Curators say a Joffrey Ballet retrospective, opening first in New York, is long overdue
The exhibit tells the story of the risk-taking dance troupe from its New York City origins to becoming Chicago’s preeminent classical ballet company.
WBEZ Chicago
The Joffrey Ballet danced along a fine line for several decades: The company could either take big artistic risks or die trying. On more than one occasion, death almost won.
But, as any Chicagoan who looks skyward on State Street knows, the Joffrey lives on. Today, the Joffrey is Chicago’s preeminent classical ballet company. But nearly 70 years ago, it was a nascent group that co-founders Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino were trying to get off the ground in New York, with six dancers and a station wagon.
That story of a boundary-pushing, industry-disrupting, risk-embracing dance troupe powers a new exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts entitled “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.,” which opens Thursday and will be on view until March before making its way next fall to Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 in Lincoln Park.
It’s rare for a Chicago dance company to be the subject of a major New York City exhibition. Compared to the stalwart New York companies (New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre), the Joffrey has been understudied by academics, the new exhibit’s curators say. This show, which is the first-ever large-scale retrospective of the company, is a chance to correct that.
But, curator Julia Foulkes said, it is not merely a history lesson. Rather, the exhibit is meant to pose big questions, like: Who is ballet for? And, what role should it play in our society today?
“The history of the Joffrey really allows a great foundation for exactly those questions,” said Foulkes, a cultural historian who teaches at New York’s New School. “The Joffrey has attempted to make an elite art form more popular. And that was really what struck me about the story.”
But the dance world still has work to do to make itself more inviting and accessible, both for performers and audiences. Foulkes said dance currently finds itself in a critical moment when it must evolve in order to survive and remain relevant, which makes it the perfect time to look back at the journey of the Joffrey. After all, the classical ballet troupe has grappled with those very concepts — albeit imperfectly — from the jump.
Joffrey, the son of immigrants from Afghanistan and Italy, was born in 1928 in Seattle. From a young age, he knew he wanted a dance company of his own, despite illnesses as a child and zero ties to the elite world of ballet. By 1956, under the wing of Joffrey and Arpino, that first group of dancers had hit the road in a station wagon, in a tour that Joffrey said was meant to ''show people what dancing was about.’'
Eventually, the Joffrey was the first company to perform at the White House, at the invitation of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy; the first ballet company to appear on television in the states; and the first to create a multimedia rock ballet.
Joffrey rejected the typical notion of building a brand around an individual dancer or choreographer, instead forging collaborations between his all-star ensemble and outside collaborators like Twyla Tharp. And, the troupe expanded the narrow idea of who could be a ballet dancer.
“They widened who was on stage, there were more people of color, not huge amount, but notable in this art form that has been white in every way,” Foulkes said. “There were different shapes, different sizes of people on the stage.”
But, throughout it all, margins were thin. And the story of the Joffrey is, at times, nomadic. In the early ’80s — before Joffrey’s death in New York in 1988 at age 57 — the company became bicoastal when it added a homebase in Los Angeles.
By the 1990s, the company had fallen on hard times and was forced to close up its New York City headquarters. Arpino withstood an attempt by the board to remove him and there were brief talks of merging with the American Ballet Theatre, which had also been struggling, according to The New York Times. But eventually, in 1995, it was Chicago that offered a fresh start for the company to put down roots and carve out its own territory — a time zone away from the crowded world of New York City dance.
Through all the turbulence, there’s a Joffrey ethos that seems to endure. Former company dancer Nicole Duffy, who is an assistant curator for the new exhibit, said every generation of Joffrey dancer she has spoken to describes feeling a part of something that was of the moment. That feeling was true for her in the ’90s when the company danced to Prince.
“We definitely felt like we were at the forefront in a lot of ways,” said Duffy, who is a repetiteur for Gerald Arpino’s works. She’s on a mission to keep alive the choreography, which she says is both technically demanding and a constant riff on classical dance.
“He did something unexpected and different than [George] Balanchine [the co-founder of the New York City Ballet], different than other contemporary ballet choreographers of his time, and he was also unafraid to integrate modern dance,” Duffy said.
The exhibition highlights the company’s out-of-box choices. It also puts the artistry side-by-side with the back-of-house realities of keeping a business afloat.
The displays include newly digitized rare films that have been reconstructed from pieces of tape; ephemera like costumes, pointe shoes, and Robert Joffrey’s high school report card (on the back, he wrote about his intention to run a dance company. He was 14.); and a look at how the company embedded itself in pop culture with dances to chart-topping pop music.
Until a few years ago, all that archival material and more sat in boxes in a Chicago storage facility. In 2017, the company donated its entire archive to the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the largest dance archive in the world. Library staff spent years sorting, digitizing and discovering the contents of more than 900 bankers boxes. There were talks at one point about keeping the archives in Chicago, but the Joffrey ultimately felt the New York library had the resources to best care for the collection. (In recent years, a group of local dance lovers have been archiving Chicago’s dance history. They’ve partnered with the Newberry Library to make their materials accessible to the public.)
The New York team unearthed moments that many had assumed were lost to history, including footage of the opening night of Joffrey’s Astarte. The seminal work was the first-ever multimedia ballet. Set to rock music, the pefundbreaking work landed the Joffrey on the cover of TIME magazine in 1968 and features prominently in the new exhibit, said Linda Murray, the head of the library’s dance archives.
But even when it comes to big works like Astarte, Joffrey has slipped from the collective memory of New York dance fans. “I think there definitely needs to be a reintroduction of the Joffrey to New York,” Murray said.
“They really figured it out with Chicago. They owe Chicago so much because Chicago took them into their hearts,” she added. “I feel like Chicago has taken ownership of that company, and it’s now resolutely a Chicago dance company, which is wonderful to see.”
But despite the Joffrey’s strong present-day ties to Chicago, the curators and current company leadership agreed that it made sense to start this show in New York and follow the same westward path that’s part of the organization’s history.
“This company is really important, and we want it to really be seen in New York City where it was founded,” said Joffrey Artistic Director Ashley Wheater. “I think that it’s a story that should be told and needs to be told, and it has value equal to any other company.”
Wheater took over the helm of the company in 2007. The risk calculation at the Joffrey has changed from the do-or-die days.
This season, Joffrey will offer its signature, Chicago-set take on the Nutcracker, designed for the company by star choreographer Christopher Wheeldon that is a December chestnut. Other season highlights include Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Atonement, with choreography by the esteemed British dancemaker Cathy Marston.
Wheater said the range in programming, done with technical precision is a throughline that runs from Joffrey’s days in the station wagon to the current studios on State Street.
“What Robert Joffrey always wanted for his company was that people would come and see the Joffrey for the name of the Joffrey, knowing that they would always get to see something that was unexpected,” Wheater said.
And that, he said, is still what the Joffrey delivers.
If you go: “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.,” Sept. 19–March 1, 2025, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York; Atonement, Oct. 17-27, Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive. Tickets from $36.