Joffrey Making Itself at Home at Cal State L.A.

Joffrey Ballet veteran Beatriz Rodriguez smiles as she gazes out toward the hills and freeways that surround and create a relatively isolated, pastoral setting at Cal State L.A.

“This is so different from the high-rise construction around (N.Y.) City Center,” she says, describing the mid-Manhattan area where the company is based. “There you go outside and see nothing but buildings; here you have sunshine and trees.”

Rodriguez and the five dozen dancers and staff members of the Joffrey Ballet are currently in residence at Cal State L.A. for a six-week rehearsal period that marks a new partnership between the Joffrey and the 20-campus California State University system.

It also represents the company’s first attempt to become genuinely bicoastal--a promise made to Angelenos in 1983 when the Joffrey became the resident dance company at the Los Angeles Music Center.

“Wherever the Joffrey has gone, we have always made inroads as builders, and we want to be a catalyst here in Los Angeles,” explains artistic director Gerald Arpino.

“There is an interaction that happens because the company is here,” adds Joffrey executive director Penelope Curry. “It makes people feel they are really ours and we belong. Cal State L.A. has allowed us to bridge the gap. They have closed the circle on making the Joffrey a truly bicoastal company.”

The university is providing a handsome physical plant for the Joffrey in its fifth-floor complex at Martin Luther King Jr. Hall. Newly refurbished, it contains two practice studios and a rehearsal hall equipped with floors built according to professional standards, dressing rooms with showers, offices, a video room and a lounge for the dancers.

“They are very well equipped,” says Rodriguez.

Curry concurs. “They are the best facilities the company has ever had as far as an environment to rehearse in, and we will be sharing those facilities with the dance students at Cal State L.A. and the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts,” she says.

The university has also provided the company with access to all recreational facilities, including an Olympic-size pool and year-old student housing, “which is geared to condominium-type living,” explains Dean Bobby R. Patton of the School of Arts and Letters.

“In New York you feel like a pneumatic drill, but here you can’t get me off the campus,” Arpino says of his apartment. “I’m doing very concentrated work here and having the quiet of the campus and the outdoors brings your center to you in a more luxurious way.”

Future facilities available to the Joffrey for rehearsals and special performances include the $21-million Luckman Fine Arts Complex, which will contain a 1,200-seat theater and a smaller experimental theater and is scheduled for completion in 1991.

Once that happens, Curry sees an opportunity “to rehearse our ballets on a stage, to do photo calls and make special little showings in a proscenium atmosphere.

Although the Joffrey pays rent for the Cal State L.A. space, Curry points out that it is “substantially lower than we would pay anywhere else--and though we will continue to perform at and maintain offices at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as its resident company, Cal State will be our actual home as far as rehearsals are concerned.” (A press conference scheduled today will announce further details of the residency.)

The new relationship began 18 months ago when Cal State Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds and Arpino were discussing mutual interests.

They concluded that bringing the Joffrey onto the campus would add a professional edge to the training program sought by Patton.

“It will give the students an example of what the real world is going to be like after they get their bachelor’s degrees,” Arpino explains. “It will introduce a new way of sponsoring the arts by combining arts and education, at a time when we are threatened by cuts from Washington.”

And it will at last give the company and Arpino a physical home in Los Angeles where, he says, “I can come to create new ballets and be a part of a productive scheme.”

In exchange for a home base, the Joffrey will offer master classes, symposiums and workshops in dance, costume design, the technical aspects of production, business management and fund-raising in the arts as well as access to “Nutcracker” rehearsals this winter at the Music Center.

Ensemble showings by Joffrey and Joffrey II dancers will be held on Cal State campuses throughout California, auditions for ballets will be held in King Hall, two- to three-day residencies by dancers during their off time in January and February are in the planning stages and, according to Patton, a “two-week tour of the campuses by Joffrey II is expected in 1991.”

“We are working out a five-year agreement with the CSU system, which will be finalized in the fall of 1989,” says Curry.

Part of that agreement, Patton says, involves locating a coordinator for the partnership who will “raise National Endowment for the Arts funds for matching grants to commission works that the Joffrey will be doing.”