With a $60 million gift, San Francisco Ballet's plans are focusing on new works

The San Francisco Ballet has a vibrant new artistic director: celebrated Spanish dancer Tamara Rojo. 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 received a $60 million contribution from an anonymous donor, the largest contribution in the company's 91-year history and one of the largest ever to an American dance company.

“It was a huge surprise for me,” Rojo, who joined the company in 2022, said in an interview. “The impact is immeasurable.”

The vast majority of the gift, $50 million, will be used to support the company's endowment, currently valued at approximately $108 million, and to help finance the creation and acquisition of new businesses. The remaining $10 million will be used to help cover operating costs for Rojo's first few seasons.

Rojo said the donation will allow the company to achieve its goal of creating modern classics.

“It is a gift of new creativity — a gift of the lifeblood of what the ballet company is and has always been,” she said.

San Francisco Ballet, which has a budget of about $55 million, hopes the gift will help the company overcome a series of challenges. The pandemic has caused financial pressure, with ticket sales falling to about $18 million in the fiscal year ending June 2022, down from about $22 million in the year ending June 2019. Sales have rebounded recently, reaching about $21 million in fiscal year. The year ended in June.

Subscriptions, traditionally an important source of income, remain below pre-pandemic levels, as is the case for many cultural organizations. The company has sold 6,118 so far this year, down from 7,784 in 2019. While favorites like “The Nutcracker” continue to draw audiences, and story ballets are popular, some mixed-repertoire programs struggle to exceed 50 percent attendance. (The group performs at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, which seats more than 3,100.)

The band was also grappling with a leadership change. Last year, San Francisco Ballet's executive director, Danielle St. Germain, resigned after just one year in the position. She was replaced by Arturo Jacobs, who is working on an interim basis. The company hopes to appoint a permanent leader by the fall.

The gift, which came within the past two months, will be transformative for the company, Allison Mosier, president of the San Francisco Ballet's board of directors, said in an interview. However, she said this would not “fully protect the company from today's challenges.”

“It remains critical that we broaden our audience and ensure that the meaning and importance of ballet becomes clear to the next generation,” Mosé said. “Tamara Rojo’s leadership and vision are outstanding, but this will also require increasingly strong support from our community and serious investment across the company’s operations.”

The San Francisco Ballet hopes to experience a renaissance under the leadership of Rojo, who previously served as artistic director of the English National Ballet, helping to raise that company's international profile. (She was principal of the English National Ballet and before that a star of the Royal Ballet.) Rojo said she wanted to commission more works that were related to social issues and “continue to enrich the art form and continue to make it a source of life.” An art form.”

This season is the first I programmed. Its opener, “Mere Mortals,” a meditation on artificial intelligence, was a collaboration between choreographer Aszure Barton and electronic music producer Floating Points. The work, which had its world premiere, received critical acclaim and nearly sold out, attracting a large number of new audience members. Restore offers It is scheduled for April.

Rojo said the gift was an investment in her goals.

“I felt a huge wave of gratitude that there would actually be so much confidence in my vision and the ambitions that I had on behalf of the San Francisco Ballet,” she said. “For me personally, it's very encouraging that I'm going in the right direction, and that my vision is the right one.”