Word: joffrey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nuts, says Choreographer Robert Joffrey. "I look upon ballet as total theater. I want to attack all the senses. I want my dancers to express my thing, the now thing, good or bad." Performing at Manhattan's City Center last week, the Joffrey Ballet nightly gave eye-dazzling testimony to that credo...
Nymph on a Gambol. Unlike Balanchine, who drills his girls until they look like so many identical windup dolls, Joffrey encourages his dancers to express their own personalities. Feathery Lisa Bradley, 20, is a fragilely beautiful study in symmetry; fiery Luis Fuente, 20, is built like a blockbuster and has the same impact; sinuous Trinette Singleton, 19, dances like a sensuous nymph out for a gambol; and then there is airborne Robert Blankshine, 19, who has mastered the neat little trick of sailing into the wings as he kicks the back of his head. They all help give the Joffrey...
...spirit if not in style, the Joffrey troupe owes an intellectual debt to the work of Balanchine. At least four other companies have been created by former Martha Graham dancers, who nonetheless reject as much as they borrow from the grand guru of gyration. Not that she minds. "I am particularly pleased," she says, "that there are no replicas of me in the field. Everyone should be doing something else, meeting their own challenge." In other words, echoing the hippie maxim, do your own thing. That they have-and their disparate styles might well be summed up as Tuned...
...bodies, and they have to be paid." They are not paid very well; while a top Balanchine star such as Villella or Melissa Hayden can make $20,000 a year, the girls in the New York City's corps de ballet average $7,000. Top pay in the Joffrey troupe is $10,000. Most of the ballet masters see some sort of state or Government aid-a commonplace in Europe-as their only prospect for solvency...
Total Cinema? In spite of its financial problems, insists Joffrey Business Manager Ewing, "the dance world is by far the most creative of all the performing arts in America today." Ewing's boast is not just hyperbole. Last year there were at least 100 premieres of new dance works...