Dance Company’s Leader Recounts Path to the Top

Randal Fippinger spent 10 months in Washington learning management, fund raising, and other skills alongside other

aspiring arts leaders as part of a Kennedy Center program. The Vilar Institute for Arts Management, as the program is known, was created by Michael M. Kaiser, the Kennedy Center’s president.

A few months after completing the fellowship program in 2003, Mr. Fippinger became general manager of the José Limón Dance Foundation, in New York. Last August he was promoted to executive director.

Here, Mr. Fippinger, 37, talks about Mr. Kaiser’s leadership and the impact the program has had on his career.

The Vilar program was good for me because I’m not much of a school person. I would rather learn on the job. The program provided a bridge for me between the production and design work I had done previously to the job I wanted of running an arts organization.

Most days we had an hour-long class with a Kennedy Center vice president and then worked in different departments on specific projects for several months at a time. I spent one rotation in the press office. When I got to Limón, they showed me the press release they had done announcing my arrival, and I immediately rewrote it to make it short and sweet and easy for reporters to grasp the important news right at the top, lessons I’d learned at the center.

On Fridays during the program I put on a tie to go to Michael’s class, where he told us he expected us to think and act like executive directors. Our assignment on our first day: A Broadway show scheduled to come to the center has been cancelled. How do you deal with it? How do you respond to subscribers and treat them properly? Michael’s response was to have a plan of action. Ask if they are interested in attending a new show or give them their money back.

I still have quarterly phone calls with Michael. In February I flew to Washington to talk to him about some fund-raising issues and other challenges at Limón. In the first five minutes, he hit the nail on the head when he told me that Limón seemed like a company that didn’t know what it wanted to be.

I wrote up my notes from our meeting and gave copies to each board member, which wound up being a catalyst for talking about the organization’s long-term plan among our board, staff members, and artists. We realized we were spending too much on nice offices, and not enough on education programs.

We’ve since saved $50,000 by moving our administrative offices from Soho to the less-upscale garment district, and we’ll rent different rehearsal studios. We’re planning to use the money we’ve saved on education programs.

The fellowship program is half about what they teach you and half about making contacts for the rest of your career. When I needed to hire a development director for Limón, a position I created, I asked another fellow, now at the Houston Grand Opera, to do phone interviews with potential candidates and give me her feedback. I still keep in touch with about half my class.

While I might have already known some of the skills taught during the Vilar program, I didn’t know how they fit together. The Kennedy Center helped create “Randy the Executive Director,” the package.