Billboards, a landmark full-length rock ballet, documents a remarkable collaboration between one of America’s most acclaimed pop performers (Prince) and one of America’s most respected dance companies (The Joffrey Ballet). It has been an outstanding critical success and has played to sell-out crowds across America.
—Copy from Billboards video jacket

When I first started reviewing the Joffrey Ballet in the early 1980s, the company was touring its “Homage to Diaghilev” evening with Rudolf Nureyev. You could say it was a gimmick. Robert Joffrey knew he didn’t have dancers who could pull off a first-rate Rose Adagio or who could perform Balanchine even as well as the Dance Theatre of Harlem did. But his troupe was game and so was he. He put the dancers in important old ballets and works that were elsewhere out of repertory, and with the Diaghilev program, he knew he had something bankable. The Ballets Russes mystique, with its heady stress on consummate collaboration, attracted art, music, and theater people as well as balletomanes—four audiences for the price of one (today it would be dubbed a “marketing strategy”). Nureyev was already past prime at this point in his career, but the star satyr of classical dance was a believable stand-in for Vaslav Nijinsky, even if physically and psychically they were different animals. When Nureyev performed the pelvic thrust that ends Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune, the unveiled orgasm that so shocked the world in 1912, it was still shocking—a long slow cold