“For a long time there were gray zones where you could make agreements without contracts, for example,” she said in a telephone interview — whereas these days financial decisions need to be made with more attention to detail, ideally by people with a keen financial sense. “It’s like any other business now,” she said.

Elsewhere the structure has proved ill-fated.

In 2016, the Berlin State Ballet company announced the joint appointment of the contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz and the more classically inclined Johannes Ohman as directors. The arrangement unraveled last month, after Ohman announced that he was leaving the company to take a job in Stockholm.

At a tense news conference last week, Waltz suggested that she might continue in the role with a new partner, adding that the collapse of the partnership with Ohman “does not mean the model of a doppelspitze has failed.”

Rissenbeek and Chatrian said their collaboration had, thus far, gone off without a hitch.

“But we still have some time,” she joked, noting that the festival doesn’t start for a few weeks. “If he had said he wanted the opening film to be, I don’t know, a small, Russian black-and-white film that’s five hours long, I would have said it’s a no-go,” she added. “But he didn’t suggest it.”