Dance: Southold Dance Theater whole

1973 – present · the city's ballet company and its school

The founding: South Bend's dance institution was founded in 1973 — the same year as the Fischoff — by three founders, Ann Dunn, Bonnie Boilini and Jill Engel Tulchinsky, in the company's history as its ticketing partner summarizes it, with first classes and performances in a historic church converted to a studio. The federal record has the organization tax-exempt from April 1977. Of the founders, Bonnie Boilini Baxter's course is the documented spine: she opened her own Dancenter in Granger in 1975, became the company's artistic director in 1982 and held the post through its formative decades, building the youth concerts that performed for thousands of the city's schoolchildren every year — the record on which she entered the South Bend Community School Corporation's Hall of Fame in 2012. The company's studios stand today at 914 Lincoln Way West, in the Colfax Cultural Center — the former Colfax School, converted in the 1980s into the city's working house of low-cost studios, galleries and rehearsal space, whose course stands with the building's record in the public library's school history and in Architecture.

The school and the stage: For its first decades the company drew its dancers from the area's private schools, Baxter's Dancenter among them. In 2000 the company restructured to carry its own school — the School of Southold Dance Theater — and that December, on the eighth through the tenth, it returned to the Morris Performing Arts Center with its Nutcracker, dancing on sets designed five years earlier to the Morris stage's own specifications and adapted in the interval to the smaller stage of Saint Mary's O'Laughlin Auditorium, where the company had performed meanwhile. The production's annual December run at the Morris continues as the company's fixture in the city's calendar. In September 2002 the company engaged Kimmary Williams and Jacob Rice, both of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, as co-artistic directors over a twenty-seven-member pre-professional training company; later national dance listings name Alexei Kremnev and Anna Reznik in the artistic direction. The company's own website, as published in November 2026, describes its work — training, performances, in-school presentations and outreach — without a history or leadership page, and this section accordingly prints the documented succession to the listings named above and names the company's present artistic leadership as a gap in the public record rather than filling it from aggregator sites, one of which dates the founding to 1968 against the documented 1973.

Sources:

1. Southold Dance Theater, company history as summarized by its ticketing partner, and the organization's current published description (southolddance.org) — the 1973 founding by Dunn, Boilini and Tulchinsky, the church-studio start, the present program of training, performance and outreach, and the absence of a published leadership page.
2. South Bend Education Alliance, Hall of Fame biography of Bonnie Boilini Baxter (2012) — her founding role, the 1975 Granger Dancenter, the artistic directorship from 1982, and the youth concerts for the city's schoolchildren.
3. South Bend Tribune (2000 and 2002) — the 2000 restructuring and the School of Southold Dance Theater, the December 2000 Morris Nutcracker and its sets' history between the Morris and O'Laughlin stages, and the 2002 engagement of Williams and Rice over the twenty-seven-member company.
4. Federal exempt-organization records — the organization's exemption dated April 1977.
5. St. Joseph County Public Library, Colfax School history — the school's 1898 construction, its 1980s conversion to the Colfax Cultural Center, and the building's present tenants.