The Man Who Would Create Lewitzky’s Dream : Dance: Martin I. Kagan heads efforts to develop the $20-million Dance Gallery. He’ll emphasize the fund raising.

Although Martin I. Kagan managed two dance companies and the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival during a 15-year career in arts administration, he says he knew nothing about Bella Lewitzky’s long-desired plans to build a $20-million facility called the Dance Gallery until he visited Los Angeles in March.

Now, however, Kagan has become the president and chief executive officer of the Dance Gallery--a new position that expands the duties of his predecessor, executive director Arline Chambers, with a special emphasis on fund raising. (Chambers left in August to become a manager at Walt Disney Imagineering.) Planned as a part of the California Plaza development on Bunker Hill, downtown, the Dance Gallery project has been delayed and even relocated as a result of funding shortfalls. At one point it was announced to be completed before the 1984 Olympics. It is now scheduled to be constructed on 4th Street between Olive and Hill streets on a parcel of land designated as part of Phase 3 in the California Plaza construction schedule--to be completed between 1993 and 1995.

Kagan started on the job Oct. 1 and says that, so far, the most daunting thing about it is “my naivete: I’m coming into a new city and there’s a lot of things I don’t know--a lot of relationships I don’t know about, feet I may step on, brick walls I may run straight into that I might have avoided. In two weeks here I’ve spent most of my time reading background stuff so I’m as up to date as I can be.”

Kagan says that when Chambers made her announcement about leaving, some members of the board of directors who knew about him phoned and “we had a number of telephone discussions. They flew me out for an interview in August and we reached an agreement about the second week in September. It’s an open-ended contract,” one with no time limit.

Forty-three and divorced, Kagan is living in Burbank: “just house-sitting around the city until I sell my house in Washington, D.C.” He lived in the capital for the last 10 years, holding a position as executive director of Opera America, a nonprofit service organization. Among his accomplishments there: raising $5 million in three years for the “Opera for the Eighties” program--which he created and supervised--to develop and produce new works.

As it happens, the Dance Gallery needs $5 million too, but this time Kagan says he is giving himself just “nine months to a year to find a donor. If we don’t have it by that point, I’m not sure, personally, that it can be found.”

That single donor would gain the privilege of naming the facility and, Kagan says, “once that’s done everything else fits into place. That gives us $20 million in real money: $5 million from the naming donor, $5.5 million from the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles and the money that we have on hand: roughly $2.5 million between cash and pledges.”

The rest of the working capital would come from $9.8 million in bonds to be issued by the investment banking firm Bear, Stearns & Co. Kagan says he plans during the construction phase to raise $10 million to be able to retire the bond in three years. (Interest, carrying costs and other expenses connected with the bonds account for the higher total.)

He expects the opening of the Dance Gallery to take place in the fall of 1993 at the earliest, and, in the interim, the organization will continue to present local and touring dance companies in various borrowed venues. Six new monthly programs in the Gallery’s “In the Works” series are scheduled from January to May at the Gascon Institute in Culver City.

“We’d love to be able to find a space that we could be in once a month and either do a dance presentation, a lecture or a movie,” he says enthusiastically. “The ability of the Dance Gallery to develop its name as a presenter: That’s what we have going right now, since we don’t have our building.”

Kagan, an energetic and down-to-earth man, says he has heard the stories of board wars at the Dance Gallery--conflicts between those who supported Lewitzky as founder/artistic director and those resentful of her authority. But he insists that he’s “trying not to deal with the past, only with the future.

“Part of my interest in taking this job was buying into the vision of the Dance Gallery--that being a unique arts facility that has a 1,000-seat proscenium theater, a black-box theater, an institute for the teaching and training of choreographers and dancers, and a school--plus a library and archives and the home of a resident company, the first one being the Lewitzky company.

“If I didn’t buy into that, I would never have taken the job. That’s Bella’s vision and the elements in themselves are the elements of a perfect dance center. It’s terrific. There’s nothing in Los Angeles like it, and my job is to make it all happen.”