Dance Gallery to Step Up Fund Raising : Arts: The organization needs $5 million by the end of the year to secure construction of a downtown facility.

Facing the same funding shortfall that has plagued the project for more than a decade, the Dance Gallery is considering new strategies for raising the $5 million needed to guarantee construction of the $25-million downtown facility.

On Monday, gallery President and Chief Executive Martin I. Kagan held what he called a “brainstorming meeting” to look at options other than finding a single naming-donor. “We’re broadening our approach to acquiring the $5 million,” Kagan said, though he declined to describe the new approaches or name the meeting’s participants.

“I don’t want to give anything away until we have a program developed,” he said. “And I am still out there meeting with (potential) single donors.”

Kagan faces a Dec. 31 deadline to come up with all of the Dance Gallery funding or lose the site at 4th and Olive streets in the California Plaza redevelopment project. But Kagan remains optimistic, saying that the switch in approach does not signal either desperation or “the beginning of the end.”

“We’re healthier now than we were six months ago,” he said. “We have more prospects and more enthusiasm.”

In other staff and strategy changes, controller Robert McEwan is being laid off. McEwan, 35, will have held the position for three years and is remaining until the end of July, assisting in the completion of the organization’s annual audit. After that, he has no immediate plans, he said. He described the severance arrangements made for him as “reasonable.”

Kagan explained McEwan’s layoff as “partly a way of saving money but mostly because we’re not generating enough financial activity right now to hold someone of his caliber.”

The gallery is also scaling back its fall production plans, though not reportedly due to financial pressures. Kagan had previously announced that the Dance Gallery would present a major company in Los Angeles this fall. He told The Times this week that he had hoped to secure the White Oak Project, a much-publicized modern dance ensemble featuring the dancing of Mikhail Baryshnikov and choreography by Mark Morris.

However, Kagan says that negotiations for a three-performance engagement at the Wiltern Theater in November ended recently when the year-old chamber company “chose to postpone its West Coast tour.”

Kagan says that gallery founder and artistic director Bella Lewitzky is considering several international companies that will be touring the United States this fall--”but nothing on as large a (fiscal) scale as the White Oak Project.”

The organization continues to finalize the legal documents establishing the Dance Gallery as a part of California Plaza--documents to be signed by Bunker Hill Associates (the developer) and by the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles. The next scheduled Dance Gallery board meeting is July 2.