For the Pacific Northwest ­Ballet, it was a disappointing turnout. Only 87 people had responded to a discount-ticket offer for anyone under age 25. Making the best of the situation, the company’s artistic director, Peter Boal, bounded into that section of the audience and thanked people for coming. At the next performance offering reduced-price tickets, the popular ­Roméo et Juliette, more than 600 twenty-somethings showed up.

In Seattle, 2,400 miles from the East Coast center of the ballet world, an idiosyncratic campaign of personal outreach to audiences, contributors, and board members is paying off. Boal, a former New York City Ballet dancer, is taking a flagging company and turning it around both artistically and financially. Indeed, four years into Boal’s tenure, it’s difficult for the city’s arts community to remember that the PNB board was making a huge gamble when, impressed by Boal’s ideas, it offered him the top job in 2004.

At the time, PNB had had several years of financial trouble. Audiences and contributions had dwindled in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and a temporary move to a former sports arena while the troupe’s performance space was under renovation drove down subscriptions and contributions. Budgeting, too, had become a challenge, with the company running an accumulated deficit of $1.2 million on an annual budget of $16.5 million.

On top of all that, Boal, a great-great-grandson of a founder of the Cadbury chocolate company, met few of the board’s search criteria. He had never run a large ballet company; he wasn’t an established choreographer; and born and raised on the East Coast, he knew nothing of the politics and personalities of the Seattle arts community. Upon accepting the post, Boal triggered a new wave of nerves when he presented an avant-garde slate, including one piece to songs by the garage-punk band the Cramps.

To the relief of PNB’s board, the program received a blizzard of favorable press. The new works turned off only a handful of long-term subscribers and began attracting new ones. More patrons and contributions followed, allowing the company to hire additional dancers and add new productions. This fiscal year, for the first time in memory, the ballet company appears on track to meet its subscription goal. PNB also has a $21 million budget, a $12 million endowment, and a $1 million cash reserve to tap should there be an unexpected shortfall in revenue.

What is most surprising is that the turnaround has gained momentum at a time when other dance companies across the country are barely hanging on. Some, like the Ohio Ballet and California’s Ballet Pacifica, have shut down altogether. In an effort to reduce its budget from $15 million to $11 million, the Miami City Ballet cut eight dancers in February and laid off its orchestra indefinitely. Later that month, New York City Ballet laid off 11 dancers. A survey conducted in December by Dance/USA, an industry-service group, shows that more than two-thirds of participating companies have been informed by foundations or corporate sponsors that their grants for 2009 will be cut.  

In terms of artistry, Boal has turned a personal shortcoming to the company’s advantage. Although he doesn’t create new works, as many ballet directors do, his close ties with leading choreographers have drawn them to Seattle to stage their works. Dancemakers such as Twyla Tharp and Susan Stroman have created new ballets specifically for PNB, while Mark Morris and Christopher Wheeldon have mounted earlier pieces there. Boal insists, though, that he is capable of making up dances. “I keep saying I will when we run out of money,” he quips.  

In the meantime, Boal has formed a close bond with PNB’s founding artistic directors, Francia Russell and Kent Stowell, who ran the company for 28 years. “We feel like he’s our stepson,” Stowell says. In spite of early fears that Boal was too inexperienced to be an artistic director, he, like Russell and Stowell, arrived steeped in the tradition of George Balanchine. The co-founder of the New York City Ballet was dying when Boal joined the company in 1983, but nevertheless played a crucial role in Boal’s career. While still a student at NYCB’s School of American Ballet, Boal was summoned to the office. “I thought I was in trouble,” he says. Instead, he was dumbfounded to learn that Mikhail Baryshnikov, then American Ballet Theatre’s artistic director, had offered him a job—and that Balanchine had intervened. Instead, Balanchine tapped Boal to join NYCB.

Boal went on to spend 22 years at NYCB, 16 of them as a principal dancer. Today he strives to ensure that his company is on a par technically with NYCB and pushes dancers to make a direct connection with the audience. In one class, he had his students execute a pirouette and then warned them that making the turn perfectly isn’t enough—it must end by meeting the audience’s gaze. He then corrected one of the dancers, showing him how to shift the angle of his hand and stretch out his arm more elegantly.

After every performance, he leads a Q&A with the audience. He has shown up, unannounced, to teach an evening adult-ballet class open to anyone in the community. He blogs on the company’s website and makes a point of attending performances of other Seattle arts companies. And he has taken pains to win over board members and patrons by frequently inviting them to rehearsals and giving them advance briefings on the works he is about to stage.

Dan Baty, the founder of a company that operates assisted-living facilities, is among Boal’s converts. A Seattle Seahawks fan, Baty had never been at all interested in ballet. But after his wife dragged him to one of Boal’s new-works programs, Baty was so impressed by the dancers’ athleticism that he became a regular. “The modern stuff really got to me,” he says. “I think it’s every bit as interesting as a great ball game, if not more so.”