News Article: Remember the Joffrey? At 50, It Fits Nicely Into the Chicago Spin

By JENNIFER DUNNING
Published: October 19, 2005
New York Times

"What have you seen lately that's interesting?" Robert Joffrey would often ask, eyes twinkling as he leaned forward to listen. That all-consuming but always unaffected interest in dance found its perfect reflection in the ballet troupe he founded in New York City in 1956 with Gerald Arpino, who now directs it.



Joffrey died in 1988 but the Joffrey Ballet lived on through crushing financial troubles and bitter takeover attempts by the philanthropist Rebekah Harkness in 1964 and by its own board in 1990. This week the company begins a 50th-anniversary celebration in Chicago, its home since 1995, which continues through early May with programs that hint at the Joffrey's special place in American dance history.

American Ballet Theater was grand classical ballet in the European mode. George Balanchine captured the speed and style of New York City, his adopted home, in choreography for his New York City Ballet. The Joffrey was the most American of the city's three major classical companies in its embrace of pop culture and its youthfulness. And it was also the troupe that drew in new ballet audiences of all ages to see not only rock ballets and Mr. Arpino's fleet-footed, vivid crowd-pleasers but also dances by European choreographers whose work was rarely seen in America, in some cases dances that were considered lost.




At one point the Joffrey repertory included 10 ballets by Sir Frederick Ashton, whose lyrical, moon-dappled "Dream," a one-act version of Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," will be performed during an opening anniversary program that begins today. It was Joffrey who introduced generations of New York audiences to the largely unknown choreography of Kurt Jooss, starting with his biting antiwar dance "The Green Table," created in 1932.

Joffrey had seen the ballet, which will be performed in a new revival by American Ballet Theater on Friday at City Center, as a child of 11 in Seattle. Even then, he sensed the differences between the ground-hugging, jagged modern-dance qualities and the ballet technique he was learning. "The Green Table," presented by the Joffrey in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam War, was the company's first full staging of a historic ballet. Delectable rarities by August Bournonville, Balanchine and Bronislava Nijinska also swelled a repertory that included choice bits of Americana, like Ruthanna Boris's ebullient "Cakewalk." Most of all, there was Joffrey's fascination with the sumptuous Diaghilev era, which led to historically important revivals of dances by Leonide Massine and Vaslav Nijinsky.

The Joffrey did not go in much for glittering guest stars, though Rudolf Nureyev did perform with the company. It was he who had approached the Joffrey, and his "Homage to Diaghilev" program on Broadway in 1979 saved the company from one of its worst financial declines. The versatile, individualistic young Joffrey dancers, drawn from a company school that has remained in New York City, played an important part in establishing the company as a thoroughly American institution. Not all had pretty faces or handsome bodies. But they could move, had an often ferocious classical technique and tended to pour themselves so eagerly into the dance at hand that the world beyond the theater paled for those two hours.

Joffrey's love for classical ballet was reflected in his "Pas de Déesses," a charming portrait of three famous 19th-century ballerinas that was included on the company's first formal program. But he was ready for wild experimentation when a filmmaker approached him about the collaboration that led to the 1967 "Astarte," a multimedia rock ballet in which a man walked onto the stage from the audience, stripped to his briefs and danced with a chill goddess who emerged from the billowing screen fabric on which huge images of the two were projected. At the end, the man calmly walked out the back of the stage, through the City Center stage door and onto West 56th Street. "Astarte" made the cover of Time magazine.

Excited young audiences packed the uppermost regions of the auditorium, as they did for the candle-bearing dancers of Mr. Arpino's signature 1967 rock ballet, "Trinity," and, six years later, for the onstage graffiti artists and hipsters of "Deuce Coupe," a company landmark, set to songs by the Beach Boys and choreographed by the young Twyla Tharp. Ms. Tharp was not the first modern-dance choreographer to be drawn into the Joffrey's fold. But "Deuce Coupe," which the company will perform in late April in Chicago at the close of its anniversary year, is considered the first piece to fuse ballet and modern dance.

The company's 1995 re-establishment of itself as the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago - now just the Joffrey Ballet again - was a daring if necessary move. The troupe had had great success in touring engagements in Chicago over the years, but the city had the reputation of being tough on its own dance companies. "The company has been reborn here," Hedy Weiss, dance and theater critic of The Chicago Sun-Times, said in a recent telephone conversation.

That may be true, too, of Chicago as a dance town. Longtime resident companies have become more active and sophisticated in recent years. "There are now lots of small dance companies and a lot more marketing for dance," Ms. Weiss said. "I partly attribute that to the Joffrey's presence." The company is now a continual presence in the city with four two-week seasons a year. And it is moving toward establishing itself as the third leg of a classical triumvirate with the Lyric Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

"I think of the Joffrey as being 10 years old, not 50," the former board chairman Pamela B. Strobel said earlier this month in remarks at a pre-anniversary gala. "And I look to parallels of what the Lyric Opera was like at 10: fragile, but with good genes and good custodians. That's where we are with the Joffrey today."