Florida Dance Festival is returning to its home at USF in Tampa

In 1998, when the Florida Dance Festival moved from Tampa to Miami, some observers worried that dance students from around the state would not follow. Those worries proved to be correct, and the festival is returning to the University of South Florida in Tampa in June.

"It was time for a move," said Bill Doolin, director of the Miami-based Florida Dance Association, which produces the 10-day festival. "It had basically plateaued here. I wanted the festival to be in a more central location, and I felt like Miami was too far away. We needed to reconnect with our audiences and our constituency again."

Before moving to Miami, the festival had been held at USF for more than 15 years, and it did well, drawing as many as 700 dance students to perform and take classes with professional dancers, choreographers and teachers. At the time, board members said the festival had outgrown the school's dance facilities, which include about half a dozen studios.

Miami was seen as a good place for the festival because of its lively dance scene with Miami City Ballet and other top-flight companies. Hosting was the New World School of the Arts, which has excellent dance facilities on its downtown campus. But participation dwindled to fewer than 100 full-time students. Crucially, the New World School has no residential accommodations, which meant festival participants stayed in hotels.

"As far as I can tell, they lost a lot of students when they moved down here," said Doolin, 54, who became interim director of the association in 2007 and took the job permanently in January. "I was at the festival in Tampa in 1996 as a performer, and there were just tons of students. When they came down here, they completely lost the northern tier of Florida that used to come to the festival. They didn't have the dorms, and people didn't feel safe sending their kids to Miami."

USF has plenty of dorm rooms in June. "We'll have dorms and counselors, with the younger kids in an area of their own," Doolin said. "I feel like that's something they didn't take into consideration when they moved to Miami. They thought they would be able to make up for the loss of Florida students by drawing from South and Central America, which did not happen."

The departure of the festival left a void in the Tampa Bay arts community, because it presented interesting, often innovative companies, not only at USF but also at other venues in the area. This year's festival will include a June 15 performance by Arch Dance Company, which melds modern dance and hip-hop under artistic director Jennifer Archibald; and David Dorfman Dance doing Disavowal, inspired by the life of abolitionist John Brown, on June 24.

John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.