Joffrey Ballet team thrilled to be collaborating with the CSO once again

Two-for-one offers don’t get much better than this: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Joffrey Ballet sharing the same stage.

On April 10-13, for the third time since 2019, the city’s premier orchestra and ballet company are collaborating on CSO subscription concerts at Symphony Center. Conducted by Harry Bicket, the program will open with symphonies by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Haydn (Symphony No. 45 [Farewell]). Then after intermission, the Joffrey will take centerstage with two world premiere ballets. First up is Second Nature, a ballet by Amy Hall Garner set to Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1 for Strings. An alternately sharp-edged and lyrical piece in three movements, it was composed in 1953. From 1998 until his death in 2004 at age 71, Perkinson was active at Columbia College Chicago in its programs focused on Black composers and musicians. Closing the program is Les Boeufoons, choreographed by Nicolas Blanc, Joffrey’s ballet master, to French composer Darius Milhaud’s jazzy 1920s romp, Le Boeuf sur la toit.

Blanc and Garner are thrilled to be working with the CSO, but they did not choose the music for their new ballets. When the CSO approaches Joffrey about joint programs, the orchestra usually has specific repertoire in mind. (Past programs have included ballets set to Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, excerpts from a Rameau opera and pieces by Stravinsky.)

“Sometimes we go through a few iterations,” said Ashley Wheater (at left), the Joffrey’s artistic director, “before we say, ‘Yes, that’s going to be a really good program.’ ”

Though he was born in France, Blanc had never heard Milhaud’s score, long associated with European surrealism of the early 1920s. It’s as famous for its nonsensical title, “The Ox on the Roof,” as for its rambunctious, off-kilter rhythms and unpredictable mood shifts. The ballets that Blanc has choreographed for Joffrey and other companies, including the New York City Ballet, tend to be more introspective.

“I said to Ashley, quite frankly, I would never have picked such a score because my creativity is more inclined to melancholy, nostalgic, romantic,” he said. “Yet here we go with this amazing score. This is such fireworks; it’s happy, and it’s a farce, and how am I going to make this?”

Inspired by music he heard during stays in Brazil, Milhaud wrote the piece to accompany a Charlie Chaplin silent movie. But in 1920, French artist and writer Jean Cocteau turned it into a theater-dance piece for clowns and circus performers. That ballet featured a full cast of outrageous characters — the Red-Haired Lady, the Man in Evening Dress, the Décolleté Lady — in a plot once described as “pleasantly devoid of all meaning.”

Both the Cocteau ballet and the Charlie Chaplin connection inspired Blanc. Costumes and props will be mostly black and white, in a bow to cinema’s earliest days. And his cast of 12 will include nine performers he calls “wacky clowns” (farfelu in French), boisterous imps sans red noses or floppy shoes.

There will be a fashionable couple and La Femme Décolleté, a non-binary dancer in an evening gown and high heels. Men took women’s roles in Cocteau’s ballet, but Blanc admits he is mixing eras because the contemporary French fashion designer, John Paul Gaultier, inspired some of his costume ideas. Working in partnership with Ellie Cotey, Joffrey’s gifted head of wardrobe, he calls them “really surrealistic.”

“I have a ballerina in a very revealing, sort of Madonna-like dress,” said Blanc (at left). “The high heels and big gown are also inspired by Jean Paul Gaultier. Despite the fact that the music is very Brazilian-oriented, I wanted to set my ideas in a very French world. Gaultier is such an iconic symbol of France.

“The more I dive into the piece,” Blanc said, “I feel totally inspired by it. I’m getting new ideas. I want to push the theatrical, the dramatic side forward. I’m trying to understand the balance between silly choreography and choreography that is also very technically challenging. I knew from the get-go you can’t just make ballet steps for this work.”

Garner has had a wide-ranging career as a dancer and choreographer. Trained in ballet, she has danced in Broadway shows and as a Radio City Rockette. She has created ballets for companies including Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and the New York City Ballet; she also coached Beyoncé for the star’s “The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour.”  

Like Blanc, she had never heard the piece chosen for her ballet with the CSO and Joffrey. But she was familiar with some of Perkinson’s music.

“I did know his name,” she said in an interview from her home base in New York City. “I had listened to a couple of his pieces, just for inspiration with other pieces I’ve choreographed. I’m always listening to composers and new music. Music is the foundation for everything. It’s where it all starts for me.”

She was hooked after listening to the Sinfonietta’s slow second movement. “I just fell in love with the lusciousness and the dreamy, romantic aspects of that adagio,” she said. “I could automatically see movement when I heard it. Then when I went back to the first section [bristling with constantly shifting accents], it made sense to me. I thought, “OK, now I see where he’s going.’ ” 

The final movement’s sweeping drive seemed tailor-made for Garner, whose dances often fill the stage with surging energy. “It feels like something that’s in my wheelhouse,” she said.

Garner (at left) is no stranger to the Joffrey. In 2011, she was among the winners of the company’s first competition for young choreographers, now called Winning Works.

After the pandemic, she returned to collaborate with a writer and illustrator on a children’s ballet titled Rita Finds Home. She used young dancers from the Joffrey Academy for both of those projects. Second Chance, with a cast of 12, will be her first ballet for the troupe’s professional dancers.

“Finally, finally, I’m working with the main company,” she said with a delighted grin.

The ballet’s title, Second Nature, refers to the connection between music and movement. “We hear music, and we move,” Garner said. “It’s innate. It’s just what we do.”

But speaking a week before starting rehearsals in Chicago, she had little clear idea of what the ballet would ultimately look like. “I don’t know what it’s going to be, because when I go into the studio, I get inspiration from the dancers,” she said. “That’s really where it comes from. I know what I want to say, and the dancers help me say it.

“What I do know is how I want the piece to feel, what I want to say to the audience. I want to give them something that’s hopeful, that’s beautiful, give them something they might question. Sometimes I don’t like to tell exactly what I’m trying to say because people can see things that maybe I didn’t even see in my own work. That’s the beauty of art.”

Garner is happy to return to Chicago. “A lot of good things have happened to me in Chicago,” she said. “There’s where I started my performing career [in touring shows]. It’s where I first started my choreographic career, with Winning Works. Chicago’s a lucky city for me.”

As Joffrey’s artistic director since 2007, Wheater also cherishes Chicago, especially the way local arts institutions value working with one another. As a student at London’s Royal Ballet School, he studied flute and cello, as well as ballet. At age 14, he danced in the world premiere of Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice.

“From a very young age,” said Wheater, “I valued the idea of collaborating.

“What I love about Chicago is that it’s such a collaborative city. Whether it’s theater or symphony or opera, there’s just an openness to saying, ‘This is an idea. Will it work?’ Everyone’s ready to put in 100 percent. On the strength of the success of the programs we’ve had with the CSO, there an audience that’s really excited to see these two coming together. We can empower the arts by collaboration. It’s a win-win for everybody.”