to the next.”
Smuin Ballet, a local touring company founded in 1994, hosted “Decoding Ballet,” a program for young professionals, in conjunction with corporate sponsor, Lyft. The event aimed to engage the tech community through a mathematical, coding-based examination of choreography, said Leslie Irwin, the ballet’s marketing manager.
“We have come along with the times,” she said. “And we now invest a lot more in our digital marketing online, through our social media channels, our email marketing and everything else.”
Keeping with the field’s global trend towards contemporary dance, both companies have sought to find their niches integrating contemporary choreography with classical repertoire. The decision, however, also represents an attempt to adapt to the culture of the surrounding community.
“We’re trying to break that mold, that perception that it’s only for the elite, white, over 60 crowd,” Shiveley said. “Down here in Silicon Valley, that does not play.”
Menlowe Ballet’s dancers seldom appear in pink tights and tutus on stage.
“We get that message out: that ballet can be fun,” she said. “It’s super athletic.”
Embracing Silicon Valley’s interest in the immediate and innovative, the company has also shifted its focus to prioritize politically and socially relevant work. “Portraits,” choreographed by associate artistic director, Sarah-Jane Measor, follows the true stories of United Kingdom suffragettes. The ballet premiered last November, at the time of the presidential election.
“People were crying in the audience,” Shiveley recalled. “I thought, ‘we need to be doing more of this.’”
An original ballet about Florence Nightingale is set to premiere this spring, followed by a guest work exploring the Syrian refugee crisis. The latter initially captured Shiveley’s attention last year in Los Angeles.
“I don’t care what the cost, we are bringing this to our audience,” she said. “People have to see this and be moved by it, and we have to help educate.”
Menlowe Ballet currently puts on four performances of mixed repertory programs in the fall and spring, with a run of “It’s a Wonderful Nutcracker,” a new take on the holiday classic, in the winter. The fall and spring programs yield audiences of around 1,500 people, roughly 70 percent of seating capacity, while the winter program brings in audiences of around 3,400 people, roughly 90 percent of seating capacity.
“I’m not growing at the rate I would like to, and I would say my audience has fairly plateaued,” Shiveley said. “I don’t think people here in this area want to see three ballet seasons a year, that’s too much, but there’s an appetite for two.”
Adding a third season, or yearly program, would entail traveling to a peripheral city with no dance programming of its own, a strategy Smuin Ballet has employed since its inception. Originally based in both Walnut Creek and San Francisco, the company expanded its touring to Mountain View, a central Silicon Valley city, in 2000, following the tech boom’s population influx. To this day, it is the only dance company to tour exclusively within the area.
“It’s a great way to reach the community and get the name out there for a small company,” Irwin said.
Two seasons in Menlo Park already push the upper limits of Menlowe Ballet’s budget, however. Shiveley can only afford to pay her dancers between $450 and $900 each week, just 21 weeks out of the year. To give dancers time to supplement their income with additional work, the company rehearses from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily.
“It has been a challenge to plan and prioritize my life,” said Sharon Kung, a former Menlowe Ballet dancer and current performer with several San Francisco-based companies.
Kung choreographs and teaches at local dance schools to bring in additional income. Other dancers, however, have tapped into the area’s business-savvy culture.
“My costume design business supplemented my salary while I was still dancing, and now is my complete income,” said Susan Roemer, a former dancer with Smuin Ballet and owner of the dancewear company, S-Curve Apparel and Design.
Though rates offered by local dance companies are “competitive” in the realm of national arts organizations as a whole, the region’s cost of living makes it difficult to stay afloat, Roemer said. The region’s consumer price index, already one of the highest in the country, is on the rise, having increased by 3.5 percent in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Those that are good enough,” Shiveley said, “they’re not staying here.”
The company’s dancers have moved onto positions with Washington Ballet, Kansas City Ballet and Ballet Monterey in Mexico, among others, where the arts receive stronger support and cost of living is far lower.
“I can’t afford to pay my dancers a year round salary,” Shiveley said. “It’s sort of a self fulfilling prophecy.”
Her words hint at a second, and perhaps more startling, reality for the future the arts in communities lacking support.
“If you haven’t grown up going to the ballet, what’s going to get you to go for the first time?” she said. “We’re killing ourselves.”
With ticket prices on the rise, many larger arts organizations, like New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera, have taken to broadcasting performances in movie theaters. The rise of inexpensive streaming services, like Facebook Live, has allowed smaller companies to broaden their own audiences, too.
“People ask what is my competition,” Shiveley said. “I say, the couch.”
She herself has received multiple inquiries about arrangements and requests to view the company’s work on YouTube. To watch a performance streamed, she said, is fundamentally antithetical.
“That is a completely different experience than being in a theater, and having the curtain rise, and knowing you’re seeing something that only a finite number of people are seeing in this moment, and you’re sharing this experience together,” she said. “I consider that invaluable, but I seem to be in the minority.”
For a community absorbed in screens, many of their own creation, a lack of interest in live performance seems expected. Dancers and industry workers alike, however, have observed a larger cultural undertone.
“I don’t know if it’s seen as intellectual, […] even though a good performer, a great dancer, is completely using their mind,” said Jan Chandler, dance teacher at one of Silicon Valley’s most competitive private high schools, Menlo School. “It’s using the body, and I think there are still people who are uncomfortable with that.”
She is beginning to feel the trickle down effects in her classes. As course offerings in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) have more than doubled, enrollment in arts electives, dance especially, continues to decrease. While Menlo School enrolled 68 students in dance in 2007, a decade later the number has since fallen to 40, according to school records.
“There are forms of dance that make it less of a ‘high art,’” said Jessica Fry, a Menlo School alumna, Stanford University student and current dancer on Broadway. “The social aspect of dance, because people dance at parties, and there is music video dance.”
Stanford’s own dance department holds only one dance academian on faculty, and does not allow students to major, Fry said. Outside of formal disciplines and social contexts, dance constitutes an extensive realm of academic study, given its reach across nearly every culture and civilization.
“It’s too intrinsic to who we are as people,” said Patricia Beaman, dance historian at New York University. “I don’t think dance has a chance of disappearing at all.”
While it may never fade from the background, its true possibilities might never be realized without the proper support.
“For an area that prides itself on its education, on its progressive thought process and its creativity, to not be embracing creativity in all forms seems shortsighted,” Shiveley said.
Dance training and performance fosters dimensional thinking and an understanding of complex structures, skills found in the culture of the region’s high-tech companies, as well. Dancers, however, also demonstrate high levels of “polymathy,” or the ability to draw upon multiple areas of physical and intellectual knowledge simultaneously, according to a 2003 study.
“Dance is all about being adaptable,” said Jennifer Wang, a former dancer with the Joffrey Ballet and founder of the feminist jewelry startup, Shiffon. “I think that translates into many other aspects of life very well, especially in the world of entrepreneurship.”
But it also cultivates something perhaps far more profound. According to a 2016 study, dancers also exhibit markedly higher levels of socioemotional awareness and empathy.
“It’s taught me how to listen to people and interact with them in a positive and nourishing way, which I think is important for all relationships,” said Abby Alter, a sophomore at Harvard University who competed at local and national levels with Bay Area Dance School in Los Altos. “Dancing forces you to locate your sense of self from within, rather than in the things you do.”
The demand for such skills in the regional climate is immediate: its suicide rate is five times higher than the national average, warranting an emergency investigation by the Center for Disease Control in 2016. Social isolation, and pressures from the high-achieving Silicon Valley culture, are leading causes, according to CDC findings.
“Because of what we’re seeing and how concerned we are about the tone in which we communicate with each other these days, there is this need, I think, for us to reach across borders and be humans first, and everything else second,” Shiveley said. “And that’s the beauty of art.”
The significance to Silicon Valley’s future was not lost on the region’s own icon himself, Steve Jobs, back in 1994.
“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences […] so they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem,” Jobs said in an interview. “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
Recognized or not, Shiveley continues to fight. Putting the success of the ballet first, she has not taken a salary in six years.
“This is truly like a startup, in terms of the hours and full investment, in every sense of the word,” she said. “In creating something, you’re trying to fill a need, and I feel like that need is for people to get in touch with their own humanity.”
It is a story Silicon Valley knows all too well: of an overlooked idea, perhaps radical, with profound potential.
