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PrintLunch With - Scott Black
Managing director, Tulsa Ballet
Date: July 20
Time: Noon
Place: Dilly Deli
Tulsans have talked a lot about how to keep/bring back young professionals. Well, recently we snagged a good one — thanks to our neighbors in Bartlesville. They managed to entice Scott Black back to Oklahoma and we (“we” being Tulsa Ballet) lured him home.
When we met, Black had been on his new job as TB’s managing director a month. Until then, as executive director of B-ville’s OK Mozart Festival, he’d had to oversee OKM’s 25th season in June. I felt as if I already knew him. Langdon Publishing, which produces this monthly, also produces Bartlesville Magazine. One of my hats is to act as its managing editor, and the festival was a recent cover story.
Black is one of those local boys who goes to the big city and then yearns for home. A Sand Springs native, while in high school he spent two summers working at nearby Discoveryland — an opportunity that helped him settle on a performing arts career. He looked at NYU and Julliard but found that “lo and behold, OU had one of the best programs” for theater, he says. Nonetheless, he knew that if he were going to break into the business, he’d have to go to New York.
After graduation, he and his roommate hopped a plane, found a place to live “and just made it happen,” he says. Remarkably, he never had to play the actor’s most ubiquitous role, waiter.
“I decided if I was going to be there, I was going to work in the business,” he says. “Otherwise there was no point.”
He did well, acting, producing, directing, marketing shows. Then 9/11 put a halt to theater projects. He moved to Wisconsin to work as a local theater producer, got the organization “back on track,” and, tired of snow and more snow, took the OKM job that landed him back in Oklahoma. The Tulsa Ballet job “came out of nowhere,” he says, “and it was too good to turn down.”
Black and Artistic Director Marcello Angelini seem to make a good team. Both understand the ballet is art and business. Previously, he’s worked with ADs who “want fabulous scenery, fabulous costumes and tell you ‘Just go make it happen,’” he says. “Marcello understands it’s all part of the grand picture, that we have to make sacrifices in certain areas to make it happen. If you want a $100,000 production, you have to find the funding, and he’s willing to help (do that).”
The arts business is changing, Black explains, and not just because of a tough economy. Before the Internet, arts groups could reach patrons with advertising and direct mail.
“Nowadays, you don’t know what’s going to work,” he says, to appeal to both older ballet-goers and those ages 30-50 just becoming interested in dance. Experience tells him that some re-packaging helped broaden the OKM audience. Angelini has already injected contemporary works into the ballet’s recent seasons, mixing them with classics. And TB’s intimate Studio K allows ballet lovers to watch dancers up close at select performances. Measures that are already showing success.
Black’s goal: to have the world “think of Tulsa Ballet in the same breath as other great ballets.”
Ambitious? Absolutely. Doable? Why not?
