Joffrey Ballet ties to Bay Area grow deeper
The famed dance company returns to UC Berkeley for another residency
In the immortal words of Cole Porter, the love affair between Berkeley and the Joffrey Ballet was too hot not to cool down.
Choreographer Gerald Arpino, who founded the company with Robert Joffrey, was so inspired by the UC campus circa 1970 that he created a series of dances known as “The Berkeley Ballets,” one of which, “Trinity,” is still in the Joffrey repertoire.
It was a conflagration that couldn’t sustain itself, and the intermittent liaison simmered on low for many years. But a weeklong Cal Performance residency in 2017 rekindled the romance, and the celebrated Chicago company returns to Berkeley next week for a second residency that includes a lecture-demonstration with choreographer Nicolas Blanc (March 5 at Hearst Gym), a Blancled community dance class (March 7 at Bancroft Studio) and three Zellerbach performances March 6-8.
For dance lovers it’s a requited relationship well worth cheering. The 2017 run was a brilliant success, and the two organizations “have had such a long history of being experimental and creating daring new works,” says Ashley Wheater, who followed his 18-year run as a principal dancer and then assistant to artistic director Helgi Tomasson at the San Francisco Ballet by taking over as the Joffrey’s artistic director in 2007.
The Zellerbach program includes two pieces featuring music by Stravinsky, with the California premiere of Stephanie Martinez’s “Bliss!” and the late addition of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Commedia,” a Bay Area premiere. The brilliant 32-year-old choreographer Justin Peck, who’s had a series of triumphs setting works on the San Francisco Ballet, is well-represented by the West Coast premiere of “The Times Are Racing,” a kinetic, high-energy piece with electronic score by Dan Deacon.
Featuring virtually the entire company, Peck takes the Joffrey dancers out of their comfort zone and pointe shoes with his sneaker ballet. The choreographer was on hand in Chicago for the ballet’s final touches a few weeks ago when the Joffrey presented “The Times Are Racing” as the centerpiece of the season’s kickoff.
“I was very curious to know what he would tell the dancers,” says Blanc, the Joffrey’s rehearsal director. “He said they were almost doing the movements too beautifully. He wanted an urban, swaggering way of dancing. They tried to really project that nonchalant quality. Justin has this amazing ability to move formations onstage in an extraordinary way with a geography that’s always changing.”
Blanc essentially got his start as a choreographer creating two dances for the San Francisco Ballet school during his tremendous run as one of the company’s principal dancers (an eightyear stint that came to an end in 2010 due to nagging injuries). He returns with the Bay Area premiere of “Beyond the Shore,” a Cal Performances co-commission first glimpsed at an open workshop during the Joffrey’s 2017 residency.
At the time he had two of the score’s six movements by acclaimed San Francisco composer Mason Bates, and “the workshop on the campus was super helpful in the creation,” Blanc says. “I didn’t have the very first part of the score so I reached out to Mason and said it would be amazing if you could write a new piece for the opening section. He created something bridging one section into the next.”
Blanc had originally planned to create a piece about immigration, but decided that packing so much narrative into a 25-minute dance wouldn’t work. Instead he embraced the challenge of abstraction, responding to each of Bates’ distinct aural realms. In one section, “Gemini in the Solar Wind,” Bates incorporated NASA recordings made during a spacewalk, a sonic element “that had a huge impact on choreography,” Blanc says.
“There’s a duet and I wanted them to function almost as satellites. There’s a very industrial feel, almost like they’re two artificial intelligence creatures exploring outer space. When Mason got me the score I had all the text and could read what they were saying, what the NASA crew was telling the astronauts, ‘Come back in’ and ‘I’m under my own control.’ At one point he says, ‘I’m standing on my head coming into the coast of California.’ I thought that was a nice wink coming back to Berkeley.”
Beyond Blanc and Wheater’s deep ties to San Francisco Ballet, the Joffrey’s Bay Area connection is striking. The company’s diverse roster includes dancers hailing from 11 countries, and among the standouts are San Franciscans Jeraldine Mendoza (who trained at the San Francisco Ballet School) and Graham Maverick, and San Josereared Derrick Agnoletti, who’s been a force at the Joffrey since 2005.
“Jeraldine is having a fantastic career and I’ve known Graham since he was a little boy,” Wheater says. “There’s something wonderful about nurturing careers, seeing them grow and become the artists that they are. So we’ve got from Derrick’s generation to Jeraldine and Graham to a young dancer Jonathan Dole from Sacramento, an amazingly gifted dancer who joined the company last summer.”
If the Joffrey’s Cal Performances residency isn’t quite a homecoming, the relationship with Berkeley is once again generating considerable creative heat.