ALAN WEISS, owner of East Greenwich-based Summit Consulting Group Inc., was recently elected president of Providence-based ballet company Festival Ballet Providence. Weiss replaces Toots Zynsky, who served in the role for six years before stepping down. Weiss is a former Festival Ballet board member who served on other boards for Elizabeth Buffum Chase Center, the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre and Trinity Repertory Company, and chaired the Newport International Film Festival.
What inspired you to get involved with the arts and help the local arts community? It’s basically two things. I always believed that the arts culture [contains] important contributors to the success of any kind of civilization and any kind of society. My son, who has acted and is an acting coach, told me and my wife once that he really appreciated what we did, not so much that we could write checks but because we attended events. He said for the arts, it was very important for people to be in the seats. As I looked at the arts, if you look at the community … the city has a wonderful artistic representation, almost better than Boston.
What are your upcoming plans as president of Festival Ballet? A few things. We have a wonderful artistic director, Mihailo “Misha” Djuric, and we want to give him as much latitude as we can … to be innovative and productive because he does such good work. Secondly, we have to start our season forward. We’re not announcing our season early enough and we’re not giving people an option to purchase tickets early enough and know what the performance dates are. The third thing is I want the ballet to be more of an active partner in the Providence arts scene, whether it’s the Rhode Island Foundation or whoever it has to be. We have a wonderful outreach in that we have an extensive, adaptive dance program for kids who are on various scales of autism. We have a very active scholarship program. We have schools that people can attend with the best dancers giving them guidance. That’s what I feel is being a good community citizen and a good arts citizen.
One of your initiatives is to help increase the donor base. What will a larger donor base do to help the organization? We’re in a peculiar situation in that our earned income – in other words, ticket sales – is far, far greater than our other income, which are donations. In other great artistic groups, that is reversed. We have to make a much better effort in getting individual donations in terms of corporate donations and grants. We’re launching plans to do that. Rhode Island is a small state, but they are very generous people and contribute to many causes all at once.
Are there new programs or productions on the horizon for Festival Ballet? There are. We have what I call the “mainstage” productions, which are at [Providence Performing Arts Center] and The Vets, and we do “The Nutcracker” every year. We also do the Black Box [Theatre], which is in the ballet itself five or six times a year at three to four performances each. We have a very aggressive slate coming up for classics, [such as] “Swan Lake” and other performances.
