Gil Boggs Turns Colorado Ballet Debt Into $15 Million Endowment

“Please tell me it gets green in the spring.”

Sandra Brown said those words to her husband, Gil Boggs, as they drove into Denver from the airport for a job interview in January 2006. The landscape was flat and bleak, a stark winter scene that offered little comfort to two lifelong East Coasters who had just left the security of New York City. Boggs, then an events manager at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan, replied with a shrug: “I have no idea.”

To hear them tell it, the decision to take over the Colorado Ballet was less a leap of faith and more a calculated risk. The company they were inheriting was debt-ridden, having lost its long-time artistic director Martin Fredmann in an acrimonious firing. The board was so convinced no one would apply for the new artistic director position that Holly Baroway, a retired dancer turned financial advisor on the search committee, had to laugh at their pessimism.

“I told them, you know, there’s about 70 to 80 dancers who retire every year with nowhere to go,” Baroway wrote in the Colorado Sun.

Boggs was one of about 40 candidates who tossed their hat in the ring. He and Brown had both been accomplished dancers with American Ballet Theater, but they were coming in to a company that owed an estimated $700,000 all over town. The math was tight. The Colorado Ballet had been sued by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon for breach of contract after it couldn’t raise the $1 million needed to stage his “Alice in Wonderland” ballet.

The struggle was not unique to the ballet company. The Colorado Sun reported that the Colorado Symphony, born out of the Denver Symphony’s bankruptcy, suffered a $1.2 million deficit in 2011 and had to cancel concerts. Opera Colorado spent years teetering between being in the red and the black. But for Boggs and Brown, the next 20 years would be a story of steady, unglamorous survival.

They steered the company through a recession and a pandemic, paying off those debts while increasing the number of dancers. They pushed to enhance production quality and tripled the budget. The question is whether that stability was built on luck or discipline, but the financial records suggest the latter.

In 2025, the Colorado Ballet posted a $220,000 surplus on a $17.4 million budget, according to tax filings. The company now holds a $15 million endowment. On a percentage basis, it covered more of its 2025 costs through ticket sales — $10.4 million — than either the local orchestra or opera company.

That shift in revenue is significant for a regional arts scene that has historically relied on endowments and government grants. It suggests the ballet company found a way to make its product relevant enough that local audiences were willing to pay for it. The company is now based at the Armstrong Center for Dance, where dancers take part in company class before rehearsal.

For a group that once looked at the flat, bleak landscape and wondered if it would ever turn green, the current financial picture is a different color entirely.

Boggs noted that while the company has survived, the work isn’t done. “We’re just getting started,” he said.