The Great Leap Forward

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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.