Blue is a metaphor for emotions, music, sensuality, and an emotionally wrought period in the life of Pablo Picasso. Like Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” the Joffrey Ballet’s Studies in Blue held […]
A star is born, and none of them is one of four movies with the same title. A star in the sky comes from dust, gravity, collision, and heat in […]
The basic plot of the famous The Nutcracker ballet is a familiar story. A young girl, Clara, receives the gift of a Nutcracker on Christmas Eve. That night, she has […]
The Joffrey Ballet took up residence in Chicago in 1996. After nearly four decades in New York and the death of Robert Joffrey, Gerald Arpino, his partner in life and […]
My interest in classical music was weaned on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet. So I leapt at the opportunity to do a Nutcracker relay last Saturday: the matinee opening […]
The Nutcracker is as much a part of me as chocolate, and I don’t think I have made it through a holiday season since I was 4 without seeing a […]
In this brave new normal, ballet premieres come while you’re sitting alone on your couch, instead of in a glittering theater gathered with hundreds of other balletomanes breathlessly awaiting. Perhaps nowadays you […]
Rahm Emanuel himself, a longtime honorary board member, kicked off the Joffrey Ballet’s winter residency at the iconic Auditorium Theatre by congratulating the company on its 25 years as a Chicago […]
To open its final season in the glittering 130-year-old Auditorium Theatre before it moves across town to the Lyric Opera digs, the Joffrey Ballet doubled down on its recent commitment […]
Opulent lifestyles, unbridled passion, and endless joy…all the while a thread of darkness and deceit lurks underneath. Such is the tale of Leo Tolstoy’s 1878 novel masterpiece, Anna Karenina, adapted into […]
The bottom line is this: if you find yourself in any seat at the Joffrey’s production of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, it is a good seat. Being in the room for this […]
The midsummer night’s dream that choreographer Alexander Ekman and artistic director Ashley Wheater are alluding to in this contemporary ballet is not the Shakespearean comedy of marriage and interwoven plots, […]