In the fall of 1994, Rodney Gustafson received a tip about a vacant building tucked away on the southern end of downtown Santa Barbara, a gray expanse of dusty concrete units where State Street and Highway 101 collide. Gustafson had just moved into town, a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre who remembered the city’s bucolic appeal when the company breezed through during a national tour. “I always had my sights set on Santa Barbara,” he recalled, “and knew I’d start my own company and studio and make it work here.”
The space in question was a less than ideal location for any business, let alone one that would usher in a particularly traditional tights and bun-head set; this was classical dance, after all, a genre weighted in sometimes stifling expectation. But Gustafson is a man with an unconventional vision and a self-described “tenacity that drove people nuts sometimes”; this particular set of bricks and mortar was as good a launch pad as any to begin his longtime dream of establishing a studio on the central coast. “A lot of people tried to dissuade me,” he explained, “saying it was a closed-off town and that people were territorial here. But I’d traveled all over the country and knew that competition existed everywhere. I wasn’t going to listen to anyone.”
That spring, Gustafson rallied a group of seven dancers and rented Center Stage Theater’s 130-seat house for the debut of his first evening-length program. Two years later, he’d established a formal company that began touring throughout the States. And 10 years after that, he was selling upward of 1,000 tickets to his season openers, collaborating with the Santa Barbara Symphony and the Santa Barbara Choral Society for the presentations of opulent classical and contemporary dance theater.