A LEAP OF FAITH
WHEN THE JOFFREY BALLET CAME HERE FROM NEW YORK, IT WAS GAMBLING WITH ITS LIFE. BUT THE WAGER IS PAYING OFF
-AND THE BIGGEST WINNER MAY BE CHICAGO.
By Sid Smith
Tribune arts critic
Published October 23, 2005
In late 1972, Robert Joffrey approached a promising young dancer named Twyla Tharp and suggested she create a piece for his New York-based ballet company.
Not one to mince words, Tharp answered bluntly. Essentially, as she recalls it, “I insulted him.”
“I don’t go to your stuff,” she told him. “I don’t know what you do. I guess I could always do another ‘Swan Lake.’ “
Unmiffed, the Joffrey Ballet’s founder replied: “If I were you, I’d start with something smaller.”
He sent Tharp free tickets to his company’s Delacorte Theatre engagement. She went. And marveled.
Immediately, she recognized something about the Joffrey that set it apart from New York’s other dance troupes. “American Ballet Theatre,” says Tharp, “was always the 19th-Century classics, the Giselles. New York City Ballet was always George Balanchine. But at the Joffrey, I saw something else, something uniquely ours. It was as if, in asking me to create a work, Joffrey was saying, ‘Come with me and dance for America.’ “
The result was Tharp’s now-legendary 1973 work, “Deuce Coupe,” a modern tour-de-force set to the music of the Beach Boys.
Thirty-two years later, Tharp has become one of America’s most famed choreographers. And the Joffrey is no longer in New York City, but in Chicago.
In August, Tharp came to the Joffrey studios here to restage “Deuce Coupe,” which will be part of the troupe’s 50th anniversary celebration, to be observed over the next two years. The close attention paid by Tharp is a rare personal tribute; she usually sends an acolyte to restage older pieces.
“The Joffrey defined a turning point in my career,” she says. “This was the first commission I ever received, the first time I didn’t have to pay for my work myself. And Joffrey stuck it out and supported me.
“The moves were hard and strange then for conventional ballet dancers, but in rehearsal, when they’d complain, he’d say to them, ‘You’re in it. Go. Do it.’ He never backed down.”
Of course, things are never so cozy backstage, not even now. When Tharp first discussed her fee for staging the revival with Gerald Arpino, the Joffrey’s 77-year-old co-founder and sole surviving artistic director, there were testy moments.
Shocked by the initial figure she quoted, he shot back, “Twyla, that’s absolutely immoral. After what the Joffrey did for you.’ “
Eventually, they settled, but there you have it, ballet in general and the Joffrey in particular: grand, beautiful, exquisite, inspiring, scrappy and vaudevillian, niggling down to the last penny, giving the likes of the Beach Boys a new form of immortality in the concert hall: a magnificent intersection of high art, the Big Top and the corner pawn shop.
Happily, the pawn shop is less in evidence than in 1995, when a desperate and destitute Joffrey relocated here. These days, the dancers rehearse in a lush new studio in the penthouse at 17 N. State St.
The rooms themselves resemble greenhouses, flooded with natural light pouring in through gargantuan, dramatically angled skylights in the ceiling, like a set for a Hollywood movie glorifying Bohemia. Unlike the troupe’s former quarters on Wabash Avenue, these rooms lack the irksome support pillars that were scattered throughout the old rehearsal space, blocking the dancers’ work and their view.
Maybe it’s fanciful, but there also seems to be a new bounce to the dancers’ steps, a new playfulness as they tussle and show off for each other up and down the studio’s long, seemingly endless corridor. Still beautiful, still exquisite, still niggling down to the last penny. And still alive.
Surely Joffrey, who died in 1988, will be watching from the wings, pleased, as the troupe spends the next 24 months reviving works that have made it a wonder and a seminal 20th-Century cultural institution.
By any practical measure, it shouldn’t be happening. The Joffrey should be dead. Several times over.
Dance and ballet are in trouble, and the Joffrey’s adopted city is notoriously inhospitable to ballet troupes. Even the handful of philanthropists responsible for the company’s survival here were shaking their heads in doubt not very long ago.