Pentacle at 50: Still pioneering new models of support for the Performing Arts
by Anna Brady Marcus
Pentacle formed during the 1970s dance boom in New York City, and reinvented itself to become a leading management support organization sustaining the performing arts field for the next fifty years. It did so by creating models of infrastructure and management support for performing artists that hadn’t existed before. From innovative fiscal sponsorship to finding work for artists to mentorship programs, Pentacle continually adapted to serve the needs of the performing arts community throughout the cultural and economic shifts of the past half century.
How Pentacle formed to serve the needs of four dance companies and then offered it to the entire field
During the 1960s and 1970s dance boom triggered by NEA’s Dance Touring Program funding subsidies, cluster management groups sprung up all over New York City to seize the opportunity to tour. Cluster management groups consisted of dance companies who would pool their management staff to handle the touring and management of all the members. Often, the cluster would leverage their combined reputations to collectively market themselves to presenters. One of the most well-known cluster management groups in the 60s and 70s was Performing Arts Services group, comprised of post-modern dance choreographers from the Judson Church era and Grand Union such as Trisha Brown, David Gordan, and Douglas Dunn.
When Pentacle first emerged as a cluster management group in the early 1970s, it consisted of four modern dance companies that were avant garde, but also accessible. Their managers included: Peter Levitan for booking, Ted Striggles for contracts and overall management, and Bob Marinaccio for bookkeeping. Ivan Sygoda, one of Pentacle’s founding directors, then a professor of French at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, remembers discovering Pentacle Management when he was looking at the NEA Dance Touring Catalog to select dance companies to bring to the college: “Our culture group at Wheaton…we were not that far out there. We weren’t quite ready for Trisha [Brown]. Plus, [she was] a little bit more expensive, but what was clustered around Pentacle: Kathryn Posin, Manuel Alum, Jamie Cunningham, [Barbara] Roan [and Irene] Feigenheimer, they were a little bit more modestly sized, a little bit more accessible. There was actually humor in their work.”
When the NEA Dance Touring program ended in the late 1970s, the cluster management model fell apart. With no more guaranteed revenue from advanced tour bookings, companies couldn’t pay their staff and they either shifted to support all of their management needs inhouse, dissolved, or morphed into other projects. Many of the original companies and managers of Pentacle left to pursue other career paths. It seemed that Pentacle would also disappear, but two remaining staff: Ivan Sygoda (who joined Pentacle in 1974) and Mara Greenberg (who joined in 1976), refused to give up. Instead, they innovated a whole new business model for supporting the fledgling downtown dance community. In 1979, Pentacle was reborn as a management support organization for the performing arts.
“I sort of delicately pointed out to Peter and Ivan that, you know, whatever the percentage we took of zero is zero … and this business model that we had ain’t going to work anymore. And that’s when… for me as the finance person within Pentacle, we made a huge transition of being this cluster management where we picked out certain… things, put a dollar amount and open the door to more than the original groups because otherwise we couldn’t pay the rent.” – Mara Greenberg, Founding Director of Pentacle
Management a la carte
The new Pentacle’s first innovation was to offer a set of core services artists needed: Financial Administration; Artist Representation (ie. booking); and Publicity and Marketing Services. Within each core service area, Pentacle further refined its offerings, so that they were customizable to the needs of each performing arts entity no matter how small. For instance, financial services offered fiscal administration for incorporated nonprofit organizations and two levels of fiscal sponsorship for individual artists. Artist representation included a curated Roster of performing companies who were sought after nationally, and for emerging dance companies, or those who booked themselves, Pentacle developed several programs, the longest lasting one being The Gallery, which allowed companies a space for their marketing materials at Pentacle’s booth during booking conferences and the ability to perform in a joint showcase at the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference in New York. This array of services was groundbreaking. Artists, whether they had staff or not (most didn’t), could for the first time procure expert help in areas crucial to their sustainability and growth. Critically, Pentacle’s model was more affordable for artists to get expert administrative and business support, at a fraction of the cost of hiring staff in-house.
By remaining flexible and responsive to the changing needs of its constituents, Pentacle extended the careers of many dance artists coming out of the dance boom, and also helped thousands of new artists navigate the cultural and economic shifts in the proceeding decades.
Fiscal Sponsorship models
One of Pentacle’s earliest innovations was developing fiscal sponsorship models for the arts sector so unincorporated, sole proprietor companies and individual artists could still receive grants, individual tax-deductible donations, and receive other benefits of a nonprofit corporation.
In 1981, Pentacle launched Foundation for Independent Artists (FIA), a comprehensive fiscal sponsorship program, still the only one of its kind in New York for the performing arts, to give unincorporated dance and theatre companies tax exempt status, as well as be their employer of record. FIA artists have all the benefits and privileges of a 501(c)(3) corporate home, without the headache of forming it and managing it all themselves. One of the first Pentacle staff members to run FIA was a PR and marketing dynamo named Nancy Umanoff. She recruited some of the most talented artists in New York City to join FIA, many of whom were also on Pentacle’s Roster. One of those artists was a young choreographer named Mark Morris. When his career soared in the 1980s, he broke away to form his own 501(c)(3) and Nancy went with him to be his Executive Director, a role she still plays to this day.
A poster from an FIA benefit performance at P.S. 122 in 1990 shows how FIA incubated some of the most exciting and lasting performing artists in the late 20th Century including: Ann Carlson, Bebe Miller and Company, Rachel Lampert and Dancers, Eiko & Koma, Ohad Naharin Dance Company, Doug Varone and Dancers, Richard Elovich and Art Bridgman/Myrna Packer. In recent years it has continued to cultivate important young artists such as Nora Chipaumire, Emily Johnson, and Kyle Marshall, while also serving the needs of later career artists, such as David Rousseve, and expanded to include theater companies like Literature to Life and non-performing focused entities like United Dance and Nightlife United.
In 1989, Pentacle formed Unique Projects, a basic re-grant fiscal sponsorship program that gives artistic projects the ability to receive grants and tax-deductible donations to support their work. At the time Unique Projects was created, these sorts of fiscal sponsorship regrant programs were not widely available. Over the years, as economic realities have made it difficult for artists to sustain their own nonprofit companies, more and more choose to work on a project basis, and use fiscal sponsors like Unique Projects to raise contributed income. Pentacle, as usual, was on the vanguard of this trend.
“Plus, I understood Pentacle. I had to learn what the new programs were, but the, the vision hasn’t changed. The mission of, you know, finding things that are needs in the community and then trying to offer low-cost services that meet those needs. So, it’s after my own heart.”
—Lynn Wichern, Pentacle Board Member
Adaptable and Iterative
Pentacle’s programming evolved by naming a challenge to the sector, and then designing a pilot project to meet the challenge. The project would run for several years and then morph into a different project, or become a permanent program or service.
One enduring challenge Pentacle set out to address is that artists, particularly choreographers, don’t know how to talk about their work. Their inability to communicate in words what they so eloquently show visually in their dance productions, makes it very difficult for them to write successful proposals for funding, sell tickets, or entice presenters to book them to perform. Drawing from the tech industry’s customer service model of a central desk where all service problems could be answered, Ivan Sygoda designed Pentacle’s Help Desk to match emerging choreographers with experienced arts managers who could mentor them in how to talk about, promote, and advance their work. Some of the mentors in the pilot run of Help Desk included Art Becofsky, former Executive Director of Merce Cunningham Dance Company; Harold Norris, Booking Agent at Rena Shagan & Associates (later Director of Booking at Pentacle); and Richard Caples, Executive Director of Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. These reputable leaders in the field made themselves available to meet with their mentees over several years, at no cost to the artist, and become trusted guides and true “partners” in their development. The pilot of Help Desk went very well. Participants called it “transformative.”
[help desk photo]
Help Desk went on to run for three cycles (1999-2006) in New York and then morphed into “ARC: Advancement, Reinvention, and Creativity” led by arts consultant Carolelinda Dickey with Sygoda in 2007. For two years, ARC helped artists engage in a strategic planning process to create a road map for their organizational and artistic goals and funds to execute their plans. Mentorship was again a key element of the program.
In 2009, Felicia Rosenfeld, who had been an evaluator for the original Help Desk, retooled it to run in cities outside of New York, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. These new Help Desk programs offered artists a package of services including mentorship, infrastructure and organizational planning and a peer network. Artists could also access direct administrative support through a program called Back Office, that provided them with a shared administrator. Help Desk 2.0 ran until 2015, when Pentacle’s programs in Los Angeles became absorbed by Dance Resource Center.
Pentacle continued to iterate its mentorship model, integrating it into many more programs over the years. Artists still need help communicating what they do to various stakeholders; emerging Arts workers still need guidance in how to build and sustain arts organizations; and no one can exist or grow in a vacuum. Pentacle developed its mentorship model to address these fundamental needs of artists, arts workers and organizations, and it continues to be a hallmark of its programs today.
“Some artists are really good at navigating [the field], and other artists want to make their art. Some artists are entrepreneurial. And so there has to be someone to bridge that gap. Who better? Then Pentacle.”
—Brian McCormick, Pentacle Board Member
Transforming into a New Organization
As Pentacle turns 50 years old in 2026, it is leading the way with another innovation: the choice to merge with another arts organization and be reborn with a new model for arts support.
In early 2024, Felicia Rosenfeld, Pentacle’s newly appointed Interim Executive Director saw that the performing arts field was facing numerous serious challenges, not the least of which was an unprecedented, multi-faceted revenue and funding crisis. She also saw that Pentacle didn’t have the capacity or the resources to address these challenges all by itself and give the artists, arts workers and arts organizations who form the backbone of the New York arts community, the support they needed more than ever.
She reached out to her friend and colleague, Christopher Bloodworth, Executive Director of The Field, and invited him to have tea and brainstorm on their mutual challenges. They began to imagine what a new organization rooted in holistic, artist-centered support could mean for New York’s arts community and the idea to form Counterpart was born.
The merger exploration process was a joint effort of both organizations’ staff and boards. They formed a committee to weigh the benefits and drawbacks from combining. They found there was very little programmatic overlap between the two organizations, but much that was complementary about their offerings. Both aimed to enable artists to concentrate on their art and community engagement, but they used different approaches to reach this goal. The Field focused on artists as individuals, and Pentacle focused on the entities (organizations, networks, institutions) through which artists create and produce art and engage with community. By combining their two approaches, Counterpart offers an integrated method, unique in the arts sector, that honors the whole artist and their arts worker partners to address all the facets of the creation, production, and dissemination of their work.
With a new organizational identity and a new, expanded mission, it would seem that Pentacle is disappearing. However, in its drive to transform and adapt to the changing times and respond to problems artists are facing, its spirit lives on, and it will take all of the lessons learned over 50 years with it into the future.
“I hope that Pentacle, as an organization, will be looked at and will be acknowledged for its innovative thinking … Pentacle has touched so many people, especially in New York, but even across the U.S. We used to have a Chicago branch, we used to have a Los Angeles branch, … people getting paid through Pentacle because the company they danced with was fiscally sponsored … Then we have The Roster, … the dance teachers who have come through our educational programming, all the interns that we’ve had …. There’s a big web.”
–Quincie Hydock, Director of Programming, Pentacle (now Counterpart)