Venue: Joyce Theatre Foundation
Town: Manhattan, US

The Joyce Theater Foundation is a leading presenter of dance in New York City and nationally. It is runs, in part, from the Joyce Theater, a 472-seat dance performance venue located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The Joyce occupies the Elgin Theater, a former movie house that opened in 1941 and was gut-renovated and reconfigured in 1981-82. In 1977, the Eliot Feld Ballet had begun exploring more affordable approaches to presenting its annual season of performances in New York City. Rental costs and house sizes of the theaters available to the company made these seasons financially risky propositions. Eliot Feld, the company’s founder and Artistic Director, and Cora Cahan, its Executive Director, envisioned creating a theater specifically for smaller dance organizations that their company could use, which would also be available to other companies. The first facility they looked at in late 1978 was the Elgin Theater, a defunct movie theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood built in 1941. They quickly commenced negotiations to purchase it, ultimately arriving at a price of $225,000 and concluded the transaction in January, 1979. The philanthropist LuEsther Mertz, co-founder of Publishers Clearing House and a benefactor of the company who had supported the renovation of the company’s studio, underwrote the full cost of the purchase. In developing financial projections for the theater, Feld and Cahan anticipated an inclusive rental cost of around $12,000 per week. In a national survey they conducted, 73 dance organizations expressed interest in using the theater at the projected rental rate. These findings helped garner a wide range of financial support for developing the theater. The project secured a $400,000 Federal Urban Development Action Grant, which recognized its potential to provide employment and add to the vitality of its neighborhood. Other Federal Government support included a $450,000 challenge grant from the National Endowme