"You can't just be one thing. You have to taste the whole world," says Dennis Nahat. In his varied career as dancer, choreographer, company director, and chef, Nahat ('65, dance)—who also minored in viola and cooked breakfast for his peers in the cafeteria while he was here at School—has always made a point of extending his repertoire for the sake of being flexible enough to satisfy his audience. "You learn how to cook eggs for different people—some people like onions, others like tomato; some people like them plain, not even with butter."
Dennis Nahat (Photo by John Gerbetz)
After leaving Juilliard to dance with the City Center Joffrey Ballet, Dennis Nahat's toe "got busted by a ballerina's pointe shoe," giving him an opportunity to put his adaptability to good use on Broadway. After two years dancing and choreographing (during which he had maintained his technique through daily ballet classes), Nahat joined American Ballet Theater. While on tour, he would cook dinner for everybody in his hotel room, "keeping the company together" during their one-night stands in unknown cities.It was during one such tour that he and a small group of friends "fell into" the buying and re-establishing of a Cleveland dance school, on the verge of closure due to the retirement of its director. Nahat saw the New Cleveland Dance Center escalate from 40 to 250 students over two years. He funded its growth through choreographic engagements in musicals and at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and oversaw its expansion by commuting to Cleveland during any break in his A.B.T. performance schedule. The school gave its first performance in 1974, two years after the purchase—and out of the school, Nahat co-founded the Cleveland Ballet in 1976, "to the amazement of everybody in a city with a 6 p.m. curfew!"The establishment of a resident ballet company did much for Cleveland's cultural infrastructure, prompting the refurbishment of the State Theater opera house. The huge size of the theater inspired large-scale, theatrical productions that proved immensely popular with the Cleveland audiences, but the city was not able to meet their expense, leading to the merger of the Cleveland Ballet with a group of dancers from San Jose, Calif., to form the San Jose Cleveland Ballet in 1985. As Nahat explains, "They were looking for a sister company, we were looking for a city—and they loved the youthfulness of our company," so suitable for the "new and vibrant" California city. The new company performed full seasons in both cities for 15 years, making it the longest-ever running co-venture dance company. Nahat attributes its success to the fact that "we never put another company out of business—we went to places where there was nothing already established, and we didn't try to merge with people who didn't really want to do it."Nahat also orchestrated shorter collaborations with Atlanta Ballet and Ballet Nueva Mundo de Caracas, so that, at one point, all four companies had four seasons in each of the four home cities—"a way to satisfy the financial demands of larger scale, theatrical ballets and their audiences, and then be able to go back home and do smaller, more experimental work" without financial concerns and with more artistic liberty.Shifting financial priorities led to the closing of the Cleveland branch of the company on the night of its 15th anniversary. The entire organization—40 truckloads of equipment, along with people and their possessions—moved from Cleveland to San Jose in the space of three weeks, in time for what became the opening season of the Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley in 2000.Six seasons later, working as both artistic and executive director of the company, Nahat swears that "without cooking, I would be insane." After a long day at work, there is nothing he prefers to going home and creating "design in a dish" (always making extra for breakfast the next day). For him, cooking and choreography are inextricably linked: "I choreograph when I cook, and I cook when I choreograph." In both crafts, he explains, "you have to know your audience, take pride in your work, and choose quality over quantity to create a clean work of art that is well presented. I have made dances on zero dollars—it doesn't have to be big to be good. You spend your money on paying great dancers. They are cherished things."—Laura Careless
