What went wrong at Ballet British Columbia? With news that one of the city’s biggest arts groups laid off 38 dancers and staff until the new year and asked the city for a $63,400 emergency grant, it’s a valid-and loaded-question. And the answer is far more complicated than the economic downturn.

But first, let’s not lose focus on the job at hand. Not to trivialize the matter, but it’s time for this city’s dance fans to get into sugarplum fairies and mice kings. If they don’t, the result is clear: Vancouver will not have a ballet company anymore. On November 25, Ballet B.C.’s board chair, Graeme Barrit, told media that flagging subscription and ticket sales, coupled with 2007’s accumulated deficit of $810,299, had hurled the company into financial crisis. His message was simple: “We are asking everyone to go and buy tickets for Nutcracker,” he said, referring to the Moscow Classical Ballet show that Ballet B.C. is presenting December 28 to 31 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. “If we sell out Nutcracker, Ballet B.C. will survive.” With six different shows in the 2,800-seat venue, that adds up to 16,800 tickets that need to be sold. Now.

There are immediate reasons to support Ballet B.C.’s survival. Although it has had to cancel its January presentation of the Universal Ballet of Korea’s Swan Lake, the company has a major new Carmen slated for February 26 to 28. Big-name choreographer James Kudelka is set to work on the project in the new year. And after its critically lauded original production of A Streetcar Named Desire shows again in April, the company is set to take it on a national tour.

That is, if it still exists.

And let’s not even talk about the dreams poured into Ballet B.C.’s first Nutcracker, an original, John Alleyne–conceived project to be completed for the 2009-2010 season. (Ironically, it’s slated as a major revenue generator.)

In an interview with Dance Centre executive director Mirna Zagar, who was still in shock from the announcement, the longer-term importance of retaining our signature West Coast ballet company came into focus.

“If we look at Vancouver as one of the major urban centres in Canada and also North America, and how it wants to present itself, the whole culture spectrum has to be present: the opera, the symphony, and the ballet,” Zagar says. “John Alleyne has made several excellent choreographies and has created a company with a distinct style. Recently, on their tour to Asia [to Korea’s Ballet Expo Seoul], where they have high standards for dance, they had great success and the ballet got excellent reviews.”

Don’t forget all the important local choreographers who have come out of Alleyne’s company. The list reads like a Who’s Who of the scene: Crystal Pite, Simone Orlando, Wen Wei Wang, Emily Molnar, James Gnam, Chengxin Wei. “That speaks a lot for a company that can nurture that talent,” Zagar comments.

So what went wrong? There were warning signs. In the past year, the company has lost iconic talent like dancers Edmond Kilpatrick and Donald Sales and ballet master Sylvain Senez, but all said they were moving on to other projects. And then there was the fact that Alleyne was not creating a single new work for the company on this season’s roster, instead filling it with remounts of shows like The Faerie Queen and Nine Sinatra Songs that had been seen on the same stage only a few years ago. In a phone interview on the eve of the layoffs, Barrit told the Straight he didn’t think the programming had affected ticket sales: “We picked our season in reflection of what we thought our subscribers wanted.”

But the fact remains that not a single other major arts group in the city is experiencing a significant drop in ticket sales—a fact that contradicts the media’s depiction of Ballet B.C.’s loss of audiences as a reflection of tough economic times. At press time, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Opera, and the Arts Club had all confirmed that single-ticket sales and subscriptions were on track through January, though most expressed concern about next year (not to mention extreme sympathy for their colleagues at the ballet).

Part of the problem at Ballet B.C. is that its audiences have such high expectations for cutting-edge new work. As Alleyne told the Straight last February, about the opening of The Four Seasons, his first new work in two long years: “We here—and maybe to my fault—continually attempt to do something different. It is so tough.” In a separate interview, executive director Susan Howard said: “Risk-taking is what we’re all about.” Then she admitted that risk “is not always a comfortable word in the boardroom”.

Howard Jang, the Arts Club Theatre Company’s general manager, knows all about that risk. He took the helm of Ballet B.C. during its last financial crisis. When he arrived from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in October 1993, the ballet had a $500,000-plus deficit on its $2-million budget and was often unable to meet payroll. It was still suffering the aftershocks of the board’s firing of artistic director Patricia Neary in 1990 and the 1992 death of her successor, Barry Ingram. By June 1997, a month after he left for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the company had gone through a Vancouver Arts Stabilization Program and was deficit-free.

“Having the pleasure and pain of working for all three [art forms], I think theatre is probably the most manageable, because of its artistic structures. We can do a smaller-cast play, whereas with a symphony or ballet you’re kind of stuck with a core group of artists whether you use them or not,” he explains. “But for Ballet B.C., the challenging thing for them as a particular company, it’s not so much a tough model but a tough mandate to support: contemporary ballet in a large theatre. They don’t have the Swan Lakes or the Giselles to fall back on, and so that makes the model that much more challenging. Having said that, they’re one of the international stars in creating that kind of work.”

There are huge challenges to presenting contemporary ballet in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre’s 2,800-seat civic venue. In many ways, that type of spare work is better in a more intimate space like, say, the 1,836-seat Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts.

Still, Jang is hopeful the company can survive. “I think what will pull them out of it is they have been around a long time and there are all of the loyalties,” he says. “The Dance Centre has been helpful having Studio Series and so on, and those are the things they really have to go back to.”

Hard to believe that just seven years ago, Ballet B.C. was riding a high of unprecedented success, with Alleyne’s celebrated Faerie Queen enjoying praise and packed houses both here and on tour. Arts groups go through good times and bad, and these phases don’t always have something to do with the economic climate. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Opera: they’ve had their crises too. They lived through them, and here’s hoping our cutting-edge ballet company survives too. But who would have thought it would all come down to a Russian ballet troupe and a wooden soldier?