Gamesmanship

THE DANCE

It has been 30 years since Ted Shawn surprised the dance world by creating a ballet for an all-male cast. That was Olympiad, and it made quite a splash in its day. Nobody has achieved anything like it since. That is why, last week, it was something of a surprise to see another try at the idea. It was a happy surprise too. Robert Jeffrey's dance troupe took over Manhattan's City Center for a wildly spirited calisthenics session. The name of the game was Olympics. It was an effortless job; no sweat.

The Joffrey company's chief choreographer, Gerald Arpino, re-created the style of the Olympic Games, with wrestling, jumping, rowing and running. There were only eleven men on the stage, but Arpino deployed them like a football team, sending them fading back and falling forward to keep the audience's eye too busy to count heads. The men writhed like tigers, spun like dervishes, vaulted as high as the muscular decathlon athletes they were symbolizing. It worked; the applause for curtain calls lasted nearly as long as the ballet itself.

It was only the second New York appearance for the Joffrey dancers. The son of an Afghan restaurateur, Abdullah Jaffa Anver Bey Khan began dancing in Seattle to get in shape for bouts with asthma. He changed his name to Robert Joffrey and turned pro at 18, worked for Roland Petit, and later, with his own troupe of boys and girls, barnstormed the hinterlands, Europe and Asia.

Though the company has won plenty of professional recognition, it has no permanent home--except for Jeffrey's American Ballet Center--and no steady income. Joffrey hopes to get a renewal of a 1965 grant from the Ford Foundation. If it fails to come through, the results could be disastrous, but Joffrey, 35, stubbornly refuses to worry. For him, events somehow have a perverse way of turning out well. Once, at the opening of the U.S. embassy in India, the curtain for the ballet stage refused to rise more than twelve inches. All the audience saw was slippered feet. But they cheered the Joffrey dancers on; they thought that was the way it was done in the mysterious West.

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