The theatre was dark. Someone at the lighting board was running cues. The dancers were on stage at several portable barres, about to start their warm up. Some were swathed in warm up clothes, others were in shorts, bare-legged. It was three hours before the curtain would rise on the Festival Ballet Providence production of Don Quixote. Artistic Director Mihailo ‘Misha’ Djuric, came in and we talked about what it’s like to be from another country, to work with dancers from different places, and what it takes to make a ballet company succeed in tough economic times.

What year did you take the directorship of Festival Ballet Providence?
1998.

How many dancers are in your company?
Twenty.

The company’s grown since you started.
Yes. When I came here there was just the company and the budget was $350,000. At that time I think there were six dancers on contract for a season of 12 weeks. The salary was ridiculously small. In this, the eighth season which we’re just now finishing, a lot of things have changed. Now I have 21 dancers, I have a school of about 500 kids. We’ve got a new building and our budget is about 1.8 million, I think.

And, [laughing] we have a big deficit—I’ve accomplished a lot!

The reputation of dance and the Festival Ballet has grown a lot. We are considered one of the major three or four arts institutions in town, which is really nice. People are starting to care again and the dance audiences are coming back to the theatre.

It’s been about three years that we’ve been performing at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium theatre. Before, we would only perform here maybe once a year and the rest would be smaller events on college campuses.

Funding is so hard to come by these days, and Providence is a small city. What are your secrets for making a company grow like this?
You need to have people on your staff who believe in what you’re doing. For a long time it was just me, only one person, full-time. Everyone else was just part-time. Now we have about five people working full-time—which still isn’t very many when it comes to handling our budget and all the things we need to do, but when people believe and are devoted, they can do a lot.

It’s terrible to have someone who just wants to work office hours. This is the arts, you have to put in beyond whatever your work time is. The work never stops. That’s one of the secrets.

Another secret is you cannot just do your job. I do a hundred different jobs. If I need to dance, I dance. If I need to clean the stage, I clean the stage. If I need to make a costume, I make a costume. If I need to teach, I teach. If I need to sit in the office and answer the telephones then I answer the telephones. And so does everyone else who is working.

Do you like to teach? Or is it something you do these days because you have to?
You know, [laughs] I’m so tired lately I don’t like to do anything!

When you go to class and you see all those dancers, you want to give them some energy, but I have so many problems myself—I know how much work I have in the office and how many calls I need to return. It’s hard to know everything, face people every day, and still remain positive—that’s my biggest challenge. Thank god I don’t have any kids or family because I’m treating the company like they’re my kids. I don’t want them to know how many problems there are, I want them to have a good childhood.

I want to ask you more about your dancers, but before we move on to that, are there any other secrets to making a dance company succeed?
You need to have a good board. And you need to have a community who cares, who wants dance. It’s tough, with the funding, especially in the United States. Everything is changing. Corporations are giving less and less. Everything is more dependent on the individual donors.

The best is if you can earn the money, not ask for it. That’s ideal. But you put so much into the productions and it’s only rarely you actually earn that back and maybe make a little profit.

So we economize. We got by before with only a little money and we still did good-quality productions. Now we have a little more money. What’s important is to sustain the quality. I don’t know about next season. I’m thinking about it, but it’s kind of vague...I don’t know how it’s all going to happen.We cannot plan ahead like some other organizations can, but in the arts, everyone has this problem. Boston Ballet has problems, too, and they’re in a much bigger city than Providence. But our aim is to have seven different programs. If we average out all our shows we would be doing about one show every week and a half. In 34 weeks we’ll give 40 performances.

What a great opportunity for these dancers, to perform so much.
And in all different styles of choreography. They don’t realize. They think it’s hard. But one day they’ll realize it was great.

You know how dancers are, and people in general. They’re not happy. They’re always wanting something better. They don’t realize what they have and so they leave. For instance, a couple of months ago, one of my dancers, who did not come back last year, called to apologize and to say “Oh my god, I was completely wrong.”— just didn’t realize. You might think you’re not learning anything, but you’re learning.

But it’s like that for everyone. Now I appreciate all my old teachers and the people I worked with. When I was dancing I thought “Stop saying that all the time, you’re driving me nuts!”—and then you’re there in the studio repeating those very same things. They had been right! It’s a generational thing. When you’re a dancer, you’re a little bit ignorant, you don’t think, you’re just selfishly concerned about yourself.

Are most of your dancers Americans?
I have mostly Americans but then I also have dancers from Italy, Canada, Russia, Belarus, and Venezuela. But usually, at audition time, I get people from all around the world.

So this company is actually rather international.
Yes, for a small city like Providence, and for a small company, it really is quite international. About half of them are Americans and about half of them are foreigners.

What about styles? When you get these dancers from such varied backgrounds you must find a lot of differences.
Yes, of course, every dancer is different. When I pick them it’s not because of how many pirouettes they do or how high they jump, but there needs to be something there that I like. And I don’t like for them to be all the same.

With this variety, there is a blending of cultures and, as happens in many companies like this, every dancer brings something to the mix. But it’s not just a mixing based on the foreign cultures. If someone comes from California and another comes from Maine, even they are different. Even the parts of the United States are, in themselves, very different.

I came from Yugoslavia where there were different cultures, a blending of things, and this is what I think makes us stronger. If you see something you like, you adopt it. This company is the same way. Every dancer influences the other, and of course I influence them.It’s good for them, they grow very quickly, both artistically and technically.

I think that is what makes the United States such an exciting country, because it’s so culturally diverse. Now we’re talking about a united Europe, and that’s nice, but I don’t know how that will go. You know how Europe is. Each country wants to be a princess, they don’t want to change. They don’t mix as well as cultures do here in the United States.

What do you notice about dancers from various places? Are there any tendencies in the training or their approach to the work?
How a dancer approaches the work, well, I think that is more a personality or individual thing, not so much what country they’re from.

Tendencies in their training, well, you can’t neatly classify people into large groups, especially these days. Everyone is traveling so much. There are Russian teachers in South America or in Cuba, and there are Cuban teachers in Europe or in North America. It’s no longer about the country where a school is located. For instance, I had a ballet mistress back in Belgrade who used to work at the Royal Ballet. And then there’s the internet and television and the movies. Between all these things, and everyone traveling so much, well, some of us might’ve grown up in different parts of the world but we’ve all been exposed to many of the same things so I think we are, in some sense, culturally the same.

I guess my company is like any community: there are people who are very hard-working, people who are lazy, people who like to talk and gossip, those that would like to be on coffee break all the time. [Laughs] no, they’re all good kids.

I just want them to do more and to do better but I also understand that they are tired. I know they have their own limits, but I wish they could push themselves more. Some of them are a little bit, well, it’s an issue with aging, maybe. And some are a little young and need that parental guidance thing.

What kind of age range do you have in your company?
18 up to 36. I’m asking a lot of them to do multiple roles, night after night. When they are performing they never have a break. Maybe they go from a principal role to corps, or to a soloist role. It’s hard psychologically and physically.

Do you have any dancers who are very open, who readily soak up everything?
I have two or three like that. Everyone you work with will tell you different things. You have to listen to what they say and learn from everyone. You cannot be in a company if you don’t want to open up to all the ways there are. “This is right,” “this is wrong”—every school can have an attitude about ’this is the only way to do something.” But if you’re open, you can learn to do things a little bit this way or a little bit that way. You end up being able to do whatever it is that a director or choreographer wants.

So, for your company, you don’t want an over-arching approach the way, for instance, New York City Ballet espouses the Balanchine style.
No. I think dancers these days—and companies and audiences—want different things. They don’t want just one thing over and over again. This changing might be harder on the body, but I think it’s more interesting for the dancers because they don’t get as tired. We went from Balanchine to Plotnikov to Di Marco; we had three pieces that were so different, and every piece called for different muscles to work. But some dancers were in all three pieces so for them it was still a very exhausting performance.

The variety in programming is really for the audiences. It’s like everything else in life—like television: there are so many channels, so many choices. I like trying to make a season that is very diverse, from the contemporary modern to the classical things. This inclination toward diversity, it goes back to what you were saying about choosing dancers that do not all look alike. Yes, but at the same time, while they are different in their physiques and personalities, when the curtain comes up, they look together. This is what I like about this group. Everyone has a lot of individual energy, but when the curtain goes up, something happens and it all blends.

Before the premiere or the opening night I used to think it was going to be a disaster. “You guys are off, you’re dancing awfully” and they’d just look at me. Then the curtain would go up and magic would happen. They would really come together.

Learn more about Mr. Djuric and Festival Ballet Providence at: http://www.festivalballet.com/.