Marvin Preston IV, who brought his expertise in saving distressed tech companies to a new role as the executive director of the Martha Graham Dance Company in 2000, and went on to lead that storied group back to solvency through a series of bold budgetary and courtroom maneuvers, died on Sept. 30 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 80.
His son, Christopher, said the cause was primary progressive apraxia, a neurodegenerative disease.
When Martha Graham died in 1991, at 96, she was widely considered one of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century. She left behind a vast repertoire of dances as well as the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, which includes both a school and the performing company.
Ron Protas, her close friend and heir, took over operations. But the organization struggled financially through the next decade, with many observers wondering whether it could survive into the 21st century. In 1998, the company sold its longtime headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to pay off debts, a move that left it with virtually no capital, and relocated to the West Village.
Enter Mr. Preston, a business consultant with a passion for music but no experience in arts administration. Taking over the company, he promised swift and necessarily painful steps to recovery — and quickly delivered.
Among his first actions was removing Mr. Protas from various roles within the organization. This was followed by the board of trustees’ decision to pause operations and withdraw from several scheduled performances. Other expenses were cut, several staff members were let go, and the organization went into a sort of suspended animation.
“We have to be responsible,” Mr. Preston told The Times in 2000.
In retaliation, Mr. Protas cut off the company’s access to Ms. Graham’s repertoire, which he claimed to control as the executor of her estate, the Martha Graham Trust. Under the terms of a 1999 contract, the company had been paying the trust $1 a year for the rights to her work, along with a $100,000 annual salary for Mr. Protas.
Mr. Preston and the board of trustees declared the contract void and removed Mr. Protas from the board.
Mr. Preston held out hope for a mediated settlement. But when the state of New York offered the Graham center a $750,000 grant to get back on its feet, Mr. Protas protested, claiming that the trust was the rightful recipient of any assistance, and sued the center.
Mr. Preston’s approach to the unfolding legal battle was a somewhat novel one. Everyone had assumed that Ms. Graham owned the copyright to her dances, which passed to the trust after her death. But, he asked, what if she didn’t?
After combing through endless archives, lawyers found evidence supporting his point: In 1956, Ms. Graham had sold her school to the center, and afterward she worked for it as an employee — a move made for tax reasons, but one that, she understood at the time, meant ceding ownership of her dances.
In August 2002, a judge agreed, finding that of the 70 dances in dispute, 45 belonged outright to the Graham center, 10 were in the public domain, and the ownership of 14 was unclear. Mr. Protas retained the rights to a single work, “Seraphic Dialogue.”
The decision allowed Mr. Preston and the board to reopen the school and restart the performing company, moving it toward financial stability.
“He had the strategic capability to see through the morass of a nonprofit organization,” Janet Eilber, a former Graham dancer and the center’s current artistic director, said in an interview. “He was able to cut through all of that.”
Marvin Preston IV was born on June 18, 1944, in Detroit and raised in Ferndale, a northern suburb. His father, Marvin III, collected and sold stamps, and his mother, Helen (Hoppin) Preston, managed the home.
After graduating with a mathematics degree from the University of Michigan in 1966, Mr. Preston worked for IBM, Ford and a series of other companies, most of them technology-related.
He married Candace Heussner in 1968. In addition to their son, Christopher, she survives him, along with their daughter, Catherine Preston Connolly; Mr. Preston’s sister, Joyce Preston; and two grandchildren.
In the 1980s, Mr. Preston founded NewMarkets, a consulting company that specialized in turning around struggling technology companies, particularly in health care. He became increasingly active in the arts around Princeton, where he and his family had settled, which is how he came to the attention of the Graham center’s board.
After Mr. Preston left the Graham company in 2006, he was a consultant for other performance groups in New York but increasingly focused on the nonprofit arts scene around Princeton.
In 2003, a reporter for The Asbury Park Press asked him why it was so important to keep the Graham company going.
“People started to presume that because what we were doing was good, it would somehow endure in and of itself,” he replied. “What you quickly find is you either dance and keep it alive and share it and spread the world, or it literally dies.”
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