Setting the company image.

This excerpt from an upcoming book on the Joffrey Ballet describes a crucial period in the troupe's City Center years during the sixties. By Sasha Anawalt

The artistic director is responsible for the image of the company," Robert Joffrey said to Clive Barnes. "For this will represent his taste, what he wants, sees, and imagines." To Joffrey and press agent Isadora Bennett, image was the exciting clay, the positive material, the real thing. Joffrey found various partners in this enterprise, but in addition to Gerald Arpino, probably no one so important to him over the years as Herbert Migdoll. He was a young photographer who had worked in the Museum of Modern Art's graphics department and who was, in 1966, the art director of Dance Magazine.

Migdoll had seen the Joffrey Ballet's 1965 performance in Central Park. It was not his first ballet encounter. For a few years, he had been experimenting with time-lapse photography at City Center performances and had tried to present his portfolio to Lincoln Kirstein.

"Mr. Kirstein, I would very much like to show you my carousel of slides. I heard you are interested in art," Migdoll recalled saying.

"It's a lie," Kirstein retorted. "Don't believe anyone."

Edwin Denby, who occupied a house in the Provincetown dunes where Migdoll had also spent his vacation, suggested he try the Joffrey Ballet. "They're just starting, you're just starting, go take pictures of them at the Delacorte in the Park," advised Denby.

Migdoll followed his recommendation, and when he saw Arpino's Viva Vivaldi! and Olympics, he identified right away with the choreographer's perception of movement. "Until Vivaldi! and Olympics I was watching ballet from the standpoint of photo source material, not from the standpoint of choreographic excellence," he said. "But you couldn't help see the ballet anyway and respond to it. Previously, ballet had never made sense to me. The men looked funny, as if they were wearing long johns. But in Vivaldi! the Spanish element made the tights almost look like bullfighter kinds of things, and I had none of that sense of them looking funny. I liked the way these ballets moved. I responded viscerally to Arpino's sense of movement."

Migdoll spent the Joffrey's first City Center season smuggling his 35mm camera and tripod into the theater, snapping photos from the balcony on the sly. He had Joffrey's permission, but not Isadora Bennett's, because she already used Arnold Eagle, her photographer, and Fred Fehl, City Center's photographer. "One of mine's enough," she quipped to Joffrey. Bennett, working in conjunction with Angelo Casalini, City Center's manager, instructed the ushers to throw Migdoll out if they ever caught him shooting.

One night, while setting up for a performance, he thought he had been spotted. He folded up his tripod, jammed it into his shopping bag, dashed backstage, and ran out onto the fire escape. He scampered to the second floor and through an open window into Joffrey's empty dressing room, where he concealed his equipment. Then he crept upstairs to hide himself in a bathroom.

Outside the door he could hear the ushers asking if anybody had seen the "thief," who had vanished onto the fire escape. Four police officers had been called to the scene. In the pandemonium, the dancers were told to take their valuables with them into the wings; feet scuttled by Migdoll. Nobody thought to check the bathroom. During the first intermission, Migdoll returned to Joffrey's dressing room. When Joffrey appeared, he asked, "Herbert, did you have anything to do with that escapade? That was you, wasn't it?"

"Oh, no, no, that wasn't me."

Joffrey laughed and moved aggressively toward engineering Migdoll's appointment as the official company photographer and graphic designer, a position that did not exist at any other American ballet company. As part of his future duties, Migdoll would design the souvenir programs with Joffrey. "When Bob presided over the souvenir program production, he became the editor in chief and worked with as much care and energy on it as he did any other element of the company," Migdoll said. "He wasn't concerned with the identification content. He wasn't concerned with documenting. He was concerned with his audience having an exciting object to take home."

Every season through 1988, Joffrey and Migdoll jointly selected a photograph that summed up the company. The image went on the souvenir program cover, the Playbill cover, the posters, and, in time, on window cards, subscription-series information flyers, T-shirts, and mugs.

In spring 1966, the image was a time-lapse photograph of Lisa Bradley in Pas des Deesses, rising from fourth position to arabesque on pointe. Or possibly the reverse: moving from arabesque to fourth. In a single frame, the before, middle, and after of Bradley's movement are visible. "The positions are contained, linked by the blur," explained Migdoll. Throughout the fall 1966 season's souvenir program there are black-and-white fugues of dancers pursued by tracers--the ghosts of their arms, legs, feet, and heads. The blurry dance photo, suggesting a rush of action, often with a crisp, isolated head or foot as its focal point, became the City Center Joffrey Ballet's--and Migdoll's--signature.

Migdoll wanted to provide a sense of seeing the ballet; Joffrey responded enthusiastically because he wanted the company's image to be that of a troupe of movers--young, energetic dancers who never seemed to stop--such as the ones performing Arpino's Viva Vivaldi! and Olympics.

Ballet mistress and teacher Rochelle Zide, discussing Arpino's ballets, said, "The subtle does not exist for Jerry. It didn't exist for him as a dancer. It doesn't exist for him as a choreographer. With Jerry there was sensationalism and exploitation of the human body. If you could do an arabesque of ninety degrees, he wanted it one hundred twenty. If you did it at one twenty, he'd want it at one sixty. As a dancer he did not tend to be outrageous in terms of campiness, but he also did not hold back anything onstage. This characteristic found its way into his ballets. He choreographed to please."

Arpino's racy, crowd-pleasing side was matched by his brooding, loner self. The soulful, dramatic persona that produced Ropes and Incubus--and would go on to choreograph Nightwings and The Clowns--also possibly stemmed from Arpino, the early Joffrey dancer. In 1956 he had played the demented son in Joffrey's Within Four Walls, and in 1959 he had taken on the role of the lonely newspaper boy in Dirk Sanders's Yesterday's Papers and the blind man in Francisco Moncion's Pastorale. Arpino's significant roles were disturbed outcasts and misfits. Such psychological material was later absorbed into his choreography. In his ballets Ropes, Incubus, Nightwings, and The Clowns, the central characters were haunted strangers, romantics bearing the burden of the world on their shoulders.

In 1966, Joffrey masterminded the company while hiding behind Arpino and Migdoll. The thing he seemed to fear most was the possibility that he would be seen as just an ordinary man. Various critics picked up on Joffrey's emphasis on imagecreating: "The Joffrey trades in romanticized images of a society, images that stress the way we would like ourselves to be, rather than in piercing observations of an artist about the way we actually are," Marcia B. Siegel wrote. "People go to the Joffrey not for subtlety or challenge but for clarity, craft, and for a look into the magic mirror of their illusions."

"To me, dance is everything that's good," Joffrey said. "Everything that's beautiful, everything that's difficult. I couldn't exist without dance. It's my whole life." His company's illusion was an honest one. Every angle, shade, tone, and form had precedent in the original 1956 Robert Joffrey Theatre Dancers. His aesthetic did not differ from his ethics; there was a bit of the charlatan and a keeper of secrets--but all subordinated to the service of a theater man.

Morton Baum, president of City Center, demanded that Joffrey himself yield a new work each season. The company was not called the Arpino Ballet, Baum argued; so far, Joffrey had buffeted Baum's pleas. Then, when fall 1966 approached, he surprised everyone and promised a world premiere--his first since Gamelan in 1962, which he would also be reworking for the season. Joffrey also announced plans for unveiling six additional ballets new to his repertoire during the threeweek engagement, September 6-25. Balanchine had offered him his Donizetti Variations--Balanchine would work with them during final rehearsals--and Ruthanna Boris's Cakewalk. Boris herself would stage the minstrel-show parody that she had contributed to New York City Ballet in 1951. Joffrey solicited more choreography from Gloria Contreras, who had participated in his very first workshop in 1961. She agreed to stage Moncayo I and Vitalitas. But perhaps the news that gladdened him most was that Eugene Loring had agreed to return to the studio. Known as the American legend who choreographed Billy the Kid, Loring had not generated anything in New York for a major company in over a decade. Anticipation in dance circles was that he might produce another classic. Loring had chosen a Los Angeles composer, Gerald Goldsmith, as his collaborator on These Three, a ballet based on the true story of the three civil rights workers who had been found murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.

Arpino was also preparing a premiere, Nightwings, to a commissioned score by John La Montaine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer. The ballet would be for Lisa Bradley and Michael Uthoff, who had married on March 5, 1965. Arpino engaged Ming Cho Lee to design the sets (as he had for Sea Shadow and Olympics), and Willa Kim to design the costumes. In 1976, Ming Cho Lee, famous for his stage and opera designs and for his work for Martha Graham, explained why he was interested in the Joffrey-Arpino vision: "There's an excitement. They're not ashamed of doing a little bit of showoff, like Viva Vivaldi! They're very human. Of course, I began to realize that a good deal of it was Jerry Arpino, because he was fantastic at showing off the dancing. He was easy to work with . . . He had tremendous energy. And the company was close-knit. Everyone enjoyed working with each other. They were not establishment."

Joffrey paced the bridge between the ages of materialism and Aquarius. He was not exactly a card-carrying member of the counterculture, but he absorbed its impact and discovered a rationale for the aesthetics that informed his company. Shaping his company as a director, he followed in the path of such choreographers as Jerome Robbins and substituted blue jeans for swan's feathers and T-shirts for sylph's wings, the democratic American middle class for the king's imperial court. Eclecticism preexisted at American Ballet Theatre, but unlike ABT's directors, Joffrey did not view his troupe as a vast museum full of permanent collections. And unlike ABT's directors, he was not producing the nineteenth-century classics--he looked to the past only as far as the memories of original cast members or choreographers permitted.

Starting with Persephone in 1952 and with his protocompany dating from the same time, his purpose was to integrate contemporary dance and music makers and position them to work with contemporary designers, stretching their ideas on his dancers like canvas on a frame. Joffrey's vision for a company was to provide opportunities for collaboration. Still using Diaghilev as his directorial model, his intellectual impetus for the City Center Joffrey Ballet was the same one that in 1959 had put Dirk Sanders's cutting-edge Yesterday's Papers on the same program as the first American staging of Antony Tudor's Soiree Musicale, on the same program with Francisco Moncion's Pastorale. This eclecticism defined Joffrey, whether he was the choreographer or not, and stimulated the artists involved.

New ballets were unpredictable. Joffrey could not screen them beforehand. He had to trust the people he asked, and often he tried to hedge his bets by bringing the choreographers in early enough so they could teach. Ruthanna Boris arrived in the summer of 1966 wearing her white Helanca V-neck leotard with a black bra underneath and banging her drum to teach the counts to Cakewalk. Loring concentrated on These Three, assisted by Margo Sappington. Rochelle Zide and Joffrey rehearsed Joffrey's new staging of Gamelan and everything but the Arpino repertoire, which landed on Jim Howell.

The spirit of experimentation permeated not only Joffrey's company but also his school. Hector Zaraspe was instrumental on Joffrey's teaching faculty, preparing company members out of the apprenticeship pool. One day, Zaraspe wanted to show off to some of his friends the number of exciting choreographers who were rehearsing. What they found behind the studio doors said a lot about the company. Noel Mason captured Zaraspe's tour for his guests in a letter:

Mr. Zaraspe took them upstairs telling them how versatile the company was and how everyone did everything. They looked into one studio and there was Margo Sappington practicing Olympics! Looked into the next studio and there was Bobby Blankshine producing fouettes (in my shoes, I might add) to the Black Swan music.

New to the group of apprentices in 1966 was Christian Holder, whom Joffrey had plucked from the High School of Performing Arts. Sixteen years old, six feet tall, and raised on dance, Holder was born in Trinidad to Bosco and Sheila Holder. Shortly after Holder was born, Bosco and Sheila emigrated to London, leaving Holder with his grandparents. Two and a half years later Holder joined his parents. He performed with their Bosco Holder and His Caribbean Dancers in nightclubs and cabarets and he studied ballet and earned a scholarship to the Martha Graham School, which took him to New York City in 1964. Dance, intense and majestic dance, was young Holder's food and air and, when Joffrey saw him, Joffrey instantly offered him an apprenticeship and persuaded him to leave Graham. (At the same school concert where he saw Holder, Joffrey had also seen Gary Chryst and offered him a scholarship to the company school. Together with Rebecca Wright, Dermot Burke, and Francesca Corkle, Holder and Chryst defined the next Joffrey Ballet generation.)

Apprentices fell under the jurisdiction of Lillian Moore and were taught, as well, by several important additions to the staff: Perry Brunson from the New York Ballet Russe school; Maria Grandy, who had performed with Joffrey during the 1957-58 tour; Meredith Baylis (by February 1967); and Zaraspe. Apprentices literally apprenticed roles in the main company. They were not--emphatically not--company members. They danced the small roles and watched the major ones from the wings.

In the summer of 1966, the dancers declared mutiny. It all began during a run-through of Gamelan for the conductor. A disagreement between Richard Gain and Arpino over choreographic accuracy had exploded into a full-scale shouting match. The entire company refused at that point to continue the rehearsal unless Joffrey intervened and proclaimed which person was doing the right step. The dancers gathered in a fifthfloor studio at the school and shut the door, locked the apprentices out, and demanded Joffrey's presence. Joffrey arrived, livid, white-lipped, and "screaming and upset," said Michael Uthoff. The dancers told him that they had gone through Gamelan again and again--and it was not an easy ballet, with the men lifting and carrying the women so much that it seemed the women's feet never touched the ground. Not once had Joffrey been present to observe their progress. They threatened to quit if he did not attend his own rehearsals.

"Joffey was in shock. He wanted us to calm down. He said we were going to be successful," said Dennis Nahat. "We said we couldn't be, since we weren't getting the training we needed. We needed him in the studio. He was angry that we had the power to confront him."

Nahat suggested that, overwhelmed with bureaucracy, Joffrey was running the company from the office rather than the studio, and the company had diverged from the classical direction without his awareness. By challenging him, the dancers had unwittingly forced him to acknowledge the disparity between his vision for the company and the reality. Explained Nahat:

"He was creating a modern company, a great company, with a whole different sensibility than what he thought. He was a classicist. He was not a modernist. When he taught class, everything was fine. He would bring his lithographs and talk to the dancers about what he saw, what he thought was good dancing, and what we should be as people--not as dancers. He was trying to replicate the image of the Kirov Ballet. Maybe his company with Larry Rhodes and Helgi Tomasson before us could have done that, but the company he now had was a company composed of all different freaks of nature. Including myself. We came from different corners of the world. We were trained in ballet, but the repertoire Joffrey was staging was not a classical repertoire, and he did not have the teachers in place to make us classical."

"Here was this incredible man who could have made all of us into much better dancers, if he had just spent time with the company," said Uthoff. "He took me once for forty-five minutes and worked on Pas des Deesses. In forty-five minutes, I completely changed. I gave a performance the next day in Toronto that got a review like no other."

Joffrey responded to the dancers' threatened mutiny by rehearsing them in his ballets Pas des Deesses and Gamelan for seven hours the next day. He taught more frequently, he addressed his weaknesses, and he let others on his staff chastise the dancers for having questioned his authority. Immediately after the incident, Edith D'Addario, presently the director of the company school, made many of the apprentices feel that they should not speak to any of the dancers--Dennis Nahat in particular--who had most vociferously threatened to quit. She "discouraged us from talking to Dennis because he was a 'traitor,'" said Holder, adding, "you felt that your loyalty was questioned [by D'Addario, Jim Howell, and Arpino] if you were seen fraternizing with 'them.'"

Nahat, who had injured himself and was teaching at the school, was dismissed from the company and school by D'Addario. He developed into a memorable ABT character dancer. Perhaps his talent may have been too special for the small Joffrey fiefdom, or at least it was too rebellious, and Joffrey, rather than confronting Nahat, allowed D'Addario to do the dismissing. It seemed an act of sheer cowardice and sent a chill through many of the other dancers, who had thought more highly of their leader.

On this issue they were in agreement, but the troupe's members were in most respects a socially divided lot. An invisible line fell roughly between those who were virgins and those who were not; those who drank and those who did not; those who did drugs and those who did not; and those who embraced D'Addario as a kindly mother figure and those who hoped she would keep her distance. They amused each other in the extreme and were, perhaps, more selfcentered than the earlier Joffrey dancers, but no less desirous of pleasing Joffrey. Their point of agreement: they cared about making Joffrey look good. They respected the way he made them look. He had an eye and a standard that they unconditionally trusted. Even Nahat had left with good words for Joffrey: "He was wonderful to be around."

Yet the Gamelan confrontation had failed to resolve several problems. One was Jim Howell. He was responsible for rehearsing Arpino's ballets; therefore, the dancers spent most of their time with him. But his experience as a professional performer was limited. He had practically danced only in Arpino works. He knew less about ballet than they did. He also committed the ballet master's crime of playing favorites, awarding good roles to dancers who were not ready for them, but whom he wanted as friends.

Other reasons for the dancers' dissatisfaction concerned the no-star, allstar Joffrey system, which struck many as small-minded and discourteous. The dancers argued that the so-called democratic hierarchy also contributed to physical injuries. If a dancer had to perform a lead in one ballet, then switch to the corps in the next, then perform a modern role, then a classical part, all on the same program (which is what Joffrey would require), then he or she would break down.

But every company has its stages: birth, infancy, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. The Joffrey Ballet was in its adolescence, and like a teenager, on September 6, 1966, it snapped out of the bad mood, acted as though nothing were wrong, and jumped into City Center Joffrey Ballet's inaugural season as though it were going on a date in a red Corvette.

Sasha Anawalt was dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and station KCRW in Santa Monica; she writes for Dance Magazine and other publications. The Joffrey Ballet is her first book.