Among the performers who have left are principals Nobuo Fujino, Kyoko Tomimura and Margarita Demjanoka (after just one season); soloists Brett Simon, Chantel Roulston, Carlo Pacis and Camilla Vergotis; and coryphees Eve Chan, Hikota Taira and Laura Zambon; as well as several members of the corps de ballet.

Home-grown star ballerina Faye Leung was controversially dismissed in January last year. No clear explanation for her sacking has been given.

The ballet's management has not been spared, either, with three executive directors (formerly chief executives) having come and gone in as many years. Last month, Rebecca Ip, a former director with Disney Media Distribution, became the latest to take up the position. She was joined by Cecilia Wong, who has returned to accept the newly created post of deputy executive director after having served the troupe as its deputy general manager between 1990 and 1995. Madeleine Onne succeeded Meehan as artistic director in May last year.

The volatility has not gone unnoticed. Ballet regular Janet Ho wrote in to the South China Morning Post in August to express her concerns.

'As most local dance critics have observed, the company has been going downhill ever since the departure of John Meehan and the cruel sacking of Faye Leung last year,' she wrote. 'The company seems to have lost its artistic direction altogether.

'One wonders if Madeleine Onne is behind the upheavals, or if she's constrained by the board of directors, which has played an ignoble role in the dismissal of Leung and appears to be running the ballet as if it were their own private club.'

SITTING IN THE Blue Pool Road office in which the ballet's administration has been based since 1993, Onne - flanked by Ip, Wong and her publicity team - is attempting to allay fears.

The former artistic director of the Royal Swedish Ballet says she sees 'nothing strange' in the company having lost 30 per cent of its dancers in two years. She points out that although dancers once remained in the same company for their entire career, it's now normal for them to move around.

'Jean-Christophe Maillot [then artistic director of Monte Carlo Ballet] once lost 50 per cent of his dancers,' Onne says. 'So I think we are pretty good.'

Likewise, Ip says that, having come from the commercial sector, she is not surprised to see staff leaving after two or three years. 'Hong Kong is an opportunistic society,' she says.

When pressed on how she plans to stabilise the company, Ip says: 'What happened in the past happened in the past. What we bring ... is a new leaf. We do want to build upon a foundation that has already been built here.'

Onne also prefers to speak about the future rather than the past and says her focus is on building a company that is able to tour with a unique repertoire - and can afford to do so.

'My long-term vision is to have a home of our own and that's something we have to fight for,' she says, referring to the fact the company has never had a permanent base.

Wong adds that 'the plaster is still peeling off' at the Happy Valley office, as it was when she left 15 years ago. But there is no good news concerning a permanent home, even within the forthcoming West Kowloon Cultural District.

'We have to increase the amount of performances,' says Onne. There are 42 performances across seven productions in the 2010/2011 year, which runs from August to June, and a planned 43 to 45 performances over eight productions in 2011/2012. 'The level of the dancers is so high and they need to perform,' she says. 'We should try to tour in China and do more performances in other places.'

Onne says she wants to build up a repertoire that no other company dances: 'If we want to tour abroad, we need to have things that are made for us, otherwise it's very difficult [for presenters] to justify bringing a company from far away.'

Stephen Jefferies, the artistic director for a decade before Meehan joined, had a similar policy and a stable of works was created during his tenure, but most have now been dropped.

The first original full-length ballet created under Onne's aegis, The Firecracker, was a hit with local audiences and at the Shanghai World Expo, during which a one-off excerpt was performed at the Shanghai Oriental Art Centre.

In programming, Onne says, she is trying to strike a balance between popular classical narrative ballets such as Swan Lake, to ensure box-office income, and mixed bills of modern works, which are vital in keeping the dancers interested.

Less of a balance, however, exists in the ballet's one-act repertoire, with no fewer than five works by choreographer Balanchine being introduced in the past four years. The work of other major 20th-century choreographers such as Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Jerome Robbins and Michel Fokine is missing altogether.

Onne says Balanchine helps the dancers: 'It is very difficult and you have nothing to hide behind so it's good for development and this company is capable of doing it. But I have no more plans for other Balanchine [pieces].'

She puts the absence of other prominent 20th-century choreographers in the repertoire down to cost. 'I've been trying to get [John] Cranko's Onegin. I have the permission and we are good enough to do it but I have to find someone to pay for it,' Onne says. 'It's simply a question of money ... we don't have the wallet.'

Money - or rather the lack of it - appears to be a recurring theme when talking about the ballet's development. Onne says she wants to bring the number of dancers back up to the 43 it was in 2008 - the number has since shrunk to 38 - but may not be able to do so this year because of budget limitations.

The ballet receives an annual subsidy from the Home Affairs Bureau - HK$32 million for each of the 2009/10 and 2010/11 financial years, which covers 75 per cent of actual expenditure and 66 per cent of expected expenditure, respectively. While the number of dancers has been reduced, non-artistic staff have risen in number from 20 to 23. Ip and Wong decline to reveal their salaries but the creation of the deputy executive director post is likely to have compromised spending on the artistic side.

The recent trend of bringing in guest stars is also costly. Resident guest principal Tan Yuanyuan, for instance, is said to command a fee of up to HK$75,000 per performance, with expenses on top. However, says Onne, 'We find sponsors for that and sponsors are willing to pay for a guest, not our own dancers.'

The Ballet Ball, organised by the board, remains the company's biggest source of private income. When it was cancelled during the 2008/09 financial year, partly due to the bad economy, the troupe went from having a surplus of HK$7.5 million to a deficit of HK$4.3 million. The ball held in May last year raised enough money to put the company back into a HK$4.3 million surplus for 2009/10.

But no Ballet Ball is planned for 2010/11 - due to 'the schedule of the members of the board and the committees, logistical performance venue scheduling and change of management', says Ip. So the company risks plunging back into the red.

The traditional function of a performing arts company board is to raise funds as well as act as the troupe's governing body. In the past, the ballet board left artistic and management affairs to the company's professional staff. That is why, when it played an active role in the sacking of Leung, it found itself in the news instead of the society pages.

Leung was fired without notice - and without the knowledge of Meehan, who was still artistic director and Leung's boss under the terms of her contract. Public statements regarding her dismissal were issued in the name of executive director Evonne Tsui, who resigned earlier this year, but the termination letter handed to Leung was signed by chairman John Ying. And it was board member Linda Fung King who told the ballerina to pack her bags and leave immediately.

Leung fought for an apology - and she received one three months later.

The fiasco had piqued the interest of the Legislative Council, though, which called a meeting in May last year to look at the governance of performing arts groups funded by the bureau. Ying told Legco that the departure of Leung was an 'operational human resource management issue at the decision of the executive director' but the company regretted the lack of communication that surrounded it. He promised the ballet would try to handle similar incidents with more sensitivity but said, beyond that, the incident was an 'entirely private matter between [the ballet] and Ms Leung'.

The meeting did little to improve the legislators' understanding of what good governance means in the arts.

Leung has moved on and is now starring in The House of Dancing Water, the new permanent show at City of Dreams in Macau.

Ying's commitment to the ballet is not in doubt. If anything, his attempts at making the company 'world class' are often seen as being too hands on. Those familiar with operations say he micromanages every aspect, right down to approving VIP seating plans for performances.

'The successful or effective formula is that the chairman trusts the decisions made by the executive director and artistic director and the board gives the management clear guidelines and objectives,' says Helen Ng Han-bing, the ballet's chief executive for a decade until 2007. 'In no way should the chairman or board members be interfering in the daily operation if good governance is to be ensured.'

Ying declined to be interviewed for this article but Ip says that since she is still new to the ballet world and the company, she welcomes his input.

'For John to get involved in certain areas makes sense to me,' she says. 'I need to understand this whole world ... so I am thankful at this stage that he is able to work with me.' Her top priority, she says, is to secure sources of revenue.

'The Ballet Ball is fantastic to raise funds,' she says, 'but my desire is to have a steady stream, to open up the doors to corporations, foundations, find different models.'

Onne says that with Ip and Wong on board, she can spend more time in the studio, with the dancers, and less at meetings.

'That's where I belong,' she says. 'But there's so much to fix - I want to fix tours, I want to fix this money.'

A dilemma Onne is facing concerns local talent. Currently, the ballet has only three Hong Kong dancers.

'We have a choice - we can nourish the local dancers, but if we do, we will have to lower standards,' she says. 'It's a choice, because they are not as good. They haven't been trained every day since they were nine years old. Of course, there are exceptions - the ones who have a perfect body - but for those of us with a normal body we have to build our body and that takes time. [Here] they just don't have that education.'

Open auditions are held at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) every year: 'Given that the government is putting so much money into education I really think we should look there first,' Onne says.

Graeme Collins, head of ballet at the HKAPA, says the academy has always enjoyed a good relationship with Hong Kong Ballet and, under Onne, students toured with the company in Shanghai with Giselle in 2008 and in Beijing with Swan Lake last year.

At a recent rehearsal for The Sleeping Beauty, which recruited 16 HKAPA dancers as extras and is currently being staged at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, he was pleasantly surprised to see how much dancing they were doing, says Collins.

'The other [relationship] people often don't realise is a fair number of the company [dancers] have been graduates from here. I appreciate that the company does take dancers from elsewhere ... but from my viewpoint, I'd like to see if that could be improved on,' says Collins, who has been with the HKAPA for 15 years. He says it has taken the ballet company some time to recover from the Leung debacle.

'When John Meehan took over, Stephen had left him a very good company,' Collins says. 'To be fair to Madeleine, she was left with a company that was like a bunch of scared little rabbits. There was low morale. I think that whole affair destabilised the company considerably. But when I saw their Coppelia production in the summer, I noticed things were a bit different. There seems to be a more positive approach and a greater sense of direction.'

Despite still not having a permanent home and having to operate on a shoestring, Onne says she remains undaunted.

'In these 11/2 years I've learnt that you should have dreams and you should fight for them,' she says. 'I will always come with my Onegin or MacMillan. If I go to dinner and [someone at the table] says they love Onegin and they have lots of money, I will ask them if they are interested in this project.

'But right now we have to build smart.'

Considering the budget woes, exodus of dancers and management, and lingering question of who is actually in control, rebuilding the ballet's reputation could take a great deal of smarts.

Additional reporting by Natasha Rogai