Gotta Dance? Dance companies in Maryland have stumbled trying to gain statewide support. An Annapolis troupe will need some fancy footwork to succeed where others have failed.

A story in the Arts section on June 22 implied that the Surge dance company, now at the Carver Center for Arts and Technology in Towson, replaced a company called Kinetics. However, while Kinetics has suspended operations as a performance troupe, it still offers dance classes at the Howard County Arts Center in Ellicott City.

The article also characterized the Ballet Theater of Annapolis as the only professional ballet company in Maryland. The National Ballet, based in Bowie, pays its soloists a stipend and can be regarded as professional.

+ The Sun regrets the errors.

As with many teen-agers, 17-year-old Ballet Theater of Annapolis wants a new name -- one that expresses its inner self. But it has the additional problem of finding one that also fits its shoe size.

While its municipal name may sound backwater, Ballet Theater of Annapolis is, in fact, the only professional ballet in Maryland. And it has big plans for statewide attention.

"How do we make people realize we're not a small, civic, school-based ballet?" asks Edward Stewart, the company's founder and artistic director.

It's a good question for a Maryland dance company looking for its identity. In the past dozen years, a discouraging number of better-known ones have collapsed here. The reasons are complex, and any dance troupe with the ambition and nerve to take the whole state as its territory will need to understand them.

A name change is, of course, superficial stuff compared to the real growth issue, which is money. From year to year, the ballet has grown slowly, disciplined by a fiscally conservative board. Its 1996-1997 operating budget was $392,000; next year's is $404,800.

But Stewart and his general manager, Deborah Harris, are thinking in terms of a $100,000 expansion, to allow for more dancers, competitive salaries and a level of production that will draw critics and audiences.

A 20-percent expansion doesn't happen overnight. "That will take money and energy and a strong will," says Harris. "But we've just added new board members, and I think we're going to be at that point." She says it may come by the end of the 1997-1998 season.

Until the board commits itself to that $500,000 budget, however, the name change will be the most visible symbol of the company's ambition.

Unfortunately, the obvious ballet names are already taken or ill-starred or both.

"Maryland State Ballet," born in the '70s, downsized itself to the Baltimore Ballet before coming to an abrupt end with a $500,000 deficit in 1985.

"Maryland Ballet Theater," born Harbor City Ballet in 1986, collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions in 1993.

Even after the passage of years, the bad luck associated with them is still fresh.

Where dance doesn't play

Baltimore has a long, proud history in the arts. It has an internationally known symphony and two major museums, a respected opera company and nonprofit theater. But in dance, it can't seem to take a step forward.

And the star-crossed history doesn't end with ballet. No other kind of concert dance has been able to establish much of a foothold, either.

The most prominent attempt was by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a company with a singular mix of modern dance and African-American sensibility.

It was approached by the state's Department of Business & Economic Development in 1987, after the Ailey company had announced it was looking outside New York for a second home in which to rehearse, teach and perform.

With its large African-American community and relatively low rents, Baltimore was regarded as an ideal place for the country's best-known multicultural company. By 1991 the venture was established; the Ailey II Repertory Ensemble, as the company calls its apprentice troupe, had a new home; and a series of summer dance camps for underprivileged children were begun at Morgan State and Frostburg State universities. The city welcomed the Ailey connection, and the state offered $300,000 in unconditional support.

With the best of intentions, the strong-willed Ailey, before he died, insisted that the local board of trustees include members of Baltimore's black community, and he opted for a home at Morgan State instead of the Peabody Conservatory.

Both decisions contributed to the project's failure. The board did not have the kind of influence or fund-raising expertise to support a $1 million operation, and the connection with Morgan State didn't give the company the presence it envisioned. The whole thing crashed in 1994 with a $139,000 deficit.

Much of the rest of Maryland's modern-dance history is connected to its colleges and universities, where -- in this era of arts cutbacks -- dance is fighting to keep what little it has.

Goucher College and the University of Maryland Baltimore County, for instance, have well-known undergraduate dance programs. Towson State University also has one, aimed at teacher-training, not performance. The Baltimore School for the Arts deserves a mention, too: Though a high school, it has a strong dance curriculum.