Late Sunday, two van loads of ballet dancers and their suitcases pulled into Riverside Theatre. A Chicago ballet company was rolling in from the first leg of its tour in south Miami, the dancers performing here Aug. 9 after teaching a two-week summer intensive.
Behind the wheel of one was Ballet Vero Beach artistic director Adam Schnell, an unlikely chauffeur but for his driving passion for ballet and his careful steering of company resources.
Schnell is used to the spotlight. A professional performer, he now choreographs for the company.
He has also spent long hours under fluorescent lights. Schnell’s job description includes not only barre work, but desk work: After successfully launching Vero’s first professional ballet company three summers ago, he is now tasked with keeping his foundling organization competitive in the arts marketplace.
It is a challenge that propelled him to earn a graduate degree last year, just when his company was getting off the ground, and long after the curtain lowered on his professional dancing career.
Today, that master’s degree in arts administration from Drexel University, along with B.S. in the same field in 2009, have guided his decisions at least as much as his creative vision.
“I would say my time is spent 50-50 administration and artistic, if not 75-25,” he says. “My graduate degree has proven time and time again to be invaluable. We would be nowhere near where we are without most of what I learned in grad school. It was absolutely worth it, especially as a start-up.”
Writing compelling thesis-length applications and making a public case for your vision – particularly at the early stages of existence – are a test of not only a non-profit’s mission, but its relevance in the community it serves.
That means no matter how abstract Ballet Vero Beach’s value may seem in artistic terms, in the end, dollars and cents keep the dancers in motion.
Next week, thanks to Ballet Vero Beach’s winning its first-ever state, regional and federal grants, the $10,000 cost of bringing Chicago Repertory Ballet to Vero is offset by $6,000.
Both organizations are funded through the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Fast Track program, funded by the Florida Department of State’s Division of Cultural Affairs, allows arts organizations with an operating budget of under $200,000 to apply for project funding of up to $2,500. The project must be spelled out from mission to logistics, and are not for general operating support. “You have to say, ‘we’re doing this project and we think it’s important and here’s why.’“
But it’s not that simple. Last year, the ballet applied for but didn’t receive help staging a George Balanchine ballet and another, Peter Anastos’ “Go for Barocco,” in Ballet Vero Beach’s January 2015 program.
“We wrote it to defray the cost of royalties,” says Schnell. “We just barely missed the cut for that one.”
While they didn’t get the grant, the three-judge panel’s conversation about Ballet Vero Beach’s application taught Schnell volumes.
“It’s a fairly transparent process,” says Schnell. “It allows you to get on a conference call and hear the analysts review your grant. They’re allowed to ask questions and they tell you, ‘This isn’t clear.’ We really learned a ton.”
At the panel’s urging, he and other arts administrators stayed on the call while the rest of the 25 to 30 applicants’ proposals were reviewed. This time, 12 were chosen, including Ballet Vero Beach.
“You can be on the phone three hours,” Schnell says. “If you want to figure out the results of the panel you have to stay on and listen to everyone.”
The comments he heard were “extremely helpful” when Schnell set about reapplying for a different grant, this one covering the July to December performance season.
“We changed the scope and focus of our grant to have them help us defray the cost of the tickets we donate to non-profits like the Gifford Youth Achievement center,” Schnell says. “Our score was high enough – at the middle or top of the pack – that we were funded this time.”
The second grant came from South Arts, a regional organization involving nine states. South Arts is particularly focused on dance, Schell says.
“We applied for a touring grant,” he says. “They accepted us to help defray the bringing of Chicago Repertory Ballet.”
The requirement of that grant is that the touring group perform publicly and include education outreach. “That fits us to a T,” says Schnell.
In the case of that grant, applicants can shoot for up to half of presenting fees, topping out at $50,000.
“We wrote the grant for $5,000 and got funded for $4,000,” Schnell says.
Key in Schnell’s grant pitches is the ballet’s target audience which so far appears to first-time ballet-goers, even novices to cultural arts generally.
“Most grants want to know your impact, who you’re reaching – and if you have a really good record of reaching not just one demographic,” says Schnell. “Depending on how good a record you keep, you can either estimate or you actually know. For us, it’s very easy to capture data from our patrons. We capture zip codes and sometimes age brackets. We know we get families as well as retired people. And we know a lot from our ticket donation program. We know exactly who’s coming to those shows.”
Information is pooled from charities including Hibiscus House, Youth Guidance, Homeless Family Shelter and Gifford Youth Achievement Center. Together they send between 150 and 250 participants to each ballet with free tickets.
“We decided to formalize the ticket donation program because it aligns so closely with our mission and the organization’s values,” Schnell says. “When ‘Dance is a universal language’ is your tag line, it’s not a universal language if only the one-percent are seeing it.”
The ticket donation program includes advancing performances with a student study guide, outreach workshops and backstage tours.
Schnell says he could envision it expanding to scholarship programs for children, job training for backstage skills, or dance training at various after-school sites.
In the broader funding picture, Schnell readily admits, it is those organizations and others essential to health and welfare that get funded most readily by government agencies. “Arts funding is kind of a tough sell,” he says. “If you’re going up for a general grant, and there’s somebody that’s going to build a health clinic versus you wanting to build a theater, the clinic is going to win out, as well it should,” he says.
The arts become more essential when they reach underserved audiences.
“We have to have an impact on populations that aren’t necessarily reached by the arts.”
The ballet is now eligible for general programming support, given by the state Division of Cultural Arts. Both Riverside Theatre and the Vero Beach Museum of Art got full funding for their grant applications last year.
As for the Fast Track grants, now, in addition to writing grants of his own, Schnell has been asked to be a panelist himself. “I just got all these grants to score,” he says.