The Northside Sun is conducting a series and speaking to the directors of the arts around Jackson, Mississippi about the impacts of COVID-19 on the art industry and how they have recovered.
David Keary grew up in Jackson and, as a little boy, was very into athletics, but also loved musical theater. His parents were both involved in music and introduced him to dance class at a young age. He officially moved over to classical ballet at the age of 13 and was quickly noticed by professional dancers from the New York City Ballet School who offered him a scholarship for their summer program. At 16, he attended for five weeks and went back each summer after that. His career started when he was offered an apprenticeship through the ballet company and was eventually hired on. He stayed with the company for seven years before going to the Fort Worth Ballet School as a principal. He then returned to Jackson and attended Millsaps to finish his undergraduate degree. He went on to law school and began clerking for the State Supreme Court Justice Jim Smith as the first intern to help with the caseload. At the same time, Ballet Mississippi was going through some changes and financial troubles and he was recruited to get it back on track. In doing so, he was named the Board President and Executive/Artistic Director of the company – a role he has kept since 1994.
How did covid initially impact Ballet Mississippi?
The hardest part was that the city immediately closed down the art center. What was really funny is that before covid hit, we had a flooding crisis that we were concerned was getting ready to happen to downtown Jackson. In January of 2020, we were sandbagging the art center all the way around because they were saying Jackson was going to be flooded and underwater. I had to go in and take up the floor and get our office equipment off the floor and everything else. That didn’t happen, so then we had to go back in and put all of that stuff back down. I’m talking six rolls of 40 feet long, five feet wide flooring that is heavy, cumbersome and a two, three, four men job but I did all of that. Right after that happened, there was a water pipe that broke out there, and we couldn’t be in there because the water was contaminated. Then, covid hit right in the middle of the production we were trying to put together. We had to shut it down, and we didn’t really know what to do. We thought it was going to be something like a month at the most. When we got two to three weeks in it, we went to Zoom classes for the students.
In some ways, it was a Godsend we could do that but, in other ways, it was just totally destructive. You just can’t train and teach dancers by Zoom video. We did that for March, April and May. We had no year end performance. Then, by the summer we were able to host some classes down at the art center, but we had to do it with smaller numbers, and everybody was wearing the masks. It was just awful, to be honest.
When were you able to resume normal classes?
We were back in the arts center from August to November. We were able to work with the theatre and put on Nutcracker Suites, which is essentially Act II. It is an hour long production instead of two hours. We worked to get spacing in the theater and people had to mask up. We had two performances and that helped financially a lot. The cost of doing business was a lot lower because we weren’t in there trying to stage the entire production. Then, when we came back, the heating and cooling unit went out in late March in the Arts Center. We have been out of the arts center ever since then, and we had to shift all of our equipment to our satellite school, which was Madison Square Center for the Arts on Main Street in Madison. When we went in there, they told us come September, you’ll be out because the city is taking over the building for renovations. We literally had nowhere to go.
Someone working with me at the time found this property out on Mannsdale Road. It was the Parkway Pentecostal Church. It’s two big buildings. I asked how much and they said $2 million. I thought there was no way, but I went over and looked at it. It was phenomenal. By September, we were able to negotiate a price on it and got some funding from the Ballet Mississippi Foundation and are beginning a capital campaign this week. We purchased those two buildings in September. The date we had to be out of Madison’s Art Center was pushed back so we were able to stay there. Right after Nutcracker was over this past year, we moved the dance floor to the new facility.
What are your plans for the new buildings?
We have started creating two huge state of the art studios. One studio is bigger than the size of the studio that we had downtown and the second one is the size of Thalia Mara Hall’s stage, so that is going to help us create all of these ballets and not have to spend so much time adjusting for space.
How was your staff impacted with covid?
When covid first hit, like everybody else, it threw us into a state of ‘What do we do now?’ I kept the staff intact as long as I could and then when it became apparent that we were looking at significant net losses for the year, the board told me to condense staff. I think if we had to do it over again, we would have done things differently, but hindsight is perfect. I let two ladies go that were really rock solid in the office and did great work, but it was me and one of my former students who had her MBA and we pretty much took four jobs and made it into two. Until recently, I have still felt the impact of that. We are still going through a considerable amount of change.
How did covid impact your funding?
At first, it kicked us in the head, but you would be amazed at how many people contributed to us during the down time even. By cutting expenses and keeping something going, we were able to meet our expenses and we had also established a pretty strong saving account. We were able to get the PPP loan, which helped tremendously. The Arts Commission provides grant money. I can’t say how much I appreciate the Arts Commission. I think a lot of us do right now. They came through and helped all of us. I have another loan we got that we have to pay back, but we haven’t touched it yet and it is primarily for salaries and that kind of thing. Our student base has been strong. Is it thin right now? Yes, but it is getting ready to change. We are getting ready to get back operational fulltime and, with tuition kicking back in and getting back into the Nutcracker performing season, we aren’t just going to climb our way out of it, we are going to jump our way out of it. It is going to take a little time, but we are going to be alright.
What attendance or ticket sale trends did you see throughout the pandemic?
The first year when we did the one act performance, we could only get about 500 people in the 2,000 seat theatre, but last year we were almost full. The Sunday show was almost sold out. The Saturday show was around 60 or 70 percent. We had our Friday night performance for young people and that did very well. Our Thursday night performance is free to the City of Jackson employees as our way of giving back to the city. We have done well. We haven’t started back up the school performances. I’m looking at doing it this year, but it will be one performance only. I’m keeping an eye on that because some of the schools are not doing field trips yet. The future is looking very good if we all can just keep it together. From a numbers point, we did very well last year. I’m thinking we will do the same, if not better this year.
What would you say the main effects of covid have been on Ballet Mississippi?
When you disrupt children’s lives and their schedules and their way of working, they’re very resilient but it wasn’t until January of this year that I was able to get some of my younger kid groups back together and start training them again. We had gaping holes all the way through. The disruption is hard on the children, but I think we are okay now because they had a very successful spring. A lot of them came to the workshops this summer. I have a lot of dancers off at other summer programs. I’ve got a dancer in Cincinnati Ballet right now and they have pulled out the red carpet of scholarships for her on the professional training track program, and I’m encouraging her to do it because she’s phenomenally gifted. We will probably lose that young dancer, but behind her come 30 other kids that are just teeming with talent. We have them back on track and I’m looking forward to having a strong year with them.
Do you think the pandemic is still affecting your business in any way?
I think we will have lingering effects of it in some form or fashion for quite awhile. I don’t see it affecting us yet, because we are back in business at the school and the current strand is not a problem. Mississippi Symphony Orchestra’s Richard Hudson and I have talked about this quite a bit. We have models in place to keep people socially distanced without losing the audience. I really think we are going to be alright. We just need to keep moving forward.
Where do you think Ballet Mississippi is two years later in terms of recovering from covid?
I think we are well on our way right now. I think we have gone through the recovery this last semester and summer. I really am expecting us to be back on pre-2020 grounds. Knock on wood!
Do you think Ballet Mississippi has been made better in any way having gone through the pandemic?
Yes, I do. We have gone through so much change in the past few years. We are going to have new teachers coming in, and we have new board members coming on and we have new students coming in. I really think it has made us a bit more resilient and smarter and knowing how to do more with less. For me personally, I go behind myself always cutting the lights off and making sure the garbage is out. It is just being a bit more responsible with air conditioners and heaters and finding ways to cut costs. I think this idea of conservation has kicked in with a lot of us. We are doing a lot more with less resources that we wouldn’t have been doing two years ago. I think that has been a really positive thing, and it pushes us to think about how we are doing things. We don’t have to go out and buy the brand new costume. We can take what we have and pick it up a bit. We still have to be smart. I think we are two to three years still crawling out of this. We are in a great place, but the next three years we’ll have to be conservative with dollars and how we train and make great use of time.
What does Ballet Mississippi have coming up that you’re excited about?
We will perform Nutcracker December 1-4. We always do it that first weekend in December. We have a spring performance at the end of the year for the school. I have guest teachers and choreographers scheduled to come in throughout the year and, after the first year, we are looking at more travel training modules instead of a big to-do spring show. They will still have a performance at the end, but I'm really looking at raising the level of their training and exposing them to more great teachers that we can bring in. It is all about the training for our dancers. The reason I’ll do that is they like to go off to great schools in the summer, and they need to be able to hold their own with kids that do this six days a week for four or five hours a day. Our kids don’t do that. They are in the studio probably four days a week for two or two and half hours, and these other kids across the country are doing two or three classes a day everyday. We have a bit of catching up to do, and that is the other reason I wanted to get us in our own facility so we can offer our own classes and train them better.
