Ballet’s Robert Joffrey Dies : Choreographer Began Company With 6 Dancers

Robert Joffrey, the visionary son of immigrant parents who founded what many critics consider the most diverse ballet company in the world, died today at New York’s University Hospital.

He was 57 and had been under treatment for a liver ailment brought on by the medication he had been forced to take for years for an asthma condition.

Joffrey was a lifelong asthmatic whose latest attacks had forced him to work from home, said Pennie Curry, a spokeswoman for the company.

He was diagnosed in 1986 as having severe myositis, which causes deterioration of the muscles and an enlarged liver. As his health deteriorated, he formed a three-person advisory group to help Gerald Arpino, his longtime partner and co-founder of the Joffrey, deal with the bi-coastal company’s operations.

Lure to Dance

Asthma ironically was Joffrey’s lure to dance as a youth. A doctor had suggested that the physical discipline of dance might strengthen the frail son of a father born in Afghanistan and a mother born in Italy.

Born Anver Abdulla Jaffa Khan, Joffrey began studying with Mary Ann Wells in his home town of Seattle. By age 12, and after the dazzling allure of some Fred Astaire and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson films, he had chosen his life’s work:

He would have his own ballet company.

“Only in America could you do it,” he recalled his father saying.

Because of his unusual cultural background, Joffrey had already developed a fascination with things ethnic. He was an early devotee of Japanese, Lebanese and Indian food, and many of the Balinese and Spanish dances he learned as a boy would find their way into the Joffrey repertoire.

Hired as Soloist

By 17 he was a soloist, and at 18 had gone to New York, where he was discovered at the School of American Ballet by Roland Petit’s Ballets de Paris. He was hired there not for the corps de ballet, where young dancers traditionally begin, but as a soloist.

He also began to emerge as a choreographer, and several of his works were staged at Ted Shawn’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

The first Robert Joffrey ballet company performed in New York in 1954, but Joffrey dated the actual founding to 1956 when with six dancers, four ballets, a rented station wagon and borrowed money he toured 23 cities.

By 1962, the company had grown to 38 dancers performing 21 ballets, and the State Department sent it on a tour of the Middle East. Co-sponsor of the tour was the Rebekah Harkness Foundation, which supported the Joffrey until 1964, when patron Rebekah Harkness Kean decided to use her money for her own ballet company.

The Ford Foundation stepped in to keep the financially ailing company afloat, and Joffrey himself raised considerable money.

Eventually, the Joffrey became the resident dance company at the City Center in New York. In 1983, it became the nation’s only bi-coastal resident ballet company when it staged its first season at the Music Center in Los Angeles.

In 1982, Joffrey was chosen for the 23rd annual award of the Capezio Dance Foundation, a prestigious prize.

The judges’ citation referred to him as “an ardent spokesman for and a stern but loving guide to youth, be they gifted children, teen-age students with dreams or dedicated young professionals whom he has served as dancer, teacher and director for 25 years.”

His only survivors are several cousins in Seattle.