Aman Leases Space in Santa Ana’s Arts Village

The veteran Aman International Music and Dance troupe will expand into Orange County with a new home in downtown Santa Ana’s Artists Village, bringing the emerging arts colony its first resident professional dance troupe, company and city officials announced Thursday.

The 34-year-old Los Angeles-based troupe, which has toured nationally, will establish a school, an office and costume storage space in the colony’s Empire Building, for which it has signed a one-year lease. Aman members will teach folk and social dance classes, offered in partnership with the city, in a former ballroom dance school on the building’s second floor.

Classes will be open to the public, but officials envision the school as a company training academy and believe the move will result in more performances in Orange County.

Aman’s new, 5,000-square-foot home “just plain fits with our mission,” troupe executive director Romalyn Tilghman said Thursday. In the past two years, the company has had no formal office and has handled administrative affairs out of Tilghman’s home.

“We perform work from all over the world, and we’re interested in what happens when [traditional music and dance] bumps up against [contemporary American culture] and new art forms are made,” Tilghman said. “There’s no place where that’s happening more vividly than in Santa Ana.”

Jim Gilliam, Santa Ana’s arts administrator, said, “Aman is a perfect partner in the arts for us because this is a city of great diversity.”

The troupe, which presents dance and music from Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America, will continue to stage roughly 200 school shows in Orange and L.A. counties, three-fourths of them in L.A. Its nine core members also will continue to rehearse at L.A.’s Loyola Marymount University.

But Tilghman is seeking a local performance venue where the company, which appeared earlier this year at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and Santa Ana High School, can quickly reacquaint itself with the community.

Aman also will hold a “housewarming,” with demonstrations on Dec. 5, Tilghman said, during an open house at the village’s Santora Building, now home to some three dozen art studios and galleries.

“I’m certain we’ll see more performing opportunities as we get down there,” Tilghman said, adding that the company will seek funding from local public and private sources. It continues to carry a deficit of about $40,000, roughly one-seventh of its operating budget.

No city funds have been given to the troupe, but Gilliam has requested $6,000 from the city for scholarships to Aman’s school. Beginning Oct. 19, classes will be taught during the day and evening, which Gilliam hopes will bolster Artists Village night life.

While construction snags have delayed the colony’s progress, two theater troupes are expected to launch inaugural seasons later this fall and this winter. That’s also when the first students are expected to move into the enclave’s anchor, the Cal State Fullerton Grand Central Art Center.

“It’s exciting,” Gilliam said, “because Aman will bring a new level of professional expertise to the Artists Village.”