Gerald Arpino’s vast body of original work gave the Joffrey Ballet a special look, and, against the odds, he led the troupe in its trek from financial ruin to survival here in Chicago.
In so doing, Arpino played a critical role in providing this city with a long elusive treasure: its own internationally renowned ballet company.
Arpino, 85, who died Wednesday in his Chicago home from undetermined causes after a long battle with prostate cancer, was one of the last remaining giants of the mid-20th Century movement that revolutionized dance and transformed it into an American art.
“He was larger than life, fascinated by everything and everyone,” Ashley Wheater, who succeeded Arpino as Joffrey artistic director last year, said Wednesday. “When you think of the people he collaborated with — once he heard two guys playing music on the street in San Francisco, and that became the music for ‘Light Rain,'” one of Arpino’s most popular works.”
Wheater added, “He enriched us so much in our lives and our art form.”
In September, in a signature event in the company’s Chicago history, the troupe moved into headquarters at 10 E. Randolph St., a new Loop high-rise christened the Joffrey Tower in the company’s honor. Though frail, Arpino was on hand at festivities there Sept. 12, treated to a standing ovation in the new home’s studio theater, which bears his name.
“It’s like a favorite uncle has died,” said Kevin McKenzie, a Joffrey dancer in the 1970s and now artistic director of American Ballet Theatre. “You couldn’t help but be affected by his exuberance.”
Arpino, who quaintly lied about his age for years, was born Jan. 14, 1923, in Staten Island, N.Y, the youngest of nine children of Italian immigrants. His father owned a string of beauty salons, greyhound racing dogs and real estate. But he lost most of his wealth in the Depression and died when Arpino was only 7. Later, a young Arpino delivered newspapers and mowed lawns, buying his mother her first washing machine with his savings.
He joined the Coast Guard in 1942 during World War II and remained expressly patriotic the rest of his life. His military service took him to Seattle, where he met Robert Joffrey, who introduced him to ballet and ballet classes, persuading him to study dance with his teacher, Mary Ann Wells. Later, in New York, he studied at the School of American Ballet.
He remained at Joffrey’s side professionally for the next four decades. After dancing in various Broadway choruses, he joined the faculty of Joffrey’s school when it began in 1953, and he was one of six dancers who loaded a U-Haul and lugged it behind a station wagon on the debut tour of the Joffrey Ballet in 1956 — co-founder Joffrey stayed behind to teach.
In 1961, he created “Ropes,” his first work for the company, and within a few years, Arpino emerged as the troupe’s chief choreographer, a role he continued to play the rest of his life. Versatile and popular, his work was somewhat controversial and sometimes critically derided. He updated ballet and rendered it more accessible and pleasing, but some argued he pandered to popular taste.
But he remained Joffrey’s right arm through the company’s emergence as a major American institution, the first troupe to play both the Soviet Union and the White House, the latter inspiring a favorite Arpino anecdote about John F. Kennedy’s eye for one particular ballerina at a reception.
His work, though infectious and sweet, also matched Joffrey’s embrace of the times. “The Clowns” (1968), for example, took on nuclear war, and “Trinity” (1970) brought a hip, new verve to the art. One observer labeled “Trinity” a ballet about love, that emblematic late-’60s buzz word. “Light Rain” (1981), which endures as a beloved finale, combined Eastern music and mysticism with a Western, crowd-pleasing, sexual spark.
Arpino’s real gifts, however, on view season after season in revivals here, lay in his ineffable sense of beauty, his knack for abstract ballets seasoned with excitement, lyricism, acrobatic dazzle and powerful emotion. “Kettentanz” (1971) is non-stop exhilaration and technical flourish; “Round of Angels” (1983 and an early artistic response to AIDS) is a cosmic, beatific view of human experience; and “Italian Suite” (1983), a lush, sensual paean to Arpino’s heritage.
Joffrey died of AIDS in 1988 while the troupe — prophetically — was performing here at the Civic Opera House. Thus began the most difficult period of Arpino’s life. He struggled to convince supporters that he had the skills to continue alone, and he nearly lost the battle in 1990 when, during a financial crisis and attempted board coup, he resigned as artistic director, threatened to take his ballets with him and rallied support. He survived and produced the popular “Billboards” program to music by Prince, as well as an important reconstruction of Leonide Massine’s masterwork “Les Presages.”
But continued financial woes led the troupe to abandon New York and relocate to Chicago in 1995. Many gave the new enterprise little hope, and the early years were challenging, fraught with a revolving door of executive managers. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there was even talk of performing “The Nutcracker” to recorded music instead of a live orchestra. “I’m doing it to save the company,” Arpino said gloomily of the proposal before it was scrapped.
Gradually, things turned around. The company developed sound management, retired its debt, starred in Robert Altman’s movie “The Company” and enjoyed a glorious 50th anniversary celebration here in 2005 and 2006, including a wealth of outdoor festivities in Millennium Park.
In 2007, Arpino agreed to step aside, and, when Wheater was introduced as artistic director at a gathering at the Arts Club, Arpino publicly saluted the choice, avoiding the ugly transition that had plagued such troupes as American Ballet Theatre and the Martha Graham Dance Company.
He leaves behind some 40 ballets and two lustrous segments of “The Nutcracker.” Ebullient and irrepressibly warm, Arpino gave total strangers the feeling he was their best friend. His emotion could be grand — as when he tearfully cheered America in a curtain speech to open the troupe’s engagement right after 9/11. And it could be caustic, as when he publicly chided Twyla Tharp for trying to charge the troupe too much for the rights to a revival. (“‘That’s absolutely immoral,’ I told her, ‘after everything the Joffrey’s done for you.'”)
Eccentric, renowned for his bad toupee as well as his emotion, he rarely let a conversation go by without stressing the importance of the arts, to him an absolute religion.
“I think I was drawn to dance because it’s total theater,” Arpino told the Tribune in 2005. “Through the unspoken word, through movement, you can accomplish so much. With a hand. With the shake of a fist.”
His choreographic record since moving to Chicago is slight and mixed. But in 2004, with a duet called “Ruth, Ricordi Per Due,” he managed one of his most stirring ballets, one inextricable from his own late stage of life. A straightforward elegy, it features a man whose dead lover returns as a ghostly memory, splicing technique to humanism, his specialty. Simple and pure, it’s a poem of profound love and grief.
“I find a lot of ballet one-dimensional,” Arpino said once. “That’s not our way. When I take a movement forward, when I lift an arm up, I’m aware of all levels, from the tip of the finger, down to the floor.”
Arpino is survived by a cousin and great-grandnephew, both of Staten Island, N.Y. Plans for a public memorial will be announced shortly on joffrey.org. Donations in his name are being accepted by The Joffrey Ballet, Joffrey Tower, 10 E. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60601.