How Artistic Directors Program a Season
One of the most challenging, but fascinating, jobs artistic directors undertake is planning their company’s repertoire each year. Programming is a task that requires insight, forethought, and creativity. Here, four artistic directors share how they approach designing a season.
The Audience
While there’s no single recipe for programming rep, artistic directors usually start by considering their audience. “That’s the first thing I always keep in mind,” says St. Louis Ballet executive and artistic director Gen Horiuchi. “It really depends on the audiences’ needs rather than our own interests or desires.”
Thinking about who makes up an audience matters, too. “What do we have for the families? What do we have for the diehard dance fans? You want the right repertoire that keeps your audience coming back,” says Orlando Ballet artistic director Jorden Morris. Toni Pimble, Eugene Ballet’s artistic director, agrees. “It’s making sure we have both ends of that spectrum,” she says. Eugene Ballet has maintained the same format for many years, doing new and challenging works along with The Nutcracker and story ballets like The Snow Queen and Mowgli: The Jungle Book Ballet. “It’s a great way to introduce kids to become our audience members of the future,” Pimble says.
New York City Ballet associate artistic director Wendy Whelan, who is tasked with designing the company’s programming, starts by looking at previous seasons. The puzzle she faces is programming rep that doesn’t overlap with prior subscriptions they’ve done within the past two years. “We can’t show a certain audience of subscribers a repeat ballet,” she says. “We have to keep tilling the soil every year or every two years to make sure we have new work moving in and out of the existing rep.”
Budget
Directors have to make sure they are also staying within their financial means. “We’re always writing grants to support guest choreographers,” Pimble says. Raising funds is crucial to producing new work, Horiuchi adds: “If in three years we need a new full-length ballet, but we have to spend $250,000 for the sets and such, then we have a goal for budgeting. We know we have to start raising money now.”
Managing the budget can be a challenge. “There’s always little things that will pop up,” Morris says, but planning for the unexpected is part of the job. “You’ve always got to be in the back of your head thinking, Do we have a little contingency fund for these weird little shifts in prices or percentages?”
The Dancers
Artistic directors also have to take their company members into consideration. “It’s important to challenge our dancers, so we’re always trying to do new work at some point in the season,” Pimble says.
Morris factors this in as well. “You want to pick the right repertoire to keep your dancers growing, but you can’t always pick what you want to do right away,” he says. “There’s stepping stones, a process to it.” For instance, two seasons ago Orlando Ballet did Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s A Streetcar Named Desire, a choice Morris made to help prepare his dancers for Kenneth Tindall’s Casanova the following season, since both stories share similar themes.
For Whelan, considering the company’s 90+ artists is her biggest challenge. “I’m trying not to overdose certain dancers and underfeed others, and that’s really hard to gauge,” she says. “We have to really check in with, especially, the more senior dancers, to see if they want to do a piece again or if they’d be okay if we moved on to a new cast. We have to be very gentle and thoughtful with how we move people in and out of work.”
Horiuchi thinks about what his dancers want to perform. “If they enjoy the choreography, it’s going to look great and then the audience will go with it,” he says. “I like to have dancers having a good time and a good experience.”
Pimble adds that offering her dancers choreographic opportunities during the season is another way to support their artistic growth.
The Logistics
Artistic directors also have to look at the practicality of programming a certain piece of rep or mounting a new ballet. “As soon as I come up with a programming sketch, I have to offer it up to our production staff, our music staff, and our marketing staff to make sure that it meets their needs and that they can handle it,” Whelan says.
Directors have to confirm their production team, stage management, and wardrobe departments can accommodate the rep, especially if anything requires new costumes and sets. At St. Louis Ballet, Horiuchi has to take venue size into consideration, since the company performs at three different theaters. And then there’s the issue of licensing. “Getting the rights and loyalties to music can be a real pain, as we have discovered,” says Pimble. Obtaining permission to perform certain ballets can be a hurdle as well.
Any number of logistical hiccups might send a director back to the drawing board. “You always run into problems,” Morris says. “Maybe a production is not available for rent that season, or a choreographer is busy at that time.” With so many variables to consider, puzzling together a season can be extremely complicated. “It can keep an artistic director up at night trying to plan,” Morris adds.
Strategizing
Planning ahead is one of the best ways artistic directors combat potential problems and unforeseen setbacks when putting a season together. Both Horiuchi and Morris have tentative three-year plans, while Pimble has a five-year plan, though “it’s not written in stone.” At NYCB, Whelan says that “between April and May or June we can chill, but then the rest of the year is spent really thinking about how to line up everything for tours and the program season.” The company recently adopted a new planning timeline in order to streamline their strategic calendar, which previously had been “a little bit disconnected,” says Whelan. Each department has to sign off on programming plans over a series of deadlines.
Making sure the necessary departments are on board with a company’s season is partly why directors plan a few years in advance. During the pandemic, many costume shops went down to fewer workers and never expanded again. Morris has to make sure that both the costume and scenery departments can commit to making what is needed for a new production two years down the road. “You have to be further and further out with your strategic planning in order to get the people and the productions in a time slot that you want,” he says.
Horiuchi says planning in advance allows the company to secure theater dates, and to set budget and fundraising goals for future productions. For Pimble, it allows her to make sure the ballets she’s choosing aren’t overlapping with performances of the other arts organizations in the area. “We have to be kind of careful about what else is going on in the community,” she says.
Morris says that planning a season is like playing a game of Jenga. “It comes down to balance on so many different levels. And the longer you do it, the better you get at it.”
