First-ever Joffrey Ballet retrospective, compiled in New York, leaves the Chicago chapter up to us

Lauren Warnecke, Chicago Tribune

A new exhibition brings dance to Wrightwood 659. The Lincoln Park art gallery is hosting “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.”

Chicago is the second and final stop for a first-ever retrospective on the Joffrey Ballet, which premiered at the New York Public Library last fall. Curator Julia Foulkes culled the show from the library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division, which holds the Joffrey’s archives. With help from former Joffrey dancer Nicole Duffy, Foulkes waded through more than 900 boxes and 5,000 reels of footage before arriving at a few themes.

“It’s an enormous collection,” Foulkes said. “What really struck me as I was going through the materials was the story was about the company. There are important people throughout, but the success and the dream of Joffrey was a company — and it’s so unusual in ballet. Joffrey was a dancer and a choreographer. But as a very young person, he realized his real vision, talent and mission was going to be a dance company.”

The show weaves a path along the perimeter of Wrightwood 659’s second-floor gallery, beginning with a video scroll of every dancer who has ever been part of that company. A recreation of a panoramic image of the Joffrey company in their Wabash Avenue studios wraps the right wall, borrowed from a story in a 1996 issue of “Dance Magazine” about their move from New York to Chicago. A few aperitifs outside the main gallery lay out the exhibition’s main priorities, presented as a series of questions as viewers get deeper in.

At its core, the Joffrey Ballet is about cultivating ballet for everyone and fearlessly embracing bold risks. A portrait of Robert Joffrey at age 30 is an inclusion that did not appear in the New York show. A costume from “Parade,” recreated from Pablo Picasso’s designs for Leonide Massine’s 1917 work for the Ballets Russes, represents Joffrey’s commitment to 20th-century works rarely, if ever, seen live until they restored them. These are positioned on the second-floor landing, preceded by a giant, neon-hued promotional poster created by painter and photographer Herb Migdoll in the stairwell. In Foulkes’ view, that is the exhibition’s pièce de résistance.

“A big part of the show is how they promoted themselves,” she said. She chose orange as a key color in the exhibition’s branding. She doesn’t know why. She just knew it was orange.

As Jean Cocteau did for a time with the Ballets Russes, Migdoll played an outsized role in crafting the look of the Joffrey, serving not just as their primary photographer for five decades, but also creating an aesthetic no one else had at the time. While the show is meant to first and foremost capture dance, Migdoll’s contributions are undeniable in the ephemera that capture it. The Joffrey forged an identity distinct from its two main competitors — one fashioned almost wholly around the creative genius of a single choreographer, and another that came to dominate the classics. Unlike New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, Robert Joffrey’s vision was not of stars within a company, but a company of stars. Migdoll’s creative input fed into this, positioning the Joffrey Ballet as the cool kids performing work of the here and the now.

Related to that, a full quarter of “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.” is devoted to “Astarte,” a psychedelic rock ballet that pushed the boundaries of what the art form could be — and where and how it was presented. A huge, gilded frame is hung just outside an immersive, multi-media trip down “Astarte” lane (complete with beaded curtain). It’s an anchor point for the exhibition that was not seen in New York, filled by a giant Migdoll painting of “Astarte” that graced the cover of Time in 1968 — a moment that solidified Joffrey’s position among the great American ballet companies.

Moving the show from a New York library to a Chicago gallery required Foulkes to rethink it, both spatially and contextually. A perpetual challenge in New York, she said, is convincing New Yorkers that there’s dance worth paying attention to in other places.

“Here, I don’t have to make that claim,” she said.

Indeed, a good chunk of “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.” is spent drawing a direct line between Joffrey’s early days touring the country, bringing ballet to places it wasn’t, and the more current model of regional dance companies that have cropped up in nearly every major U.S. city.

Foulkes said imagining the show for Chicago was about reminding current Joffrey fans where the company came from — and how hard co-founders Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino fought to keep their dance company going through perpetually hard times.

In fact, “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.” represents only about 40 of the company’s 70-year history, developed in New York from an archive held by NYPL that ends about the same time the Joffrey Ballet moved to Chicago — penniless and on the brink of closure, again.

What a cliffhanger. Foulkes said the decision to end the show there was partly pragmatic, with more current archival materials still held by the Joffrey themselves. She also knows it’s Chicagoans, not New Yorkers, who are writing the rest of Joffrey’s story. Indeed, it was more than two decades before they went back.

In the beginning, Foulkes said, “New York was home, but it was hardly the point.”

Today, Chicago is very much the point. Gerald Arpino — who shepherded the Joffrey Ballet after Robert Joffrey died in 1988 from AIDS-related complications until current artistic director Ashley Wheater took over in 2007 — believed in Chicago. Against all odds, and with support from long-time boosters like Bruce Sagan, Arpino knew the city’s resilience, fierce loyalty and rebellious spirit might be just the thing his dance company needed. Survival is never guaranteed in the arts, but for now, Chicago appears to have been another of Joffrey’s risks that paid off in spades.