The San Francisco Ballet has a vibrant new artistic director: renowned Spanish dancer Tamara Rojo. And the company has had a relatively strong recovery from the pandemic, with ticket sales recently approaching pre-Covid levels.
Now the San Francisco Ballet has received a groundbreaking gift: It announced Thursday that it has secured a $60 million contribution from an anonymous donor, the largest in the company’s 91-year history and one of the largest ever to an American dance company.
“It was, for me, a huge surprise,” Rojo, who joined the company in 2022, said in an interview. “The impact is incalculable.”
The vast majority of the gift, $50 million, will be used to strengthen the company’s capital, currently valued at approximately $108 million, and to finance the creation and acquisition of new projects. The remaining $10 million will be used to cover operating expenses in Rojo’s first few seasons.
Rojo said the donation will enable the company to achieve its goal of creating modern classics.
“It’s a gift of new creativity – a gift of the soul of what a ballet company is and always has been,” he said.
The San Francisco Ballet, with a budget of about $55 million, hopes the gift will help the company move past a series of challenges. The pandemic has caused financial pressures — ticket sales fell to about $18 million in the fiscal year ending June 2022, from about $22 million in the year ending June 2019. Sales have rebounded more recently, reaching about 21 million dollars in the fiscal year ended June.
And subscriptions, traditionally a major source of revenue, are still below pre-pandemic levels, as they are for many cultural organizations. The company has sold 6,118 so far this year, up from 7,784 in 2019. While favorites like “The Nutcracker” continue to draw crowds and story ballets have been popular, some mixed-repertoire programs have struggled to break 50 percent attendance. (The company performs at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, which seats more than 3,100.)
The troupe also faced leadership turnover. Last year, San Francisco Ballet executive director Danielle St. Germain resigned after just one year in the position. He was replaced by Arturo Jacobus, who is serving on an interim basis. The company hopes to name a permanent leader by the fall.
Alison Mauzé, president of the San Francisco Ballet’s board of directors, said in an interview that the gift, which was raised over the past two months, would be transformative for the company. However, he said it would not “fully protect the company from the challenges of the day”.
“It remains critical to broaden our audience and ensure that the meaning and importance of ballet is made clear to the next generation,” Mauzé said. “Tamara Rojo’s leadership and vision are brilliant, but this will also require increasingly strong support from our community and serious investment across all company functions.”
The San Francisco Ballet is hoping for a revival under Rojo, who previously served as artistic director of England National Ballet, helping to raise that company’s international profile. (She was a principal for English National Ballet and before that a star at the Royal Ballet.) Rojo said she wanted to commission more works connected to social issues and “continue to enrich the art form and continue to make it a living form art.”
This season is the first he has scheduled. His debut, “Mere Mortals,” a meditation on artificial intelligence, was a collaboration between choreographer Aszure Barton and electronic music producer Floating Points. The play, a world premiere, was critically acclaimed and nearly sold out, attracting a large number of new audience members. Encore performances are scheduled for April.
Rojo said the gift was an investment in her goals.
“I felt a huge wave of gratitude that there would already be so much confidence in my vision and my ambitions that I have on behalf of the San Francisco Ballet,” he said. “For me personally it’s a huge encouragement that I’m going in the right direction, that my vision is the right vision.”