A misbegotten pas de deux with a rent-raising Manhattan landlord may force one of America’s best-known ballet schools into bankruptcy.
Joffrey Ballet School for years housed students in a Grove Street building in the heart of Greenwich Village, just steps from its school on Sixth Avenue at West 10th Street.
The school was negotiating to buy the building in 2014 when the owners sold it instead to the Sabet Group for $24 million.
Sabet more than doubled the $40,000 annual rent to a crippling $108,000, according to Joffrey executive director Christopher D’Addario.
The school had 30 days to accept the new multiyear deal or else relocate the students. D’Addario says the Joffrey School tried for more than a year to make things work, even though the building desperately needed renovations — as cabinets and counters were falling down, and rodents were rampant.
“These were the most dilapidated, debilitated apartments” where the students live, D’Addario said.
Sabet wouldn’t even give the school a break on the rent when it shut down individual apartments for repairs, according to D’Addario.
When Joffrey couldn’t handle the increased rent any longer, Sabet refused to let the school walk away.
“They could have easily let us out of the lease,” D’Addario told The Post.
“We can’t pass the cost onto the parents . . . We couldn’t afford it. We have 200 musicians and instructors that work for us. These people depend on us for a paycheck.”
The school moved its students out of the building last summer, but paid the rent through October anyhow.
“If we paid another month’s rent we would be out of business,” D’Addario said.
The Grove Street building includes 12 apartments and three retail units. Sabet also more than doubled the rent for famed drag lounge Boots & Saddle, which was forced to relocate after more than 40 years there.
Sabet has been buying up property in the Village and surrounding neighborhoods for years, and claims the two sides had worked out a deal to pay the arrears, with installments of $200,000 a month.
The school, which houses about 300 full-time trainees, 1,000 young children and 1,000 adults, missed two payments. Sabet wants $800,000 from Joffrey as a penalty for the broken lease, says a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit.
The Joffrey Ballet School has been a pioneer in dance.
Its rock opera “Astarte” landed the school on the cover of Time magazine in 1968. The school was also the first to commission a work from well-known dancer Twyla Tharp, and the 1993 work “Billboards” set to music by Prince.
Being forced to pay the money would be disastrous for Joffrey, which was co-founded in 1953 by legendary choreographer and teacher Robert Joffrey and which charges $2,299 for a month of “performance track” classes.
“There’s no way to pay that,” D’Addario said.
A Sabet lawyer didn’t return a message seeking comment.