The Great Leap Forward

(See Cover)

Ah, ballet. Gossamer goddesses tippy-toeing through the glades. Princes bounding about like young stallions. And then, after a twitter of arabesques, the embrace. Ecstasy.

Ah, nuts, says Choreographer Robert Joffrey. "I look upon ballet as total theater. I want to attack all the senses. I want my dancers to express my thing, the now thing, good or bad." Performing at Manhattan's City Center last week, the Joffrey Ballet nightly gave eye-dazzling testimony to that credo.

Running, bounding, diving, vaulting, cartwheeling and somersaulting, a dozen bare-chested male dancers in royal-blue tights flung themselves across the stage like beanbags. Crazed clowns attacked a plastic bubble, which, inflating like a Zeppelin, devoured them alive. Minstrels strutted, samurai cut curlicues in the air. And while filmed images slithered across a billowing screen, a man and a woman simulated lovemaking as strobe lights flickered, spotlights raked the audience, and a raga-rock band screamed bloody murder.

Least Inhibited. Far out, flashy, mod, mind-binding--that is dance today, the most inventive and least inhibited of the lively arts. Not even the new cinema has done as much as dance has to free itself from the rules, cliches and conventions of the past. In the regal prime of classical ballet, the dancer's craft was devoted to polishing and perfecting an established series of formalized gestures; choreography was as structured as a French garden. Today, however, a ballerina may have to arch on point in one sequence, boogaloo in another, then writhe on the floor like a snake on the make.

Nor is choreography any longer an artistic handmaiden, subservient to the greater demands of score. In a reversal of precedence, music is now only one of many elements that contribute to the impact of dance, which is a matter of sight and sound as well as movement. In effect, the choreographer has become the Jack-of-all-arts--the direc tor of a new theatrical form that has a total design for total involvement.*

"The days of Swan Lake and Giselle are gone forever," says Brian Macdonald, the director of the Harkness Ballet. "Today's choreographer can choose any subject he likes." In ballet, the fairy-tale prince of yore is now more likely to be an uptight hippie blowing his mind on pot. Suicide, alienation, bigotry are all possible subjects for dance--as are cerebral abstractions or psychedelic nightmares. As for sex, the prettily stylized love gestures of romantic ballet have given way to body-blending duets that look like lovers' lanes in living color.

Looking Westward. The sets swing too--literally. They reflect the trend of multimedia dance, which means that moving scenery, lights, props, sound effects and film clips have all become an integral part of the choreography, as in Jeffrey's Astarte (see cover picture). Accompaniment ranges from full symphony orchestras and electronic yawping to jazz and, as in the case of Jerome Robbins' Moves, dead silence. Costuming can consist of tossing on anything that suits the moment or, as in Parades and Changes, performed by Ann Halprin's Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco, taking it all off and cavorting around in the buff (although they wrap themselves in reams of flesh-colored paper).

Significantly, the new mod movement in dance is a phenomenon that can be labeled MADE IN THE U.S.A. "American dance," admits Benjamin Harkarvy, co-director of the lively and inventive Netherlands Ballet, "is the most advanced and richest in choreographic development in the world today." With rare exceptions, Europe's great and historic ballet companies still operate pretty much in the shadow of Petipa and Fokine, and when they dare something new, they almost invariably look westward across the Atlantic for inspiration.

In particular, they look to the prime movers of the first generation of dance rebels: George Balanchine and Martha Graham. A onetime dancer with Diaghilev, Balanchine (TIME cover, Jan. 25, 1954) not only built the New York City Ballet into one of the world's great ensembles but also shaped a new style of classicism that blended traditional movement with the exuberance of the American spirit. Far to the artistic left, Pennsylvania-born Martha Graham almost singlehanded molded the modern dance, in which carefully formulated postures of ballet gave way to expressive writhings of existential psychodrama.

The new concept of dance as total theater is an eclectic hybrid: it borrows what it needs from classical ballet, modern dance, jazz, rock 'n' roll and pop art --and goes on from there. In recent years, it has found its expression in scores of versatile companies: not only the Joffrey dancers, but also the Harkness Ballet, the troupes founded by Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, Alwin Nikolais, Merce Cunningham and others (see adjacent color pages). Uncommitted to principle or precedent, these organizations--and the dancer-choreographers behind them--have begun to have an impact on their masters. Balanchine's newest ballet, Metastaseis & Pithoprakta (TIME, Jan. 26), for example, is as strikingly original as anything that the new troupes do.

Jumping for Joy. What makes the boldness of the new choreography possible is the exhilarating brio of American dancers. Envious European ballet masters concede that in terms of physique and stamina they are the world's best. The girls are lean and leggy, with an air of windswept prairie about them. The boys are tall, sturdy-limbed, and have the athletic bearing of flanker backs. Their attack is clean, crisp, and as wide open as the Yucca Flat. They jump for joy. Arcing skyward, legs extended and arms pointing the course, they seem to be saying "Wheee!"

In the wings, urging dancers to higher leaps and wilder arabesques, is a corps of inventive and unfettered choreographers, for whom dance is not so much an art as a way of life. Robert Jeffrey, 38, for example, has been in love with dance since he was nine. Christened Abdullah Jaffa Anver Bey Khan by his immigrant Afghan father and Italian mother, he started taking ballet lessons as a strengthening way to ward off asthma attacks. At 18, convinced that dance was his profession, he hopped a ride to Manhattan, and outstepped 200 candidates for a job as soloist with Roland Petit's Ballet de Paris.

After one season with Petit, Jeffrey said "goodbye to union wages" and set out to lay the groundwork for a company of his own. He taught by day, took classes by night and, beginning at sunrise, held rehearsals for his own ballets, which were performed at the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A. In 1952, he rented a loft in a Greenwich Village building that formerly housed the American Communist Party and, in the best spirit of free enterprise, opened Robert Jeffrey's American Ballet Center.

Coke on Wax. By 1956, Jeffrey had created enough of a repertory to launch seven of his dancers on a tour of one-night stands in 23 Southern towns. They traveled like gypsies in a borrowed station wagon and a rented trailer crammed with hand-me-down costumes from Balanchine and discarded scenery from the Metropolitan Opera. They danced in movie theaters, veterans' halls and gymnasiums; music was provided by a borrowed tape recorder or one of the dancers who dashed to a piano between his numbers. To ensure their footing, they often had to sprinkle a tacky coating of Coca-Cola on freshly waxed stages, many of which were so cramped that when it came time for a lift, the ballerinas would disappear into the flies.

The prospect of prosperity came in 1962, when Standard Oil Heiress Rebekah Harkness, a longtime ballet buff, invited the company to her 49-room ocean-front mansion in Watch Hill, R.I., to initiate a summer dance workshop. Lady Bountiful they called her, and so it seemed during the next two years when she helped finance the successful Jeffrey tours of the Near East and Russia. As time went on, however, Lady Bountiful began to seem more like Lady Macbeth to Jeffrey. She wanted more say in artistic matters and insisted on changing the company's name to her own. Jeffrey refused, and so they parted. Broke and unable to offer his danc ers any future, he lost all but two of his 26-member troupe, 14 of them to the newly formed Harkness Ballet.

Anguished Recesses. Jeffrey huddled with two friends who had helped him build the original troupe: Choreographer Gerald Arpino, 37, and Business Manager Alex Ewing, 37. Over the next year, in a kind of freewheeling fiscal pas de trois, they raised $165,000 and landed two Ford grants totaling $165,000. Ewing, a Yale graduate, arranged for a one-week tryout season at the City Center. Arpino created two new ballets. Jeffrey, meanwhile, hand-picked the best 20 dancers in his school, and rehearsed them until 10 every night for nearly seven months. When the revitalized Jeffrey Ballet finally made its City Center debut in March 1966, it scored such a resounding critical success that it was quickly installed as the theater's resident company.

The troupe has since expanded its annual budget to $1,500,000 and its repertory from six to 30 ballets. Four works donated by Balanchine--Pas de Trois, Pas de Dix, Scotch Symphony and Donizetti Variations--form a solid classical foundation. But what gives shape and personality to the company's artistic profile is the choreography of Arpino and Jeffrey. Arpino is a chameleon. In Clowns, he flashes the frozen, mocking smile of the eternal Punchinello, the sad slapstick hero bested by a world beyond his control. In Viva Vivaldi!, one of the finest examples of bravura dancing ever fashioned, he is all glitter and grin, allowing his dancers to free their inventiveness in a blur of twinkling allegros.

Like Balanchine, whom he greatly admires, Arpino is a choreographic virtuoso. Vivaldi and Secret Places, a pas de deux set to a Mozart piano concerto, are neoclassic ballets of almost pristine purity. Yet he can also dramatize the anguished recesses of the mind. In Incubus, the scariest of his dark fantasies, a Freudian slip of a girl tumbles into an abyss of madness, where she is tormented by leering ghosts out of her childhood.

Joffrey's most spectacular contribution to the repertory, Astarte, is a $60,000 monument to multimedia--a wild, whirling riot of sight and sound. The distorted movie screen, four projectors, screeching music (by the Crome Syrcus) and flashing lights are designed "to involve people, to go beyond the proscenium." Way beyond. The lead male dancer, stripped to his shorts and having spent his passion on the moon goddess Astarte, exits through a rear door of the theater in full view of the audience, while one of the cameras shows his progress down 56th Street.

Never Let Down. Joffrey also ranks with Balanchine as one of the nation's most gifted--and most demanding--teachers of dance. He currently conducts his school in a converted Greenwich Village chocolate factory, where his 6-ft. by 10-ft. office is appropriately painted a kind of off-Hershey. On his desk is a bronze bust of Napoleon, a symbolic gift from his students. At 5 ft. 6 in., he looks the role--and sometimes feels it. "You must never let down!" he duns a student. "No day should be wasted! Every minute, every step is precious!"

The thrust of Joffrey's teaching is "to tune the body so that any choreographer, modern or classical, can do what he wants with it." The method, in short, is "to learn classical technique--then forget it." The best way to do that is to get down on the floor in the modern way and "dig in and search." For reasons of "mental independence," Joffrey separates the boys into classes that stress the he-man aspects of stamina, big jumps and multiple turns. So effective is his teaching that Rudolf Nureyev, when he is in town, as well as principal dancers of the New York City Ballet, stop by at the chocolate factory for extra lessons.

Nymph on a Gambol. Unlike Balanchine, who drills his girls until they look like so many identical windup dolls, Joffrey encourages his dancers to express their own personalities. Feathery Lisa Bradley, 20, is a fragilely beautiful study in symmetry; fiery Luis Fuente, 20, is built like a blockbuster and has the same impact; sinuous Trinette Singleton, 19, dances like a sensuous nymph out for a gambol; and then there is airborne Robert Blankshine, 19, who has mastered the neat little trick of sailing into the wings as he kicks the back of his head. They all help give the Joffrey Ballet its hallmark: go power plus grow power.

In spirit if not in style, the Joffrey troupe owes an intellectual debt to the work of Balanchine. At least four other companies have been created by former Martha Graham dancers, who nonetheless reject as much as they borrow from the grand guru of gyration. Not that she minds. "I am particularly pleased," she says, "that there are no replicas of me in the field. Everyone should be doing something else, meeting their own challenge." In other words, echoing the hippie maxim, do your own thing. That they have--and their disparate styles might well be summed up as Tuned-in, Turned-On, Dropped-Out and Flipped-Out.

>PAUL TAYLOR, 38, is a tall, block-shouldered Tuned-in from Pittsburgh who spans the gap between classical and modern like a colossus. He had his fling at the far-out, once stood stark still onstage for four minutes (Dance Observer responded by running a review that consisted of four inches of blank space). But today he also has a bit of Mr. B. in his,bonnet. Aureole is a freshly pressed version of a washed-out, frilly "white ballet," in which his dancers interweave flurries of mincing steps with great swooping glides without a seam showing. In Orbs, a kind of astronaughty tour of life and love on the planets, he injects moments of broad, bawdy humor, into a probing of the epic theme of God, man and nature. Cosmic it may be, but he gets through.

>ALVIN AILEY, 37, is a Turned-On with a streak of the revivalist in him.

"Look!" he tells his Negro brethren. "Look what you've made. Look how beautiful it is. You made it out of adversity. Be proud of it!" He is talking about their cultural heritage, and when he celebrates it in dance, it is something to be proud of. In Revelations, a searingly personal statement based on Negro spirituals, his dancers evoke all the yearning, despair, anger and, finally, bright hope of a people who will overcome. Ailey already has; such powerful, nonethnic dances as his Feast of Ashes and Ariadne mark him as one of the most richly gifted talents in dance. And he has the receipts to prove it. Two years ago his twelve-member troupe grossed $29,000; this year it will top $250,000.

>MERGE CUNNINGHAM, 46, Dropped-Out from the Graham company 21 years ago because of her "psychological drift." He didn't want a mother figure, he wanted Dada instead. Ever since, he has been one jump beyond the avantgarde. He was among the first American choreographers to use musique concrete, the first to leave the structure of a ballet to chance. He rehearses in silence so that his dancers will not be influenced by the music. Themes? "Supply your own," he says. Yet for all his seeming whimsy, Cunningham is a dancer and choreographer with serious intentions. He wants to take chances, shift the angles of balance, create new patterns that will be as distinctly different as the mobiles of Alexander Calder.

Rhythmically and spatially, like commuters crisscrossing in a train depot, his dancers move independently of one another. The effect is often riveting. Summerspace evokes moods and memories of sunshiny days by the sea; How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run, danced to the accompaniment of Composer John Cage sitting onstage, smoking, drinking champagne and reading aloud from his memoirs, is zany, true, and touching all at once.

>ALWIN NIKOLAIS, 56, is a Flipped-Out, plugged into a high-voltage fantasy world where stage and sound effect share equal billing with the dancers. In Vaudeville of the Elements, figures in bulging fluorescent balloons waddle and contract like pregnant accordians. One dancer wrestles with a space-age cobweb. Others, with illuminated lampshades on their hands and feet, do a close-order drill. Now the dancers are drunken caterpillars, now they are partnering their own distorted shadows. All the while, nine speakers ringing the auditorium sizzle, crackle and explode with electronic music; twelve slide projectors and 30 spots splash colors across the stage like an aurora borealis gone amuck. Nikolais, an ex-puppeteer who creates the music as well as the costumes and lighting for his dances, calls these trips into the twilight zones his "esthetic Rorschach." Some of Nikolais' Flipped-Out spirit is reflected in the work of one of his dancers, Murray Louis, whose Junk Dances is a kind of op art satire in motion.

Hovering between and beyond these styles are the Hung-Up, Freaked-Out and Put-Down. Ann Halprin, 47, wife of San Francisco Architect Lawrence Halprin, is a Hung-Up who likes to hang up her dance-workshop students on a cargo net and, shifting their positions in the webbing, stage a kind of spider-and-fly routine. Erick Hawkins, 54, Graham's former husband, is a Freaked-Out who finds Method in the madness of portraying such things as a pine tree and a shy squash. His movements, though, are often so blandly repetitive that he would do better to imitate a dancer. Anna Sokolow, 55, is a Put-Down whose searing, bleak dances are a condemnation of society's ills. Try as she may, she can't seem to manage a smile. Last year she set out to strike an upbeat note in Time Plus 7 by having teen-agers frugging to jazz; in the end, she had the boys straggle out in Army coats with bloody bandages wrapped around their heads. "I tried to end it happily," she moans, "but how could I with everything that's happening in the world today?"

Out of Indecision. To be sure, not all --or even most--of American dance is on the wiggy fringe. In its own clean, frostily abstract ballets, as well as in classical standards such as the Nutcracker, the New York City Ballet is the peerless pro. Ranking not too far behind is the American Ballet Theater, founded (in 1940) and largely financed by Lucia Chase. Emerging strongly now from a gloomy decade of indecision and decline, Ballet Theater has the most balanced repertory in the country; its full-length Swan Lake ranks with the world's best.

Philadelphia has what amounts to a Balanchine road company in the Pennsylvania Ballet, founded by three of his former students. Rapidly shaping a style all their own, the Pennsylvanians scored a critical hit recently with the world premiere of John Butler's Ceremony, a frank, sexy study of fear and alienation. Even more ambitious is the Harkness Ballet, which now has ten former Jeffrey dancers to count on, at least two soloists (long-haired Lawrence Rhodes and sultry Brunilda Ruiz) of star magnitude, and the staggering total of 20 newly commissioned dances in its repertory. Still another inventive company is the one founded by Mexican-born Jose Limon, whose choreography--as in The Winged, an hour-long evocation of birds in all their variety--blends the psychological expressiveness of Martha Graham and the fiery intensity of flamenco.

Beyond this galaxy of talent, there is even more unmistakable evidence that the U.S. is in the midst of what amounts to a resurgence of interest in dance. A decade ago, there were only 75 dance companies in the U.S. Now there are at least 450 professional and semiprofessional companies.

The modern-minded National Ballet of Washington, D.C., performed 26 different dances last year while building its season to 94 performances. During its 45-week season, the Utah Civic Ballet plays to an audience of more than 90,000. Like many regional troupes, the Cincinnati Civic Ballet, which has 475 students presently in its school, imports such stellar guests as the New York City Ballet's Violetta Verdy and Edward Villella. It is only fitting. As part of a vast farm system for the larger companies, Cincinnati supplied Balanchine with his reigning ballerina, Suzanne Farrell.

Beyond the Elks. Not even the smaller cities are immune. There are four dance companies in Tacoma, Wash., three in Jacksonville, Fla., one in Huntsville, Ala. In Alaska, the Anchorage Civic Ballet has graduated from the Elks Club to the West High School auditorium, where its performances of Nutcracker attracted sell-out crowds of over 2,000.

Dance has also arrived in suburbia, where leotards and toe shoes are beginning to replace the piano as a culture symbol. Manhattan has 70 dance schools, greater Washington, D.C., has 60. Says one Manhattan teacher, surveying the proliferating schools: "They're like bookies --there's one in every basement." Each September, when Balanchine's School of American Ballet holds auditions, the line of hopefuls stretches around the block. The few who are accepted are properly proud and even a little haughty. Says Nanette Glushak, 17, of Manhattan: "We saw a movie of Pav lova the other day, and I can tell you that she was pretty bad. I don't think she'd get accepted here today. She just wasn't good enough."

Sissy Stigma. Nijinsky, though, might have had a good chance. While the U.S. is developing more female dancers than it can productively use, there is still a dearth of male talent. Unlike Denmark, where women curtsy in the street when a ranking male dancer passes by, or Russia, where Bolshoi stars are accorded the same respect given to cosmonauts, the stigma of sissy still lingers in the U.S. Many dance schools offer free scholarships to any boy who will don tights; others patrol athletic clubs to recruit prospects. But the climate is changing: the ratio of girls to boys taking up dance, once 50 to 1, is now only 15 to 1. Even more important, the percentage of homosexuals is diminishing too. "When I first started," admits Dancer Paul Sutherland, "about 90% of the men were queer; now the ratio is about 60 to 40."

Feet in Toe Shoes. One nagging problem is, as always, money. Despite growing national interest, most of the 40 or 50 professional companies in the U.S. are direly pressed to meet their weekly expenses of $10,000 to $100,000. Production costs are prohibitive; the American Ballet Theater, which carries 58 dancers, plus 38 musicians and technicians on tour, plays to packed houses but still loses $10,000 every week it sets its feet on stage. Just to keep those feet in Capezio toe shoes ($9 a pair) costs $1,000 a week.

As a result, the history of many troupes has been distinction verging on extinction. Fortunately, the Ford Foundation had a better idea. Since 1963, it has given a total of nearly $9,000,000 to major dance groups, while the National Endowment for the Arts has divvied up another $1,000,000. Says National Arts Council President Roger Stevens: "Dance needs money more than any of the other arts. A writer needs pencil and paper, a painter needs canvas and paints. But a choreographer needs bodies, and they have to be paid." They are not paid very well; while a top Balanchine star such as Villella or Melissa Hayden can make $20,000 a year, the girls in the New York City's corps de ballet average $7,000. Top pay in the Joffrey troupe is $10,000. Most of the ballet masters see some sort of state or Government aid--a commonplace in Europe--as their only prospect for solvency.

Total Cinema? In spite of its financial problems, insists Joffrey Business Manager Ewing, "the dance world is by far the most creative of all the performing arts in America today." Ewing's boast is not just hyperbole. Last year there were at least 100 premieres of new dance works in the U.S.

Since its founding, the Harkness Ballet alone has commissioned more music scores than any U.S. orchestra except the New York Philharmonic. One sign of dance's expanding horizon is the interest of artists in exploring its possibilities. Painters Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella have collaborated with Merce Cunningham; Underground Film Maker Ed Emshwiller is filming dancers in what may be a dance-dominated "total cinema."

Even more telling, perhaps, is the fact that the audiences flocking to dance performances these days are getting more youthful all the time. Raised on TV and movies, a visually oriented younger generation finds something in the spectacle of the dance that turns on the mind's eye. Following a recent performance in Manhattan of John Butler's Ceremony, two flower children stopped the choreographer on the street. "You Butler?" said one. "Saw your ballet. You tell it like it is, man." Says Butler: "It was the best compliment I've ever been paid."

*The major reason why TIME, which for 44 years covered dance as part of its Music section, now considers it better suited to the Theater section.

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