Dancers perform 'Billboards' in PBS' 'The Joffrey Ballet.'
Based on this admiring new documentary, the sometimes-quirky Joffrey Ballet proves there is value in a good vanity project.
It also suggests the limitations and perils of being an independent contractor in the often unpredictable world of the arts.
This production often plays like a Wikipedia version of Joffrey history, and not in a bad sense.
It explains step-by-step to people outside the ballet world how Robert Joffrey and his lover-then-business-partner Gerald Arpino created a ballet company because they wanted to.
Joffrey's first company consisted of six dancers who toured the country in a borrowed station wagon with costumes in the back, traveling 350 miles a day to play high schools and art events.
It was grueling and not especially lucrative, but it introduced high-quality ballet to rural America and gave Joffrey a solid foundation of versatile dancers, as well as a modest but glowing reputation.
That stage ended with the first of several financial crises that led to a near-total artist turnover and a new mission for the company.
Dire as these crises looked at the time, they also mostly ended in upgrades, because Joffrey also ran a school that trained the next generation of dancers.
When the company settled in New York, before moving to Chicago in 1995, it built a reputation for radical approaches to dance and radical statements within the dance. If it wasn’t always technically the most accomplished, it became hugely influential in the dance world.
Despite some technical content, this documentary isn’t for dance world insiders. It’s for people who may not even think they like ballet, but can appreciate a good story.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
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