Robert Joffrey

Dancer

  • Born: December 24, 1930
  • Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
  • Died: March 25, 1988
  • Place of death: New York, New York

American choreographer

Joffrey, founder of the influential Joffrey Ballet, reached out to popular audiences by incorporating elements from modern, popular, and world dance traditions. He pushed the dance repertoire to emphasize male virtuosity and worked to preserve the early twentieth century choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky and Léonide Massine, among others.

Areas of achievement Dance, education

Early Life

The influential American choreographer Robert Joffrey (JAWF-ree) was born Abdullah Jaffa Anver Bey Khan in Seattle, Washington. His father, Dollha Anver Bey Jaffa Khan, was an Afghan immigrant who owned a restaurant, the Rainbow Chili Parlor. His mother, Marie Gallette, was a Northern Italian immigrant and an amateur concert violinist. Dollha Khan had changed his name to Joseph Joffrey after emigrating in 1916, and he met Marie shortly after she arrived in the United States. She worked for him as the restaurant’s cashier.

Joffrey, the couple’s only child, had health problems from early childhood, including asthma, bow legs, and severe tibial torsion, which caused his feet to turn in. He wore braces and was encouraged by doctors to exercise; he first took up boxing, but by the age of ten he had persuaded his parents to let him study dance at the studio above the restaurant. He began with ballroom and tap dancing and took his first ballet lesson a year later. At the age of fifteen, he began studying with Mary Ann Wells, a Seattle teacher who combined ballet with modern dance instruction. Wells’s school offered a broad education in dance and deportment; students studied European folk dance and etiquette as well as the classical and modern repertoire.

Although he was short for a male dancer, at five feet four inches, Joffrey excelled under Wells’s tutelage. He began performing minor roles with the renowned European troupe Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which frequently performed in Seattle, and was excited by the creative influence Sergei Diaghilev had over the company. At age seventeen Joffrey announced his intention to his teacher to start his own company one day.

Life’s Work

In the mid-1940’s, Joffrey met his lifelong partner, Gerald Arpino. Their mothers had been friends in Italy. Arpino, who had been stationed in Seattle with the U.S. Coast Guard, looked up his mother’s friend. Marie Joffrey sent Arpino to meet her son, who was in class with Ivan Novikoff at his School of Russian-American Ballet. Noticing his build, Novikoff dragged Arpino into the class, pushing him into his first plie right there in the studio. Naturally talented, Arpino immediately fell in love with ballet and not long after fell in love with Joffrey. Arpino frequently ran away from his ship to take classes and spend time with Joffrey; they lived together in the Joffrey family residence until 1948, when they moved to New York City. Although their romantic involvement ended shortly after the move, they remained close friends and artistic collaborators, living together platonically for the remainder of Joffrey’s life.

The early years in New York were eventful. Joffrey danced with Roland Petit’s Les Ballets de Paris and began teaching at the American Ballet Theatre School (ABTS) in 1949. He took on additional classes at New York’s High School of Performing Arts, quickly becoming an immensely popular and respected teacher. On January 13, 1952, a corps of dancers performed a program of his choreography the first all-Joffrey performance, featuring Pas des Déesees, La Bal Masqué, Harpsichord Concerto, and Pierrot Lunaire at the 92nd Street Y. A year later, Joffrey quit ABTS and founded, with Arpino, the American Ballet Center in New York’s Greenwich Village. His onstage career ended that same year when he tore a ligament while performing with May O’Donnell and Company, and his attention turned fully toward building his own company from the core that had performed his works in 1952. By 1956, a touring company was established and signed with Columbia Artists Management. The company had its premiere performance in Frostburg, Maryland, on October 2, 1956.

The touring company, then known as the Robert Joffrey Theater Dancers, had seven consecutive annual tours to smaller venues around the United States. In 1960 the company became the Robert Joffrey Ballet, and its increasing popularity led to patronage from philanthropist Rebekah Harkness Kean. Kean began sponsoring the company in 1962, funding an immediate international tour to the Middle East and the Far East, and a tour to the Soviet Union the following year. They performed at the White House for President John F. Kennedy and completed another American tour. The relationship soured in 1964 when Harkness demanded Joffrey change the company’s name to the Harkness Ballet. Joffrey refused, and then disbanded the company, losing sets, rights to perform much of its repertoire, and any dancers who were contracted to Harkness. With remarkable resilience, he re-formed the company the following year at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York as the City Center Joffrey Ballet, replacing the New York City Ballet, which had recently moved to Lincoln Center.

Joffrey turned the routine working of the company over to Arpino, who became the associate director and chief choreographer, and concentrated on finding new talent, particularly guest choreographers to develop new material for the company. He also wanted to reconstruct the Ballet Russe repertoire. Joffrey made a rare return to choreographing on his own with Astarte, a 1968 psychedelic, Vietnam War-era modern ballet with a rock band in the orchestra pit. The ballet created a stir and appeared on the covers of both Time and Life magazines.

Joffrey gave Twyla Tharp her first-ever ballet commission, for Deuce Coupe (1970). Alvin Ailey, who in 1962 had choreographed Feast of Ashes for Joffrey and become the first modern dancer to choreograph a pointe ballet, returned to the troupe to develop the jazz ballet Mingus Dances (1971). In 1976, the company was the subject of the first episode of the Public Broadcasting Service series Dance in America, but the company, by then known as, simply, the Joffrey Ballet, was in financial trouble, and only through assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts was it able to continue. An association with the Music Center of Los Angeles made it the first bicoastal ballet company.

Joffrey died March 25, 1988, in New York. The official cause of death was respiratory and renal failure, but it is widely believed that Joffrey’s death was caused by complications from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Joffrey’s life partner, A. Aladar Marberger, with whom Joffrey had a relationship since the mid-1970’s, died from AIDS-related complications a few months after Joffrey. The manager of Manhattan’s Fischbach Gallery, Marberger was a gay activist and was open about his HIV infection. Joffrey, however, never admitted to being HIV-positive.

Joffrey was cremated. A portion of his remains was buried in New York’s Church of St. John the Divine, another portion was given to Arpino, and the remainder was scattered over the waters of Puget Sound in Washington State. Ownership of the Joffrey Ballet passed to Arpino, who moved the company to Chicago in 1995.

Significance

Although Joffrey and his ballet often faced critical attacks for appealing to popular audiences and for poor handling of the classical ballet vocabulary, Joffrey’s fusion of classical ballet, particularly the athletic Russian tradition, with indigenous American dance traditions became the future of dance. He choreographed numerous works featuring male dancers and is credited with increasing the number of men in the profession. His historically precise and theatrically compelling revivals of the dances of the Ballet Russe that he remembered from childhood, particularly the choreography of Léonide Massine and Vaslav Nijinsky, have preserved those works for future generations and are significant contributions to dance history.

Bibliography

Anawalt, Sasha. The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company. New York: Scribner, 1996. The only full-length biography of Joffrey, and a comprehensive history of the Joffrey ballet troupe.

Croce, Arlene. Afterimages. New York: Knopf, 1977. A collection of reviews and observations from a leading contemporary dance critic.

Dorris, George. “The Choreography of Robert Joffrey: A Preliminary Checklist.” Dance Chronicle 12, no. 1 (1989): 105-139. A chronology of choreography published by Joffrey.

Gruen, John. The Private World of Ballet. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Includes an interview with Joffrey that gives rare insight into his mind-set at the peak of his career.

Reagan, Ron. “Robert Joffrey, RIP.” National Review 40, no. 8 (April 29, 1988): 18. An obituary of Joffrey, written by the son also a dancer of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

Siegel, Marcia B. At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972. Siegel’s collection of essays includes a discussion of Joffrey’s reconstructions of Ballet Russe performances.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. A collection of critical reviews.

Solway, Diane. A Dance Against Time: The Brief, Brilliant Life of a Joffrey Dancer. New York: Pocket Books, 1994. This biography of Joffrey Ballet dancer Eddie Stierle, who died of AIDS-related complications at age twenty-three, paints a less-than-flattering picture of Joffrey.

1941-1970: October, 1956: Joffrey Founds His Ballet Company.

1971-2000: March 1, 1973: Tharp Stages Deuce Coupe for the Joffrey Ballet.