Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre closing after nearly 50 years

After nearly a half century of training generations in the rarefied art of ballet, the Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre is no more. 

On Monday, SCBT’s longtime artistic director, Diane Cypher, announced that the local training academy is closing its doors at the end of July. For Santa Cruz County audiences, SCBT was known largely for its full performances of “The Nutcracker” each holiday season at the Santa Cruz Civic. But for young dancers interested in rigorous ballet training, it was a top-flight academy that, in many cases, led to careers in professional ballet. 

Caught between maintaining high-level pre-professional training in ballet and increased competition for the time and attention of its potential clientele, SCBT decided to shut its doors rather than compromise its standards, Cypher told Lookout.

“It’s been coming,” she said at SCBT’s longtime mid-county studio in Soquel. “In 2016, 2017, we started seeing a real downturn in enrollment.” Then, of course, came the pandemic, which the academy survived by adapting to the needs of its highly motivated young dancers, but which also crippled its efforts to recruit the next generation of ballet dancers.

In the spacious rehearsal studio just off Soquel Drive, Cypher takes a photo off the wall — one of probably well over a hundred photos of past performances — from the “Waltz of the Flowers” scene of a “Nutcracker” performance of less than a decade ago, featuring 24 young dancers. If SCBT would have continued this holiday season, that scene would have dropped from two dozen to probably four dancers.

“And that’s just not the same thing for their training,” said Cypher. “They really need to be with that many people on stage, negotiating spatial awareness, working together, learning how to follow each other.”

In a post-COVID world, the kind of all-consuming commitment that SCBT demanded from its pre-professional dancers and their families fell out of favor, and the academy was not willing to relax its standards. “People realized [during COVID] that having their families together on a Sunday was really nice for them. I’m not going to disagree with that at all, but I can’t compete with it either. If you’re not in the studio six days a week for hours at a time, you’re not going to get the strength and the training and the technique that you need for a career in ballet.”

Cypher said that she first entertained the idea of closing the theater after the 2023 performance of “The Nutcracker” at the Civic. “It hit me after ‘The Nutcracker’ last year,” she said. “I mean, wow, that was great. But if one person had been out sick, it would have been bad news.”

The ballet academy dates back to 1976 when Jean Dunphy started The Studio in downtown Santa Cruz. A decade later, The Studio grew into Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre, and then moved to Soquel after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. (“The Studio, School of Classical Ballet” remains the certified, pre-professional academy arm of the larger SCBT). In 1998, Cypher and then-partner Robert Kelley took the reins from Dunphy. Since then, the academy, teaching kids in three programs from preschool to high school, has placed dancers with professional companies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Frankfurt and beyond. Among the celebrated graduates of the academy over the years — many of whom have returned to Santa Cruz to perform in “The Nutcracker” — are Melody Mennite of the Houston Ballet, Lucien Postlewaite of the Pacific Northwest Ballet and Les Ballets De Monte Carlo, and Beth Terwilleger, now artistic director of The Gray in Seattle.

When Cypher and Kelley took the reins of SCBT, the pre-professional academy had about 250 young dancers. Since COVID, enrollment has averaged about one-fifth of that number. 

In recent years, SCBT has also faced competition from dance studios that offer limited ballet training as part of a program that features a wide variety of other dance forms and activities. Such programs don’t generally ask of their students the commitment of time and attention that SCBT demands of them.

“My whole focus,” said Cypher, 59, “from when I was a dancer and started teaching 42 years ago has been to train professionals, because that’s the way I grew up.”

In January, Cypher disclosed to her board of directors that she had decided to close the dance academy rather than continue on with a different orientation or a different set of standards. “They were the first to know,” she said. “There were a lot of people who were upset. They didn’t want this to go away because they loved it for their kids. I didn’t want it to go away either. But I felt I was just not willing to lower my standards. You don’t do this halfway.”