"Sometimes you do yourself in," says Joan Lazarus, director of the 21-year-old WestWave Dance Festival, which presents Maurya Kerr's Tinypistol on Monday at Z Space.
It's a single performance that closes the door on the history of this summer tradition, headed for 17 years by Lazarus, who says she leaves WestWave with few regrets after a rewarding and difficult year.
In the 31 years since Lazarus arrived in the Bay Area, she has been a maven in the unsung arena of arts administration - an unabashed cheerleader for the dance scene, who served as executive director of Oakland Ballet, managed the Cowell Theater, guided the capital campaign for ODC's new facility and helped steer the annual Bay Area Celebrates National Dance Week, in addition to running her own nonprofit DanceArt, which sponsored the WestWave Dance festival every summer. And yet Lazarus is philosophical about her departure and the confluence of events that have led to it.
Highs and lows
Speaking by phone from her offices in Steamboat Springs, Colo., where she is now executive director of the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School, Lazarus spoke frankly about a whirlwind year that went from the high of WestWave's 20th anniversary season to a funding desert that left the festival with only one performance and serious questions about its viability.
Under the aegis of DanceArt since 1998, WestWave boasted more than 2,000 performances, featuring hundreds of choreographers from the Bay Area and beyond. Lazarus often worked on it without a salary to keep the budget for the festival, which ran around $75,000, as small as possible.
"WestWave was a bargain, and that's one of the reasons I would get so frustrated," Lazarus says. "Because what we could manage to do for that small amount of money was tremendous - it was very lean and mean, but we needed at least that much to do it, and it's just gotten harder and harder to raise."
Lazarus describes the funding challenges of the past year as "the perfect storm," in which the festival strangely became a victim of its own success.
After a banner 20th anniversary season that featured nine programs and stretched from July through October, Lazarus hoped the momentum would continue. She sought grants from a dozen agencies, but was disappointed to find that only a handful of funders were prepared to support the festival. "They said, 'You had such a great year last year that we're sure you'll be able to garner new support, so we decided to give to someone else,' " she says.
Without enough money to secure a theater, much less move forward with planned programming, Lazarus e-mailed the hundreds of friends, artists and administrators with whom she had worked over the years, but was again disappointed to receive only 30 responses.
"And it wasn't the artists who donated - only about three or four choreographers pitched in, and that was a very clear indicator to me," she says pragmatically. "Organizations and projects have life cycles like anything else. So when I had the offer in April to come to Perry-Mansfield, it made my decision really easy. It wasn't, 'Oh, you can't leave because WestWave needs you to keep going.' It felt like my time here was done."
The forthright Lazarus is quick to note that WestWave stalwarts like Janice Garrett, Amy Seiwert and Benjamin Levy were able to use the festival's open-ended, "try anything" approach to their advantage, testing ideas for new premieres without having to produce themselves. And Lazarus has often seen WestWave as an opportunity to give a boost to promising talents.
Three works
One such artist is Maurya Kerr, whose Tinypistol company will present three works at WestWave's only performance this year. Kerr first came to Lazarus' attention during last year's gala, when she was looking for a ballet choreographer for the program.
"Someone recommended Maurya, so I called and said, 'You know, I haven't seen any of your work, but I'm just going to ask you, is it good?' " Lazarus recounts, chuckling at the memory. "And she said, 'Yeah, I think you'd be happy.' Working with her was so easy - when I needed information she sent it, her company showed up on time, they didn't whine, they didn't ask for things we couldn't provide. She just did it, and it was fantastic."
Lazarus held on to that memory while planning this year's offerings. Then, with only $7,000 in the bank from a few long-standing supporters, she made a decision based on gut instinct. "After the 20th anniversary gala last year, I had asked Maurya if she'd ever shown a full evening of work, and she said no. So I offered her a full evening. Even as things began to dwindle this year, I was unwilling to take back this offer," she says simply.
"And if little WestWave can offer an opportunity to someone who doesn't have an organization yet, who doesn't write grants, who just has a strong body of work - well, it's a real privilege to be the person who can make that happen for them. As everything else slipped away, I had to make the choice. We could only do one concert - I could either present five artists who've done this before, or I can still do this for her, and to do that felt really nice."
WestWave Dance: Maurya Kerr's Tinypistol. 8 p.m. Monday. Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F. $18-$23. www.westwavedance.org, www.brownpapertickets.com.
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