Creating our own heritage: concepts of companies.

Seventy years is not a long time in the story of mankind; it is not even a particularly long time in the history of Western civilization, yet those biblical three score and ten can occasionally, in certain areas, cover what seems to be a surprising amount of round. Consider the technological changes in the world since 1927 -- perhaps distinguishing between those that could have been anticipated, from nuclear warfare to space travel, and those that might not have been, from computerization to fax machines. And the changes in society and culture -- many of them developing from emerging technologies -- are perhaps even vaster and more complex, from a world without a world war for a half century to a society dominated by the motivating images of television.

So our world is a very different place from the one into which Dance Magazine was clumsily born in 1927. For that matter, our America and our American dance were very different. Indeed, it might almost -- not quite, but almost -- be said that there was no American theatrical dance in 1927. Dancing, yes; dancing in theaters, well, yes; but theatrical dancing quite as we today know it and, more significantly, to the extent that we know it today ... not really.

There had been ballet of sorts given here since 1735; the period of the Romantic ballet had seen highly successful tours from the likes of Fanny Elssler, and the renown, at home and abroad -- even in Paris, no less -- of native-grown talents such as Augusta Maywood and Mary Ann Lee suggests the presence of an emergent ballet culture. And in the present century not only had the first three decades already seen tours by Anna Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin, and even Adeline Genee, but Diaghilev's Ballets Russes itself, with Nijinsky and the world premiere of his Tyl Eulenspiegel, arrived in 1916. Moreover, in addition to such fancy dancing, America had started to spawn its own manner of dance.

At the turning of the century Isadora Duncan had shown the world America dancing -- in a sort of Grecian fashion -- and Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis had opened their vastly influential Denishawn School in Los Angeles as early as 1915. But there was no indigenous American dance company around when our magazine so cheekily opened up in 1927. Not one. Martha Graham had opened her school around that time -- she had given her first solo recital in 1926 -- but her company didn't start until 1929. And today the Martha Graham Dance Company is the oldest of our dance troupes.

The oldest surviving classic company? It depends on how you count. I would say that it was New York City Ballet -- dating it from the very first performances of Balanchine and Kirstein's American Ballet in 1935 (the ones a few months before in Hartford were, strictly speaking, amateur ventures); but other people, insisting on strict continuity, would date life from the forming of American Ballet Theatre (then just plain Ballet Theatre) in 1939. Yet many would point to San Francisco Ballet, which started life as the San Francisco Opera Ballet, and a school founded by Adolph Bolm. Then again, some claim could be made for the Catherine Littlefield Ballet Company (later Philadelphia Ballet), which started in 1934 and was undeniably the first American company to acquire any kind of international reputation, undertaking a European tour in 1937.

Today I would hate to guess how many professional dance companies -- large and small -- exist in North America. Of course, it depends somewhat on definition -- the definition both of company and professional, and occasionally nowadays, even the definition of dance! -- but it must be more than a thousand. This is incredible. This has happened over the seventy years of our magazine's existence. Dance has run through our theaters, through our colleges, and, most important of all, through our hearts in a fashion that the most sanguine of dance lovers could not have foreseen in 1927.

Of course, during those seven decades there have been success stories and failures, and the founding, and sometimes the floundering, of vast enterprises and smaller endeavors. Dance has run the gamut of human ambition. The surviving companies have all survived in different ways for different reasons -- and they have been as fantastically varied as the pioneer men and women who first started and then nurtured them, and, for that matter, also as varied as their subsequent histories.

Three recent books tell the stories of three North American companies that could hardly be more different, whether in their founding, their development, or their present existence. The books are The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Company, by Sasha Anawalt (Scribner, $35); Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance, by Jennifer Dunning (Addison-Wesley, $30); and Power to Rise: The Story of the National Ballet of Canada, by James Neufeld (University of Toronto Press, $45 Canadian). It is not particularly my purpose here to review these as books -- suffice it to say that the first two are markedly better written than the third, and that both Dunning and Anawalt present honest, warts-and-all portraits of their protagonists (the latter is particularly successful in winkling out and documenting the political tergiversations of the Joffrey troupe, which were, of course, far more complex, arcane, and even more savage than the circumstances surrounding Ailey's company); Neufeld might have written with more obvious insight about the individual quirks and ramifications of the Canadian story. Future historians of each company should find the documentation on both the Canadians and, particularly, the Joffrey admirable; the Ailey book, concentrating as it does more on the man than on his company, is rather more sketchy.

What concerns me here are the stories behind these books. The way in which three fairly, typical large-scale North American dance companies -- two classically oriented and white and one modern dance and black, two American and one Canadian -- have developed over, give or take a bit, four decades. Can we learn anything here? Can we see a blueprint for a North American dance company? Are all such companies the chance confluence of a character and circumstances, of a need and a person to fulfill it?

They were so different, these three founders -- Robert Joffrey, Alvin Ailey, and Celia Franca. Each of them at one point had some choreographic aspirations, but Franca gave up early and sensibly (she was never much of a choreographer, despite the decorative promise of her very first ballet, Khadra), and Joffrey sacrificed his perhaps quite considerable choreographic gift in favor of organizing the "museum" aspect of his company, and encouraging the more evident and immediate talent of his friend and colleague, Gerald Arpino. Ailey, on the other hand, was primarily first a dancer and then a choreographer, and at first his company was a showcase for his personal talents, although very soon he envisaged -- in a manner then virtually unique in American modern dance -- a repertory based like that of a classic troupe, with a range of works by choreographers other than himself.

The need for dance companies over the past seven decades has varied, of course, from the general -- yes, when North America had virtually no dance companies there was an emergent demand for whatever could be produced -- to, later perhaps, the specific, dealing with an individual community need. Neither Joffrey nor Ailey met any specific need, but Franca in Canada is almost an archetypal example of community demands. Franca didn't wake up one morning and decide that what Canada really needed was a national ballet. On the contrary, it was Canada that woke up -- in the sluggish way that all nations wake up to artistic needs. Interested people, primarily in Toronto, set up various inquiries and what was virtually a search committee. Largely on the recommendation of Ninette de Valois, they settled on Franca, a former member of Ballet Rambert and the Royal Ballet, who had participated in the organization of a small and briefly existing British troupe, Metropolitan Ballet. She agreed to come to Canada to organize the new company. Another Englishwoman, Betty Oliphant, was placed in charge of the company's school.

In a sense this is one of the basic patterns by which classic ballet develops in North America: A company is formed and formulated to meet a local or, perhaps, national demand (the National Ballet of Canada, based in Toronto, was only the third classic company to be founded in Canada; professional troupes already existed in Winnipeg and Montreal), and either a ballet master or a choreographer (frequently a dance celebrity) is selected to head it. Or, just as frequently, a company is developed from a local dancing school.

Public and private subsidy, usually on a foundation or corporate level, have played a large part in these endeavors, as they did in the foundation of the National Ballet of Canada, and in many of the larger companies -- Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet, and quite a few others -- that developed across the continent. Most of these repertories, like Franca's, were based loosely on the classics, with Coppelia and Giselle proving the most practicable and popular, yet they also introduced modern classics such as Les Sylphides and Prince Igor or a large range of Balanchine works in addition to completely new works, often specially tailored to the specific needs of the dancers and their audiences.

As devised by Joffrey, the classic company was as maverick as Joffrey himself. More than anyone else in American dance -- apart from those dreamers Lincoln Kirstein and the lesser, yet significant, Richard Pleasant (founder of Ballet Theatre) -- Joffrey, as Anawalt's book makes brilliantly clear, was a visionary. He was also a ballet fan. It was really this latter factor that set him apart from everyone else. He was a dancemaker who had the same kind of commitment to dance and dance's past as a highly sophisticated dance lover. At the beginning Kirstein had something of this quality, but very soon his involvement with Balanchine removed that unusual catholicity of taste which marked out Joffrey.

More than anything, and perhaps more than anyone since the days of Diaghilev, Joffrey wanted to form a company that would be a reflection of his own taste. It was to lead him to sponsor experimental works, mostly by Arpino, that tried to push the boundaries of dance into areas of pop art, and it also led him to collect ballets almost as if he were a museum curator -- he built up an Ashton repertory, a Ballets Russes repertory, even a Kurt Jooss repertory. He possessed a unique ambition, and one that provided the company with a flavor and a purpose that were all its own.

To an extent, and possibly more by chance than by design, Ailey found himself following something of the same path. Before Ailey, although there had been ill-fated attempts to form mixed repertories, modern dance troupes had fundamentally been the sole instruments of their choreographer-directors, with Martha Graham providing the original pattern and prototype. Admittedly, the Jose Limon company had Doris Humphrey as its artistic director, and the company's repertory featured both choreographers. And there were a few examples of other directors inviting the occasional guest work. But Ailey almost from the start -- first with a few works from his own West Coast teacher, Lester Horton -- began to run this modern dance company virtually on classic ballet lines, eventually calling it the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and introducing old modern dance standards as varied as works by Ted Shawn, John Butler, Anna Sokolow, and Katherine Dunham, as well as by moderns such as Talley Beatty and Donald McKayle. In all, Dunning lists more than thirty choreographers who worked with the company before Ailey's death in 1989.

Joffrey died in 1988. Franca retired much earlier, in 1974. Thus, these three companies offer us examples not only of the manner in which North American companies have been founded but also of the manner in which their founders' heritage has been handed down, and how they have continued. Dame Ninette de Valois, principal architect of Britain's Royal Ballet, once shrewdly observed that her success was not to be measured by her own achievements but by the achievements of her successors. It is one thing to start an arts institution, but it is quite another to ensure that it continues beyond its first begetting.

Well, I suppose the good news is that all three, companies are still with us. Whether they will be with us in 2067, when Dance Magazine will celebrate its 140th birthday, is perhaps a point that we can leave moot -- and after all, it is at least conceivable that we ourselves will not have a 140th birthday. Funnier things have happened. But what we can perhaps even now question is how true they are at present to the dreams, ideals, and concepts of their original founders. And also, how smooth their transitions have been.

Unquestionably the smoothest transition and the smallest change have been with the Ailey troupe. The company you can see today is recognizably the same company that Dunning wrote about. Whether consciously or not, Ailey seems to have prepared for his own departure. The company is now directed by Ailey's own principal muse, Judith Jamison, with another longtime Ailey dancer, Masazumi Chaya, as associate director; and the company, still deriving great strength from Ailey's memory, which has become a living force and inspiration, has changed and developed along strictly predictable lines. The dancers dance differently today, but that would assuredly have been true had Ailey lived; unquestionably Jamison, Chaya, and all their associates, including those with the school and junior troupes, have remained remarkably true to the faith.

Things have been more complex with the Joffrey Ballet, although here, too, after a certain degree of muddle, doubt, and finagling, the reins have been handed over to Arpino, Joffrey's handpicked lieutenant and the cofounder of the company and its school. But while the handover has turned out to be secure enough, financial difficulties, which so often threatened to engulf Joffrey himself, have worsened, and the company, once a national troupe based in New York City, has had to relocate to Chicago, with perhaps a certain loss of status and, at present at least, performing opportunities. Today it maintains a considerably smaller repertory than in its glory days with Joffrey, and its artistic policies, especially with regard to the seeming exploitation of its pop ballet Billboards, have come under scrutiny. Yet it survives, and has lived to laugh another day.

The post-franca history of the Canadian company -- and this indeed is the main burden of Neufeld's book -- finds parallels with other American troupes of similar size perhaps San Francisco Ballet, to an extent New York City Ballet and certainly American Ballet Theatre, the company in all of North America with which the National Ballet of Canada has the most in common. Since Franca's resignation there have been a number of directors, notably Alexander Grant, Erik Bruhn, and now Canada's bestknown choreographer, James Kudelka. Grant and Bruhn largely implemented and extended the basic ideas of Franca's policies, but what Kudelka, who obviously, and justifiably, has a creative agenda of his own apart from the company's, will make of the National Ballet remains to be seen. He has been in charge for less than a year, and appears to show a willingness to maintain the company's image and profile as it has been shaped by Franca, Grant, and Bruhn. But, like the other two companies discussed here, the National Ballet of Canada, once cushioned by Canada's comparatively progressive policy of arts funding" is now feeling a certain financial pinch.

So what do we learn from this saga of three disparate pioneers -- Ailey, Franca, and Joffrey? Partly I think it is that the past seventy years in American dance have offered opportunities for growth that will obviously never be repeated. You can only grow something in the desert once -- unless, of course, wholesale disaster destroys everything, leaving, the desert itself again the barren master. This is unlikely to happen. Yet, although the circumstances were indeed propitious for these pioneers - -and for all the others of whom these three are here simply bearing witness -- they did all share an idealism and, even more, a determination to get things done and not be discouraged when they were not done immediately.

The dance scene has indeed changed miraculously in the past seventy -- even thirty-years but it didn't happen just by a miracle. Constant understanding of and belief in what has happened, and constant vigilance in protecting the vision of these people who in their various fashions built up dance in North America -- and they number in the hundreds -- must be maintained if we are to keep what we have acquired and nourish what we have achieved. This is the problem for the future -- the new is always attractive, and it is easier to pioneer than to maintain, easier to explore than to cherish. The next seventy years of American dance will be different, but some of the same qualities of vision, endurance, and luck will certainly be required. Learn from these people. And watch these pages.