THE JOFFREY BALLET
Robert Joffrey’s death from renal and respiratory failure in New York during his company’s Chicago season saddened many. Only 58, he trained many fine dancers, created a strong and entirely unique ballet company, maintained the Joffrey Ballet for more than 30 years, actively encouraged many young choreographers and dance scholars, and entertained countless Americans in regular seasons in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Joffrey has won numerous awards, most of which cite his ability to entertain, to make an essentially elitist art form available and understandable. To me, Robert Joffrey will always be the man who made history dance.
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Nijinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (“The Rite of Spring”) is the latest addition to the Joffrey’s repertoire of historic works–the most powerful, most mystical, most important work of an impressive collection, a treasure and Joffrey’s most precious legacy.
The dance’s greatest drama arises from stillness. While the stage explodes with beating feet and whirling pattern, the Chosen One stands transfixed–one arm raised, hand curled but not quite fisted, head to one side, her eyes fixed on something we cannot see, her experience something we cannot fathom–and tension grows. The more the energy of her final dance contrasts with the others, the greater that tension. There is no possible release except death, the leap straight up into the fight.
Some reviews of the 1912 Paris premiere of Nijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune stress the choreography’s severe two-dimensional effect; others give the impression that the entire theater was in rut, so erotic was Nijinsky’s choreography and so feral his performance. It was shocking, widely considered obscene. With Tyler Walters as the faun and Jill Davidson, Kathryn Ginden, Jennifer Habig, Valerie Madonia, Elizabeth Parkinson, Victoria Pasquale, and Charlene Gehm as nymphs, Faune looks sleepy and somewhat sedate, more a mild adventure in autoerotism than flagrant bestiality.
