Word: joffreys
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...Carmen Jones (1955), he soon was off to New York to study modern dance with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, ballet with Karel Shook. Since the rise of his own company, he has continued to freelance extensively as a choreographer. His iconoclastic Feast of Ashes, created for the Joffrey Ballet in 1962, signaled a new fusion of classic ballet and modern dance styles, or the advent of what can only be called the Ailey style. "What I like," he says, "is the line and technical range that classical ballet gives to the body. But I still want to project...
...Joffrey alumna, Miss Sappington both created and performed in the nude adagio of Oh!, Calcutta! She clearly has an eye for the unexplored erotic potential of the body in ballet. Weewis -the title's meaning is still its creator's secret-presents three couples who appear to exemplify the varying moods of love (definitely profane). The first couple (Gary Chryst and James Dunne) is composed of two Latinate boys in candy-striped leotards, who shuck and jive about the stage like bodega gauchos trying out for a revival of West Side Story. They end their number with...
Triumphs and Disasters. While Joffrey has been cultivating talent, the man who has done most to give the company a style is Arpino, a close friend and longtime collaborator. Joffrey contends that a resident choreographer is essential for a company seeking definition and consistency. There is some dispute in ballet circles, though, about whether Arpino is the best man possible for that purpose. He is wildly uneven, capable of lasting triumphs like his muscular tribute to masculine athleticism, Olympics, but also given to pretentious disasters like The Poppet, an epicene parody of Arthur Miller's The Crucible...
Arpino is responsible for roughly half the works in the large and varied repertory of 36 items-perhaps too large for the company's size (between 38 and 40 dancers). Reflecting Joffrey's scholarly catholic taste, pieces by other choreographers range from delicate snippets of 19th century Danish court-style ballet (Bournonville's William Tell Variations) to an intelligently danced but dramatically muzzy re-creation of Petrouchka, to the somber, erotic psychodrama of Todd Bolender's The Still Point (new with the company this season...
...Joffrey possesses a shrewd, show-bizzy instinct, not merely for what his dancers can manage but for what his audiences will swallow. So far he has avoided full-length ballets in the Russian tradition on the grounds that a Swan Lake or a Giselle would expose more of the company's faults than its virtues. Nonetheless, the question remains as to how long this promising fancy-free troupe can survive on nerve, verve and youthful fervor. When will it undertake major pieces that demand dramatic development rather than mere disciplined dazzle...