Boston Ballet & the Sorry State of Dance Dance companies are, at best, a precarious proposition. Even the largest of them seem to live on the edge financially with little room for miscalculation. The past six months have been particularly difficult. Boston Ballet seems on the verge of imploding after a couple of difficult years. Last week the company staged a wholesale purge of its roster, firing nine dancers (the company awkwardly prefers to call the moves "non-reengagement") reportedly at the behest of incoming artistic director Maina Gielgud. This week Gielgud abruptly quit even before she had officially joined the company, and the fingerpointing has begun. But even before recent events, the company has been shaky: In 1997 Heidi Guenther, one of the company's dancers, died of a heart arrhythmia, and last September her mother filed suit against the company charging it with wrongful death. Anna-Marie Holmes, the company's artistic director since 1997, left under cloudy circumstances last winter. She told a Boston Herald reporter she had been fired, but the company (and she) later denied the story. Gielgud was hired even though she'd had a checkered recent past. She'd been fired as head of the Australian Ballet and subsequently she walked out on the Royal Danish Ballet after serving only two years of a three-year contract. Boston is only part of the troubled dance picture worldwide: Last summer the Cleveland-San Jose Ballet got an involuntary name trim when the Cleveland side of the operation went bust. The company reinvented itself in Silicon Valley, but it's not at all certain the enterpirse will take root there. Then there's the venerable Martha Graham Dance Company, which shut down in the fall in a dispute over control of the company. Graham heir Ron Protas holds claim to rights for the choreographer's work, and despite extensive negotiations, revival of the company looks uncertain. Now the future of Graham's dance legacy seems uncertain. Dancers have been leaving the Australia Ballet "in droves" prompting concerns that the company is in danger. The British ballet world is in turmoil, and three directors of prominent companies have recently quit. Most recently the English National Ballet’s Derek Deane, left, citing "insufficient funding and a lack of board support" for his more adventurous work. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet has had three artistic directors in eight years. And, with the recent dismissal of Andrew Wilhelm-Boyles, three executive directors in the same period. What's happening to one of Canada's great dance companies? The once-venerable Bolshoi Ballet has fallen into disrepair, with its leadership (including artistic director Alexei Fadeetchev) recently fired by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

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