Joffrey Ballet: His life if not his namesake

Gerald Arpino, artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, smiles a little when asked to compare his own highly theatrical style of choreography -- and, indeed, of being -- to that of the late Robert Joffrey, who died in 1988.

“He was the classical one. I was the revolutionary,” muses Arpino, 75, as though recalling the family dynamics of two close siblings instead of the intense creative and personal partnership that led to the founding of the Joffrey Ballet in 1956.

Joffrey did not live to see two revolutionary changes in the life of the company that bears his name. One was its painful ouster in 1991, due to financial difficulties, as the resident company of the Los Angeles Music Center, ending the New York troupe’s enviable bicoastal status. The second was the Joffrey Ballet’s reinvention in 1995 as the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago.

The split with the Music Center was particularly messy and unpleasant. While the dancers were somewhat removed from the politics, 20-year company veteran Deborah Dawn recalls that they felt like children who know something is seriously wrong even before their parents announce the divorce.

Maybe it’s the passage of time, maybe Arpino’s relentless optimism or maybe the sheer force of Chicago’s legendary winds -- but now any trace of bitterness over what happened a dozen years ago in Los Angeles seems to have blown away as the company prepares to perform here for the first time in six years.

The Joffrey will return for four days’ worth of performances, beginning Thursday, with an all-Arpino program, including the choreographer’s new ballet about capital punishment, “I/DNA,” and another program of ballets created for the early 20th century impresario Sergei Diaghilev, among them the reconstruction of “Le Sacre du Printemps” that had its world premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1987. The original ballet caused a riot when it premiered in Paris in 1913.

And while the Joffrey has, geographically, been off the L.A. radar screen for several years, it’s been discovered by Hollywood: It is the “company” in the coming Robert Altman film “The Company,” an inside look at the ballet world starring Neve Campbell as a dancer on the verge of becoming a star. James Franco portrays Campbell’s non-dancer boyfriend, and Malcolm McDowell plays the Arpino character.

Embraced by the Windy City

The Joffrey has other reasons to be in good spirits. Despite what Arpino describes as some initial fears on the part of Chicago’s dance companies that it would present competition in the funding arena, Gail Kalver, executive director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, says the Joffrey has instead raised the bar on donations to dance. “I think they have added to the cachet of the cultural landscape. I think they have upped the ante,” she says.

Not only have local critics praised the company, but Kalver believes the Chicago arts climate allowed the Joffrey to put down roots in a way that always seemed to elude the company in Los Angeles. “Chicago is a tighter community, focusing on the arts, not just entertainment,” she says. “We don’t have the movie industry. And this is a big testing ground for Broadway, a big preview town. It’s fertile ground to set up shop.”

Adam Sklute, one of the company’s ballet masters, agrees. “I feel completely embraced by this city,” he says. “This is a city that becomes really passionate about things. It’s passionate about its arts, and it’s passionate about its sports. So ballet seems to be a perfect fit.”

Arpino thinks so too. “I always wanted a place that we could actually call home,” he says while putting his dancers through their paces for “I/DNA” at the company’s Chicago studios. “I wanted to be what New York City Ballet is to New York, what San Francisco Ballet is to San Francisco, what the Royal Ballet is to London.”

Chicago is “a typical American city in that it’s still striving for its standards. It has that pioneer quality about it,” adds Arpino, who on this day, wearing a dark blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the red-and-white letters “USA,” looks more like an Olympic team coach than a choreographer. “It’s ambitious -- you can see it in the architecture, you can see it in the museums. Yet it’s still always looking forward to new frontiers in the arts. This is always what the Joffrey has been about to me.”

Arpino borrowed the subject matter for his “I/DNA” from his new surroundings -- specifically, Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s Jan. 11 decision, just three days before he left office, to commute the sentences of all 167 people on death row, most to life imprisonment. The ballet premiered in Chicago in April.

For “I/DNA,” Arpino, also borrowed religious imagery to liken the execution of an innocent man (portrayed by Mexican dancer Domingo Rubio) to the Crucifixion. In the rehearsal studio, an oversized plywood mock-up of an electric chair stands stark and tall in the middle of the room.

The ballet’s overall message, Arpino hopes, is positive. “Isn’t it funny how ‘I/DNA’ reveals the Christ within?” Arpino says. “If there is one person I ever wanted to meet, it would be Christ. If someone were to say, ‘Is there one person you would like to meet?’ I’d say Jesus, hands down.”

To an observer, the rehearsal seems to be going well enough; Rubio drips sweat from his bare chest. But Mr. A, as he is known, is not satisfied with the male angels circling the condemned man. Arpino is also not feeling well -- maybe a cold, maybe seasonal allergies -- and complains that their performance is only making him feel worse.

“This is what I hate ballet to feel like,” he says. “You have lost your wings, you’re really not moving. You’re constipated. You are running like you have two anchors tied to your behind.”

But the mildly comic outburst is as much theater as genuine frustration, and both choreographer and dancers seem to know it.

“I give it to them, but they know it’s out of love,” Arpino explains later. His motivation, he says, is not to injure, only to inspire.

The blend of strictness and compassion in the rehearsal room seems a microcosm of the dichotomy that is Gerald Arpino -- a survivor of 47 years of extreme highs and painful lows for the dance company that has routinely been mentioned third on the list of American ballet’s Big Three, after New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.

The highs have included becoming the American ballet company of the tumultuous 1960s with its productions of Kurt Jooss’ 1932 antiwar ballet, “The Green Table”; Arpino’s antinuclear ballet, “The Clowns” (1968); his rock ballet “Trinity” (1970); and Joffrey’s 1967 multimedia “Astarte,” a pop left turn for the choreographer that propelled the company onto the cover of Time.

“I look at many dance companies now, and so many of them are doing Joffrey-type programming, those kinds of re-creations and new works,” observes Carole Valleskey, a Joffrey dancer from 1976 to 1991. She stayed in L.A. after the company lost its residency and is now director of the in-school education program California Dance Institute. “Almost every choreographer from Twyla Tharp to Mark Morris to Billy Forsythe did their first ballet pieces for the Joffrey, and now they are kind of accepted as ballet’s great choreographers.”

Transition and fund-raising

The company’s lows included not only the death of Joffrey but an internal creative power struggle that led Arpino to briefly resign as artistic director in 1990, taking his ballets with him, and the loss of the residency in Los Angeles, where dancers happily mingled with movie stars and where the local “FOJs” -- Friends of the Joffrey -- often took company members into their homes. There were also four lean years of competing for funding with myriad other dance companies in New York before the Joffrey finally found its new base.

Now housed in cramped temporary digs where passing El trains rattle the teeth, the 34-dancer troupe is launching a $50-million capital campaign, to include from $35 million to $40 million to build a new studio by the end of 2005 on land donated by Commonwealth Edison. Besides continuing to tour both in the U.S. and abroad, the Joffrey has signed a four-year residency agreement and is adding several performances to each of the three miniseasons it offers at the Auditorium Theatre in addition to its December run of “The Nutcracker.” It has hired its first music director, Leslie B. Dunner, also director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra. And Executive Director Jon H. Teeuwissen reports that the Joffrey, with an annual budget of $12 million, ended the last fiscal year with a slight surplus.

In a conversation rattled by those El trains the day after the Tony Awards ceremony in New York, Arpino expresses consternation at having watched choreographer Twyla Tharp win a Tony for the Broadway musical “Movin’ Out,” a dance extravaganza set to the music of Billy Joel.

He points out that his 1993 production “Billboards,” to the music of Prince, had a similar concept and that discussions once took place about taking it to Broadway.

“That was really my Tony,” he says gently.

Then, in virtually the same breath, he declares that there is no room for resentment in ballet -- or, in fact, the world. Whether it’s losing a Tony, or a residency in Los Angeles, he is determined to see the positive.

He still considers himself a “flower child,” rooted in the values of the 1960s.

“The ‘60s were the most lush, creative time, when we took over the world with art,” he reminisces dreamily.

After Joffrey’s death, Arpino never wanted to rename the company the Arpino Ballet. “We had good stock, and you hold on to the blue chips, honey!” he says.

Indeed, Music Center President Stephen Rountree says that, although the center is not considering making any one dance company its resident troupe soon, it hopes to make the Joffrey a regular part of its dance season, which it plans to expand now that the Los Angeles Philharmonic is moving to the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in the fall.

Despite his Chicago boosterism, Arpino’s voice does grow wistful as he talks about what might have been.

“If there was any city that should have been the city, it was L.A.,” he says. “I just think that coming back to Los Angeles is another step in the growth of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, a big step. It advances my belief that our relationship with Los Angeles is again beginning.”

Having made the successful move to Chicago, Arpino also accepts that the company will eventually need to embark on another new beginning -- with a different artistic director. But on one condition: A new leader must preserve what was put in place by Joffrey and Arpino.

“I think the legacy will be that there will be a top person, but much more of a director than a choreographer,” he says. “The person must have a knowledge of the repertory and come in wanting to preserve the company’s style for what it is -- that is, all styles and no style.”

Someone with aspirations to become a signature choreographer, Arpino warns, “would ruin the Joffrey.” Then he adds, with the inscrutable mix of humor and seriousness that is Mr. A: “There will never be another me.”

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Joffrey Ballet of Chicago

When: Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

Ends: June 29

Price: $25 to $85

Contact: (213) 972-0771 or www.musiccenter.org