Where the Heart Is
By Kyle MacMillan
In addition to helping fulfill the wish of Jeffrey Haydon, Ravinia’s president and chief executive officer, to put a renewed accent on dance (in keeping with the festival’s long history with the music-adjacent art), the company’s performances in 2021 and again this year are part of his desire to more frequently collaborate with other prominent Chicago-area cultural institutions.
“I’m really thrilled getting to know Jeff Haydon,” says Ashley Wheater, Joffrey’s Mary B. Galvin Artistic Director. “He’s passionate about all things Chicago, and he wants the Joffrey there more often. So, we’re all really happy, and we have a huge audience there.”
For its latest appearance at Ravinia, Joffrey is presenting two programs on the Pavilion stage—an evening performance September 13 with live music and, reprising a tradition from the past, a morning presentation September 14 as part of the festival’s Kids Concert Series.
Joffrey’s first Ravinia visit took place in 1972, long before it was based in Chicago, and at that time it became something of a perennial presence, appearing in weeklong residencies each year through 1979. But subsequent returns were more sporadic: a series of multidate stands occupied the calendars of 1997 through 2000, and performances dropped off after 2008.
The Joffrey Ballet’s own Nicolas Blanc’s Beyond the Shore marked the company’s return to the Pavilion stage in 2021.
(Photo: Kyle Dunleavy/Ravinia)
Wheater is glad now to be back on a more regular basis. He believes Joffrey’s Ravinia appearances are an ideal complement to its main season at the Lyric Opera House, attracting audiences who typically don’t go downtown to see the company or who eschew formal theater-going experiences altogether.
“It’s been really amazing,” the Joffrey leader says. “Ravinia is such a special place that going to a performance there is a heightened experience just because of the open air, and you are at one with nature. It’s just a more relaxed feeling than going into a theater.”
Keen eyes may have noticed that the September 13 program underwent a sea change in late July. Because the company is embarking on a European tour right after its Ravinia engagement, set pieces, costumes, and stage equipment necessary for the original repertoire would have to be aboard a ship bound for Germany starting in August.
In the present lineup are two works by Gerald Arpino, the New Yorker who co-founded The Joffrey Ballet in 1956 and choreographed nearly 50 works on it during his more than 50-year tenure with the company—first as a dancer and later Artistic Director. The Gerald Arpino Foundation celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth with a pair of performances of his works in September 2023 at the Auditorium Theatre, featuring eight major American ballet companies, including American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, and, of course, the Joffrey.
As a spiritual extension of that event, Joffrey will present Birthday Variations (1986) and Round of Angels (1983), which the company brought back to its repertory for the Arpino celebration. The company performed the former, a neoclassical work suffused with gentle, unhurried elegance and performed in tutus and opulent jackets, as part of a mixed-rep program in 2021.
The evening’s finale is British choreographer Andrew McNicol’s Yonder Blue, which Joffrey premiered in 2019 on a program titled Across the Pond and revived in February 2024. Inspired by Siri Hustvedt’s book A Plea for Eros, it is set to a minimalist score by Peter Gregson.
“The emphasis is on well-etched lines and sculptural combinations, all done with a coolly mannered, manicured feel,” a dance critic observed for the Chicago Sun-Times. The centerpiece of September 13, of course, is the constant (except by virtue of now bearing an official title)—a premiere by Houston Thomas that will be performed by the Joffrey Studio Company, a group of 10 preprofessional dancers, and other Joffrey Academy trainees. Thomas, a Chicago native, studied at the Joffrey Academy of Dance until he left at age 16 to attend the famed School of American Ballet in New York City. “When we first opened the school,” Wheater says of Joffrey’s Academy, “Houston was one of our first students. He was super talented.”
Choreographer and former Joffrey Academy dancer Houston Thomas
Thomas, 29, who recently moved to New York, describes the early training at the Joffrey as “vital” because it allowed him to be around a top-level ballet company and see what it took to be a professional dancer. “Joffrey is really the reason why I am a dancer today,” he says. He went on to become a member of Dresden’s Semperoper Ballett and attained the rank of second soloist, completing his tenure with the German company in 2022–23.
Being a choreographer has been Thomas’s lifelong dream since he was enraptured by Joffrey’s annual production of The Nutcracker at the Auditorium Theatre as a child. He made his debut in that capacity in 2018 at a Semperoper Ballett event for young choreographers and premiered a work in 2022 as part of the Young Emergent Choreographers Contest in Biarritz, France. He has created dance pieces for such companies as Opéra National de Bordeaux, Cincinnati Ballet, and The Juilliard School.
In February, Thomas was one of five choreographers chosen to take part in the Joffrey Academy’s 14th annual Winning Works Choreographic Competition, which supports new works by emerging ALAANA (African, Latine, Asian, Arab, and Native American) artists. Performances of the resulting creations took place in March at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
The Joffrey Ballet has been acquainted with the inimitable piano jazz of the late Ramsey Lewis for nearly 20 years, courtesy of his original ballet score To Know Her, choreographed by Donald Byrd and commissioned and premiered at Ravinia in 2007. One of Lewis’s pieces in that score—“Watercolors,” originally written for Ravinia’s One Score, One Chicago project in 2006—was selected by Houston Thomas to feature in his new commissioned choreography receiving its premiere on September 13, For Mr. Ramsey Lewis.
Thomas’s success in that event led to this latest commission, which called on him to construct a work using the music of Ramsey Lewis (1935–2022), who served as Artistic Director of Jazz at Ravinia for 25 years and gave more than 40 performances at the festival. “When I got to learn who he was as a person and an artist, I was like, ‘Oh, definitely something I want to do,’ ” Thomas says.
Lewis (left) enjoying a rehearsal of To Know Her with choreographer Donald Byrd (seated, right)
Wheater is delighted that Thomas is back in the Joffrey fold, and he plans to have him create a piece for the main company when a scheduling slot opens up—something that would be a dream come true for the choreographer. “To be taking these steps even closer to that main goal of creating for the main company is really exciting,” Thomas says. “I’m just happy to be able to come home and contribute to the art landscape of the city and be part of that.” Providing the live music for the premiere is Lewis’s backing band from his last decade, the Urban Knights, along with pianist Richard D. Johnson, one of the teaching artists of the Ravinia Jazz Mentor Program, which Lewis helped establish in 1995 to train Chicago Public High School jazz students in skills to pursue professional futures.
The September 14 family presentation by the Studio Company and Academy students will feature a revival of Rita Finds Home, a 45-minute ballet produced in collaboration with Miami City Ballet and first performed in 2022 at Navy Pier. Inspired by the survivors of the 2017 Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, it tells the story of a young artist living on a tropical island who dreams of living in a bustling city. But when a damaging storm forces her and her mother to make just such a move, Rita feels lost and disoriented and embarks on a journey with her family and new friends to rediscover herself and her talents and redefine what home means.
The Joffrey Ballet’s Rita Finds Home in its 2022 premiere at Navy Pier (Photo: Katie Miller)
“In any part of our lives, even as adults, there are moments that either physically or emotionally displace us,” says Karla Estela Rivera, a Chicago-based writer, performer, and cultural organizer. “What do we do and how do we find our people when our whole life has been flipped upside down?”
Rita Finds Home creative team (left to right) Elisa Chavarri, Amy Hall Garner, and Karla Estela Rivera (Photo: Katie Miller
She was part of an all-female creative team brought together for the project, including choreographer Amy Hall Garner and award-winning children’s book creator Elisa Chavarri. Rivera, former executive director of the Free Street Theater, was surprised when Erica Lynette Edwards, Joffrey’s then-community engagement director, approached her about working on the project because she had never been involved with ballet. “Well, you a storyteller, aren’t you?” Edwards asked. And of course, she responded affirmatively, quickly realizing this project was right in her wheelhouse. “I have really lived my life at the intersection of the arts and social change,” Rivera says. “Part of my vocation is really to use any kind of work I do to support and uplift communities and their stories.”
To ensure that audiences can easily follow the story and their attention doesn’t waver—especially among young children—Rivera added narration in either English and Spanish that she recorded for the production. “We really wanted to make sure that folks connected to the story and the characters,” she says, “while also learning about this medium.”
Rivera and her artistic partners conceived the concept for the ballet in 2019 with the idea that it would be produced in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic intervened, postponing its premiere.
“Lots of projects ideated for 2020 didn’t come to fruition, but the Joffrey really remained committed to producing this story,” she says. Following its debut, Rita Finds Home was performed earlier this year in the Miami area and at Aurora (IL) University.
“It’s very engaging,” Wheater says. “It’s inclusive. It’s super colorful. It’s just a great kind of introduction for young kids to get involved and see what storytelling is like through movement.”
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Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.