The Auditorium’s fall line-up is, hands down, among the most notable things in dance this season, and Marisa Santiago has a lot to do with it. As producing director of artistic programming for the 135-year-old venue bordering the Loop’s southern edge, she curates dance programming and is largely responsible for bringing Dance Theatre of Harlem back to Chicago. The nearly 60-year-old historically Black ballet company has not visited in a decade, and will perform a single night at the Auditorium in October.
In November, comes Ballets Jazz Montréal’s Chicago debut. The Canadian company is set to perform “Dance Me,” an evening celebrating the music of Leonard Cohen that’s set to retire after this tour.
It’s the latest in a series of great decisions for the Auditorium, where the programming has felt particularly “in the pocket” over the last year. They got the Martha Graham Dance Company to come during its centennial year, the return of Parsons Dance Company and Tiler Peck and Friends, a project of the New York City prima ballerina that Santiago calls “one of the best shows that we’ve had on the Auditorium stage.”
There’s also a long-standing partnership with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, an anchor of the Auditorium’s dance programming for more than five decades.
The season ahead celebrates North American dance as a theme, with Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballets Jazz and Ailey joined by the returns of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and Ballet Folklorico de Mexico in the spring.
While these are certainly not the edgiest of selections, Santiago’s decision-making has been increasingly tuned to her keen awareness of the Auditorium’s audience — and the venue itself.
“It feels like the aesthetic of the Auditorium,” Santiago says. “We are a historic venue that has housed many of these companies before. We can take some ownership of that.”
As an entertainment venue, the choice to present dance at all can be a calculated risk. The dance audience is smaller. Presenting it is expensive. Sometimes, just breaking even can be called a win.
There’s also the Joffrey Ballet to consider, which has made ballet a particularly tricky thing to program at the Auditorium.
“The dancers are too good. The work is too good. They are making great decisions programmatically. They are investing in what they are building at the Lyric, and it’s beautiful to watch,” she says.
The Joffrey made the Auditorium its preferred performance venue even before Chicago became its permanent home. The then-New York-based company’s regular tour to Chicago moved across town from the Lyric, housed in the Civic Opera House on Wacker Drive, to the Auditorium in 1989 and stayed there after permanently relocating to Chicago in 1995.
It was a veritable heyday for “the Aud,” a time when Broadway tours like “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Misérables” regularly filled its calendar. American Ballet Theatre made its Chicago appearances there, too — at a time many might consider that company’s modern-day peak. One might see Susan Jaffe, Julie Kent and Paloma Herrera in a single weekend, for example.
In 2017, the Joffrey announced a three-year plan shifting back to the Lyric, which has a larger stage, more generous backstage space and an in-house orchestra. The Joffrey’s production calendar had expanded to 16 weeks by that point, including a full month of “Nutcrackers” in December (the second act sets, by the way, still showcase the Auditorium’s iconic golden-hued proscenium and gorgeous arched rafters above the seats).
Santiago, a longtime company manager who previously worked with Hubbard Street 2, Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Jessica Lang, joined the Auditorium in January 2019. After a lengthy search to replace Tania Castroverde Moskalenko, current CEO Rich Regan came a few months after that.
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Joffrey’s plan, of course, was delayed by the pandemic, not completing the transition to the Lyric until 2021. Nonetheless, it was a huge blow to the Auditorium, which had to navigate its own pandemic recovery without its anchor tenant for the previous two decades. Coincidentally (or not), Regan came to the Auditorium from the Lyric.
“I believe he had a vision to fill that gap, the revenue gap in particular,” Santiago says. “That was adding more concerts, adding more commercially interesting shows, more diverse audiences coming into the venue, relationships with different promoters and things of that nature.”
It forced Santiago and the rest of the Auditorium team to get creative, but she says scrapping dance altogether has never been on the table.
“Dance belongs here,” she says. “Dance has a history here, and we need to continue that.”
In order to do so, though, Santiago says she’s had to be strategic and intentional, sometimes reining in her own more contemporary tastes.
One change: accepting that 4,000 seats are about 1,500 too many for most dance performances. The venue recently introduced its “curtain cap” system, draping off the upper balconies to create a less daunting house to fill.
“It’s more intimate without being stuffy,” Santiago says. “It feels like an appropriate size audience for some of the acts we’re bringing in.”
It also pushes audience members desiring a lower-cost ticket toward the front of the house and has generated more opportunities for “sellouts.” They have the option to release new batches of tickets and open the balconies if that happens.
“That feels good as a presenter,” she says. “It feels better from every perspective.”
Other efforts include Dance Partners, an affinity group of donors that was largely responsible for sealing the idea to bring “Dance Me” to Chicago. The group traveled with Santiago to Montreal for a studio visit with Ballets Jazz and, in her telling, said Chicago simply had to have it.
There is also a notable shift away from Moskalenko’s previous efforts to favor Chicago companies. The Auditorium’s Made in Chicago series is a thing of the past. Instead, Santiago sprinkles Chicago dance in with the rest. Last season, that included Trinity Irish Dance Company and Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater as part of a slate of performances themed around female leadership in dance. This year, it’s not on the menu at all.
It’s not about unworthiness, she says. Santiago also serves as vice president of the board of directors for See Chicago Dance, an advocacy and audience development nonprofit committed to promoting Chicago’s 200-ish dance companies. But her job is to balance artistic excellence with the raw numbers and what audiences will actually show up for.
“It’s a lot of seats,” she says, noting the tangible gap in midsize theaters for Chicago companies looking to responsibly leapfrog toward a venue like hers. “There are so many people in this city who love dance, and all of them go to everything. They want to support everyone. But that math does not match.”
There is one notable exception: Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, which under Santiago’s watch has managed to make the Auditorium its home theater for one night a year.
“People are talking about them like Ailey,” she says. “They’re here. They’re doing it here. And they can say that their roots were partially at the Auditorium.”
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Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.