Not long after he had taken over as executive director at Atlanta Ballet in 2021, Tom West and his board of directors had to make one of the toughest decisions in the company’s history. Last August, they did something rather startling: They sold their headquarters—the Michael C. Carlos Dance Centre —for $8.3 million to Faropoint, a New Jersey real-estate investment firm.

It wasn’t an easy decision. Coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, Atlanta Ballet— founded in 1929 and the longest continuously operating ballet company in the United States—found itself $2 million in debt.

The cascade began when the ballet was unable to negotiate a deal with the Fox Theatre to continue staging choreographer Yuri Possokhov’s acclaimed new take on The Nutcracker . In 2020, the production was set to ma

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