Students from Harvard Business School are engaged in a field immersion project in Johannesburg, finding ways to shore up the precarious finances of the South African Mzansi Ballet, which has heroically managed to stay alive without public funding for the past 12 years. While the ballet company rehearses for its upcoming season of ‘Don Quixote’, the business school students and professors are busy conducting demographic surveys and developing marketing strategies to try and lure bigger audiences into the theatre. They are struggling against a public perception that “ballet is a white man’s dance.”
