You can use the phrase “a line around the block” as an exaggeration, but when it comes to the turnout for tickets to City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, it’s a statement of fact.

When the box office opened for this event, the line started at City Center, snaked west to Seventh Avenue, wrapped to 56th Street, and came back around almost to the front of City Center. By 8 that night, the six-night festival (which begins this evening) was sold out. That’s because every ticket was just $10.And every night of the festival – now in its second year – is a chance to see five different dance companies performing a signature work.

Similar success was enjoyed by New York City Opera earlier this season. In August, the company introduced, for the first time, the Opera-for-All Festival. Tickets to “Madama Butterfly” were offered for just $25. The low prices were available for two nights only – and one of them included a special appearance by Rufus Wainwright. The performances sold out in three days.

The success of these festivals should send a message – in giant neon flashing lights – to arts administrators: There is a hungry demand for performing arts, but they have become unaffordable. Ticket prices are just too high. And when tickets are subsidized, people show up in droves.

Who is doing that subsidizing? In the case of both Fall for Dance and Opera-for-All, the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation was a leading sponsor. (Time Warner also gave major support to the dance festival, and the Rigler-Deutsch Foundation was a big help to the opera festival.)

The Sharp Foundation – put in place by its namesake, the late real estate mogul who owned the Carlyle Hotel-has been sprinkling money around the performing arts world for years. With these two festivals, however, it has shown leadership and creativity that deserves special recognition. By agreeing to a new way of building audiences, this foundation has changed the landscape of performing arts marketing.

But Norman Peck, president of the Sharp Foundation, isn’t precious about it. “If you make the ticket cheap enough, you’ll get people,” he told me.

Sounds so simple, but it takes a lot to make it cheap enough. Not so much in terms of money. According to Mr. Peck, the Sharp Foundation gave $250,000 to City Center for the dance festival.

What it really takes is leadership, which City Center has in its president and CEO, Arlene Schuler, who looked to the foundation for support. “She is one of the smartest operators I’ve run across in the not for profit world,” Mr. Peck said. “She was looking to try to get a younger audience interested in dance. She started it last year, and the thing was such a humdinger of a success.”

Not only that, the model was good enough to replicate at City Opera. Where else can this formula be tested? Let’s hope it catches on all over town – and throughout the country.

***

Tonight at Joyce Theater is opening night for Jennifer Muller/The Works, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary season. Ms. Muller is a modern choreographer with the unusual ability to give dances heart and depth. She’s a thinker – an artistic thinker – and her work shows it. Her season includes three premieres and three revivals across two different programs. And almost all of the works are set to original scores that she commissioned.

What you’ll get from her works is a sense of the dancer as a person, not just an object moving through space. “When you finish a performance, you really get to know the people on stage,” she said. “I really want to see human beings up there.”

Her dances stem from a technique that she has developed based on the oppositional forces at work in the body. “You have both control and freedom to use the body,” she said. “We use the floor more than other companies, and there are more extremes between the down and the up.”

Ms. Muller’s style has evolved over time, thanks to her long career and connections to the history of modern dance in America. She started out at age 15 with Pearl Lang. At 18, she toured the Far East with the Louis Falco Dance Company. She has also been trained in the technique of Martha Graham and Jose Limon.

Ms. Muller struck out on her own in November 1974, with a company of just seven dancers, including herself. Why not simply create works for other companies – and rove around as a freelance choreographer? It’s all in the details. After setting a piece on a company, she found that dancers would revert to their own training: “I’d go back to see that it had morphed into their style. The hands were in their style. Their plies were their way.”

And so, Jennifer Muller/The Works was bound to happen. “In order to really do the work that I wanted to do, I had to take on the responsibility of running a company,” she said.

Thirty years later, she’s still going strong.

pcatton@nysun.com

Jennifer Muller/The Works, September 27 to October 2, Joyce Theater (175 Eighth Avenue, 212-242-0800 or www.joyce.org).