Joffrey Ballet

The Joffrey Ballet is an American dance company and training institution in Chicago, Illinois. The Joffrey regularly performs classical and contemporary ballets during its annual performance season at the Civic Opera House, including its annual presentation of The Nutcracker.

Founded in 1956 by dance pioneers Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, the company has earned a reputation for boundary-breaking performances, including its 1987 presentation of Vaslav Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring, which reconstructed the original choreography from the 1913 premiere that was thought to be lost. Many choreographers have worked with the Joffrey, including Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and George Balanchine.

From its foundation in 1956 through the mid-1960s, Joffrey's and Arpino's dance company initially toured the United States and sometimes other parts of the world (for example: the Soviet Union in 1963). The dance company gained its first permanent residency in New York City in 1966, and expanded to Los Angeles in 1982. In Los Angeles in 1987, the group premiered a reconstructed version of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which they performed many times in the subsequent years. The expanded ensemble ended its residency in Los Angeles in 1992, and the company moved from New York City to Chicago in 1995, where it remains to this day.

In 1956, a time during which most touring companies performed only reduced versions of ballet classics, Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino formed a six-dancer ensemble that toured the country in a station wagon pulling a U-Haul trailer, performing original ballets created by Joffrey. The original six dancers were Arpino, Dianne Consoer, Brunilda Ruiz, Glen Tetley, Beatrice Tompkins, and John Wilson. While Joffrey stayed in New York City to teach ballet classes and earn money to pay the dancers' salaries, Arpino led the troupe. The ensemble first performed in a major city in Chicago in 1957. The Joffrey Ballet eventually settled down in New York City, under the name the Robert Joffrey Theatre Ballet. In 1962, modern choreographer Alvin Ailey was invited to make a work for the company. Rebekah Harkness was an important early benefactor and she made international touring possible (Soviet Union, 1963), but in 1964 she and Joffrey parted ways.

Joffrey started again, building up a new company that made its debut in 1965 as the Joffrey Ballet. Following a successful season at the New York City Center in 1966, it was invited to become City Center's resident ballet company with Joffrey as artistic director and Arpino as chief choreographer. Arpino's 1970 rock ballet Trinity was well received; Joffrey revived Kurt Jooss's The Green Table in 1967, followed by revivals of Ashton's Façade, Cranko's Pineapple Poll, Fokine's Petrushka (with Rudolf Nureyev in 1979), Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun, also with Nureyev, and Massine's Le Tricorne, Le Beau Danube and Parade. In 1973, Joffrey asked Twyla Tharp to create her first commissioned ballet, Deuce Coupe. The company continued as City Center Joffrey Ballet until 1977.

From 1977, it performed as the Joffrey Ballet, with a second home established in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1992. In 1995, the company left New York City for Chicago to establish a permanent residence there.

The first few years in Chicago were financially arduous for the company, nearly causing it to close several times, but audiences later became larger and younger. In 2005, the Joffrey Ballet celebrated its 10th anniversary in Chicago and in 2007 concluded a two-season-long 50th-anniversary celebration, including a "River to River" tour of free, outdoor performances across Iowa, sponsored by Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa.

In fall 1987, the Joffrey Ballet premiered a reconstructed version of Igor Stravinsky's seminal ballet The Rite of Spring in the city of Los Angeles. The original ballet debuted in 1913 in Paris, France, and was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. Dance experts Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer spent 18 years gathering research on the original ballet in order to properly reconstruct it. Eighty percent of the original costumes were located and reconstructed for the performance, and Hodson and Archer were able to consult with Nijinsky's rehearsal assistant Marie Rambert on the original choreography, before her death in 1982.