Kathleen Thielhelm and Fabrice Calmels in a pose from George Balanchine’s Apollo in front of Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor, Millennium Park, Chicago, 2006. Photograph by Herbert Migdoll ©Joffrey Ballet. Courtesy of The Joffrey Ballet.

The Joffrey Ballet was many people’s first introduction to the world of ballet and dance. After the company was founded in New York City by Robert Joffrey (1930–88) and Gerald Arpino (1923–2008) in 1956, it grew and performed in big cities and small towns across the United States and the world. Now entering its 70th year, the Joffrey Ballet continues to showcase excellence and innovation in dance in its forever home, Chicago, since 1995.

The company’s archives are now housed in the New York Public Library (NYPL) for the Performing Arts’ Jerome Robbins Dance Division (LPA), which mounted an exhibition, “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.,” in 2024–25 at LPA. The exhibition is currently open at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659, an exhibition space, from October 3 through December 20.

LPA acquired the Joffrey Ballet archives thanks, in part, to a conundrum of ownership and digitization. Linda Murray, curator of NYPL’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division, explained that when she started in 2015, one of the librarians came to her with a problem: Joffrey had left his personal library of videos of dances “on deposit” at LPA.

“On deposit” meant that someone could leave the materials at the library without transferring ownership. Space in New York City has always been at a premium, and this practice allowed artists like Joffrey to store their materials and still have access to them; it has since been discontinued.

Murray said, “The rationale was not about public access, and these materials remained predominantly restricted. Rather, the goal was to ensure that important dance heritage was not lost due to financial constraints or storage capacity on the artist’s part.” It’s often the first step to transferring ownership to the library, Murray explained. Over several years, Joffrey made several deposits and also revisited the materials, according to his correspondence with LPA.

But when Joffrey died in 1988, that left the collection at LPA in limbo. People could still visit the library to view the videos, as had been the practice, but the materials needed to be digitized for future preservation. LPA did not have the authority to digitize them, so Murray called the Joffrey Ballet to find out how they wanted to proceed.

Not only did the Joffrey agree to the digitization and transfer of ownership to LPA, but asked if LPA wanted to tackle its full archives. In 2016, Murray traveled to Chicago to understand the extent of the collection. A year later, she and two members of her staff boxed it up, packing 972 banker’s boxes in three days—at the time, the largest collection NYPL had acquired in a decade, said Murray.

Since LPA wanted to create an exhibition around the materials, Murray and other staff members prioritized processing the archives. By 2019, the Joffrey papers were available to the public through finding aids and search functions; LPA has also digitized more than 1,500 audio and moving image files since 2021. What remains is the separate catalog of all audio and moving image files. While the cataloging of those files has not yet occurred, members of the public can ask a librarian to locate the file of a specific performance by searching its metadata—a workaround for now.

Murray reported that the Joffrey archives are 400.87 linear feet long, with 889 manuscript boxes, 49 oversized folders, 30 tubes, and 57,676 computer files. Those figures do not include physical and moving images. Since the company is still performing, Murray estimates that LPA will return to Chicago every 10 to 15 years for additional archival material to add to the Joffrey archives.

AN ARCHIVAL “UNICORN”

Murray described dance archives as “unicorns in the universe,” since dance is one of the most ephemeral art forms. “It doesn’t really leave behind many tangible traces. There is no universally agreed upon way in which to document dance, and what that has meant for us over the course of human history is that most of our dance history is lost to us,” she said.

Music and theater have scripts and scores to transmit knowledge across generations, Murray noted. But “until the invention of film, there was not a really good way to record dance,” she explained. “Even then, the cost of film made it prohibitive for most dance artists to think actively about filming their work that they were making until relatively recently.”

Because it was many people’s first introduction to dance in the 20th century, the company has played a major cultural role in the United States. Joffrey traveled to rural parts of America, putting on world-class performances in states where people had never seen professional dance before. On the 1960–61 tour, for example, the company traveled all over the United States, performing in large and small cities including Chicago; Vicksburg, MS; Hammond, LA; and Lakeland, FL. Some performances were held in theaters, others in school auditoriums.

The company still gets letters and modest checks from people who remember those performances. “That sense of dance is for everybody,” Murray said. “Everybody should have an entry point into dance.” The archive keeps that rich history and legacy alive and accessible.

The Joffrey Ballet also played an important role in dance by encouraging new developments. While it is now common practice for ballet companies to hire non-ballet choreographers to make new work, Robert Joffrey was the one of the first artistic directors to do so. It was a way to invite choreographers from different fields to make new work to expand the vocabulary of ballet, Murray said, and a way to make the art form more relevant to contemporary audiences.

Joffrey made “space for unknown young voices in dance to have access to a professional company like his to make new work,” Murray said. Many legendary choreographers, such as Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, got some of their first commissions from the Joffrey Ballet. The archive includes some of the earliest works by these luminaries and others, including photos and footage of Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe, first performed in 1973 at the City Center for Music and Drama in New York. The piece combined the music of the Beach Boys, traditional ballet, and live graffiti art.

Not only did Joffrey uplift newer voices, he also worked to conserve the choreography of artists who came before him. For example, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company (1909–29) was “broadly considered in dance history circles to be the rebirth of ballet in the 20th century, and it gave us [choreographers] like Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine,” Murray said. There was a danger that these works would be lost forever until Joffrey intervened by making a concerted effort to collect items about Ballets Russes.

Joffrey worked with dance historian Millicent Hudson and art historian Kenneth Archer to reconstruct Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s controversial The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky, which the Joffrey Ballet performed. He also brought back Russian choreographer Léonide Massine’s Cubist ballet Parade, which included costumes and sets by Pablo Picasso. (The Chicago exhibition features one of Picasso’s costumes as well as painted pointe ballet shoes.) Thanks to Joffrey’s efforts to record, save, and conserve this material, people can use the Joffrey archives to reconstruct, research, or build upon these prior works.

ASTARTE AND BEYOND

Astarte poster, 1967. Photo by Herbert Migdoll © Joffrey Ballet. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

The photographs, business files, production and technical files, programs, press and publicity materials, props, and costumes in the archives span from 1877 to 2017, with the bulk dating from 1956–2013.

These include papers and other materials from the company’s founders, Joffrey and Arpino. One of the pieces that made Murray “swoon,” she said, was Joffrey’s high school report card. On the front it was a traditional report card with his grades, which was lovely in and of itself, she said, but on the back of the card he had written about volunteering in a Victory Garden during World War II and earning money working in his parents’ restaurant so he could buy his own clothes. When asked what he was going to do after finishing school, he said that he was going to run a ballet company. “Just to see that at 14 years of age he had such a clarion sense of mission and an understanding of who he was going to be,” Murray said, “that, for me, was breathtaking.”

Murray also appreciated the recipes from the Joffrey family’s restaurant, such as one for chicken pilau from the 1940s. His father was from Afghanistan and his mother from Italy; Robert’s birth name was originally Anver Bey Abdullah Jaffa Khan. Murray pointed out a photo of him pointing to the company’s poster in Farsi while the Joffrey Ballet was on tour in Afghanistan in 1963.

While Murray was packing up the company archives, she was hoping to find a recording of the groundbreaking 1967 ballet Astarte with the original cast, including dancers Maximiliano Zomosa and Trinette Singleton. Named for the Greek goddess of fertility, war, and sexuality, Astarte was a revolutionary fusion of rock and roll, psychedelia, mixed media, and erotica in dance form.

As she and her colleagues were itemizing videotapes and film reels from the Joffrey Tower in Chicago, she found several reels of later productions, but none with the original dancers. “I had completely given up hope,” Murray said. “Literally, the last reel I touched before I closed the room down” was the copy she was looking for. It was a thrill, she explained, to find this historic item, the very first dance piece to make the cover of TIME magazine.

A key part of both the New York and Chicago exhibitions is an immersive room that allows participants to experience Astarte. Julia Foulkes, curator at both locations, explained that one of the curatorial challenges with dance is that it’s hard for many to watch footage for long. “You have to choose carefully not to overwhelm people,” Foulkes said, “The other question is, how can you change up how you display footage so that people aren’t just sitting in front of a screen?”

That’s what led to the development of the space, where visitors can see different performances of Astarte projected onto different walls. It puts viewers into the ballet’s world to provide a taste of how revolutionary it was.

FLESH AND BONES OF AN ACTIVE DANCE COMPANY

One of Foulkes’s favorite items from the exhibition is the 1991 Joffrey NY/L.A. jacket, which marks the time when the company had studios in both New York (1956–95) and Los Angeles (1983–92).

Another is a promotional photograph from the 25th anniversary of the company in 1981. To celebrate, the company held a block party where dancers gave out buttons and other memorabilia. For Foulkes, it exemplified the Joffrey’s “All Star No Star Policy.” In other words, the traditional hierarchies found in other dance companies didn’t exist; a dancer could play the leading role in one piece and a minor role in another.

Foulkes also highlighted the importance of the business archives within the larger collection, noting that the business side of the arts is not talked about enough. It was important to show the challenges of running a dance company, including the devastation that occurs when a single donor who supports the entire company decides to stop funding the ballet, such as in 1964, when Rebekah Harkness pulled her support from the Joffrey to start her own ballet company; later the National Endowment of the Arts stopped funding the company’s tours in the mid-1970s. Over its 70-year history, the company saw significant financial ups and downs and had to innovate and experiment to survive. The exhibition includes a brief ad in which the Joffrey Ballet endorsed sneakers—one way it raised revenue.

“Arts are an ecosystem. They’re not one thing. And the ecosystem includes the finance piece,” Foulkes pointed out.

The Joffrey Ballet Company, 1996. Adapted from a design that originally appeared in the May 1996 issue of Dance Magazine. Reproduced with permission from Dance Magazine. Photograph by Herbert Migdoll © Joffrey Ballet. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

ACTIVE USE

Since the New York exhibition was housed in a library space, and therefore free and open to the public, Foulkes estimated that about 16,000 people visited, including many schoolchildren. LPA even created a pedagogical guide for New York City schoolteachers.

The archives have also helped mount older dance pieces from Joffrey and Arpino. The Gerald Arpino Foundation, which holds the rights of both founders’ works, licenses them so they can be performed and seen by new audiences. The Joyce Theatre in New York held an Arpino festival in September and October. Foulkes noted that Arpino’s works are rarely performed together, so it was a great way to celebrate the Joffrey cofounder’s work and draw more attention to it.

The Arpino Foundation also reaches out to the LPA archives for musical scores, footage, and photographs, Murray noted. “In order to keep the repertory moving forward in living bodies, the archive is an essential part of making sure that the actual choreography is being accurately transmitted to new dancers,” she said. The documentation helps verify how a dance piece was performed and costumed, because people’s memories are often fallible. But, Murray explained, “the archive on its own is never enough, and the memories of those who performed [are] never enough. You have to have the two components together.”

Foulkes sees a great opportunity for scholars to write an updated biography of Robert Joffrey and the company. There are older biographies, but she hopes the archives and exhibitions will spur further scholarship. Murray noted that she’s seeing graduate students making use of the Joffrey archives since they became publicly available.

While LPA’s Joffrey archives draw on the wealth of materials of the company and its founders, its representation of individual performers is not as robust. Joffrey Ballet alumni may choose to donate to their local institutions, rather than sending everything to LPA. “There’s likely always going to have to be a little bit of navigation done between various archives to get people where they need to go, depending on what their line of research is,” Murray noted. However, the exhibitions brought many Joffrey alumni out of the woodwork and may spur former dancers and other staff to think about their own archives’ futures.

Those interested in seeing footage and other materials in the Joffrey archives can get an NYPL card, which is available even to non-residents. People can request to view performances—such as Astarte, The Rite of Spring, or many others—in the library using this form. In Chicago, “The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S.” is on view at Wrightwood659, 659 W. Wrightwood Ave., until December 20.