The right moves in a cold artistic climate

The Mark Morris Dance Company performed "Looky" at the Institute of Contemporary Art. (Michael J. Lutch for the Boston Globe)

The year in dance had a distinct Odette/Odile cast to it - the dual good/bad role at the heart of the most popular of classical ballets, "Swan Lake."

There were magical developments, leading local presenter Maure Aronson, executive director of World Music/CRASHarts, to enthuse in a recent interview, "Dance is very robust in Boston - experiencing a renaissance, if you like."

But there was also a cold, dark side to the year, with midsize local troupes not so much drowning, like the Swan Queen and her lover, as frantically treading, well, air. "My image was a Bugs Bunny character running off the cliff and hovering and waiting to see if the Boston funding scene would come up and meet us and support us," said Snappy Dance Theater artistic director Martha Mason recently. "But the foundations just don't seem to care."

The year began auspiciously in January, at the Institute of Contemporary Art's glowing new building. That's when CRASHarts kicked off a series of dance performances in the ICA's new theater, with its walls of glass framing Boston Harbor. Choreographer Stephen Petronio's ricocheting yet tender "BLOOM" burst onstage in the theater's first full concert. Other odysseys of the imagination there included Aszure Barton's roiling "Les Chambres des Jacques," performed by Les Ballet Jazz de Montreal, in Boston for the first time in 20 years, and the Bebe Miller Company's dusky multimedia "Landing/Place," Miller's treatise on the now-grounding, now-disorienting role of locale in our lives.

All told, says Aronson, his organization saw its audiences for dance jump, on average, from 65 percent capacity in 2006 to 81 percent capacity for 2007. Total dance ticket sales rose from 11,003 in 2006 to 13,886 in 2007.

On the other side of the Harbor - way on the other side - Boston Ballet was living a fantasy of its own, in Spain. This summer the troupe, led by artistic director Mikko Nissinen, toured abroad for the first time since 1991, performing in seven festivals around the country over a six-week period, to enthusiastic reviews and often sold-out houses. It presented two programs: "Classic Balanchine," including the elegiac "Serenade," Balanchine's first work choreographed in the United States, and August Bournonville's version of "La Sylphide," the quintessential Romantic ballet whose authenticity was assured by the exquisite staging of Sorella Englund, a former principal with the Royal Danish Ballet.

Boston audiences, too, had a chance to see both of these impeccably danced programs, as well as Maina Gielgud's elegantly pared-down production of "Giselle." It's been six years since Gielgud's abrupt resignation as incoming artistic director of the Boston Ballet, and her strengths as a choreographer will far outlive that controversial blip in her career. Her "Giselle" shone, limning in stark detail the mid-19th-century classic's themes of betrayal and the redemptive power of romantic love.

Yet in dance, aesthetic triumph - even on an international scale - doesn't necessarily mean money in the bank. As the Globe reported this month, Boston Ballet ended its most recent fiscal year in the red, with an $800,000 deficit.

Celebrity Series of Boston presented a strong dance program in 2007, including Belmont-bred Sean Curran's heart-stopping "St. Petersburg Waltz" and Paul Taylor's at turns furious and melancholic "Lines of Loss." But the absence of an international ballet company such as the Kirov on the roster was a stark reminder that the 69-year-old organization had pushed through its first year with neither a title sponsor nor the dance partnership it had kept for five years with the Citi Performing Arts Center, formerly the Wang Center for the Performing Arts.

Across the river in Cambridge, Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre enjoyed a string of successes. In the spring, Mateo went out on a limb, premiering his first full-length repertory ballet, "Salome Dances for Peace," a sprawling three-act piece inspired by Terry Riley's charged minimalist score for strings. This winter, the group's "Nutcracker" ticket sales are up by 40 percent over last year. But the big news may be that the company received a $100,000 grant from the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Charitable Foundation to fund the capital expenses in the first phase of an ambitious new initiative: Mateo's Dance for World Community, a five-pronged extravaganza comprising a website, festival, conference, publication, and youth programs. The project aims to build collaborations between the dance community and groups working on campaigns involving the environment, health care, education, and human rights.

The Boston Dance Alliance, headed by Ruth Birnberg since 2005, was also thrilled to receive its first National Endowment for the Arts grant - $10,000 that kicks in next month - to advance audience development. Under Birnberg's leadership, the organization has quadrupled its budget, to $250,000, and increased its membership by 50 percent.

Yet the changing status of two major home-grown contemporary-dance troupes, Snappy Dance and the Bennett Dance Company, cast a long, Odile-like shadow on the city's dance scene. In late spring, for its 10th anniversary celebration, Snappy Dance combined its edgy acrobatic vocabulary with computer-generated animations to present "String Beings" for 13 nights at the Boston Center for the Arts' Virginia Wimberley Theatre - an unheard-of run for such a company in this town. Copresented by CRASHArts, the show drew an audience of 3,500, says Snappy executive director Jurgen Weiss. Yet with all but one of its 30-plus grant applications turned down, artistic director Mason must shift to a lower gear: transitioning Snappy from a full-time company to one that works on a project-by-project basis.

Christine Bennett, also choreographing in Boston for 10 years, rang a similar knell for her troupe. In October, she announced her resignation as artistic director of her company, whose future remains uncertain. "In the past six years, my shift toward administrative and management tasks has hindered my ability to create new dances," she wrote to the dance community in October.

To me, she was more blunt: "I was tired of wearing all these hats," she said. "Had I been able to see the light at the end of the tunnel - the ability to hire a managing director - I might have kept going. But the funding is just not there for a managing director for companies with budgets of under $250,000 a year."