The Green Table is one of my earliest memories. I was only a young child when the Jooss company came to Seattle, but I still remember vividly the flashing white gloves of the diplomats and Death's inexorable stamping, gathering in his victims. \ufffdRobert Joffrey (1930-1988), co-founder of The Joffrey Ballet.

The Green Table is considered one of the greatest ballets of the 20th century. Dancing with Death: The Green Table, a one-hour program to premiere on WTTW 11 Friday, March 30 at 9:00 p.m., provides an intimate portrait of German choreographer, dancer and teacher Kurt Jooss and insight into the forces and inspiration that compelled him to create this landmark ballet. Once acquainted with Jooss, viewers will experience The Green Table in its entirety as performed by Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, a company that enjoys an enduring connection to the dance. This performance of The Green Table was staged and taped in WTTW's 10,000 square foot Grainger Studio.

Kurt Jooss (1901-1979) created The Green Table, his anti-war masterpiece, for a choreographic competition in Paris in 1932. Initially, he had designed sketches for a solo he would perform himself based on a medieval Dance of Death or "danse macabre" frieze he had seen years earlier in a German church. Faced with the pressure to create a full work for the competition and haunted by his growing fear that Germany was moving toward another world war, Jooss expanded his original idea. The resulting work is a vivid and emotionally charged ballet in eight scenes, set to a score for two pianos that clearly conveys Jooss' artistic message: where there is war, there will be death, dancing with innocent victims.

Within months, despite the ballet's first prize at the International Congress of the Dance in Paris and international acclaim, Kurt Jooss found himself under increasing scrutiny by his own government for his artistic vision and for his refusal to bow to demands that he dismiss Jewish members of his dance troupe. He was warned by friends to flee Germany and escaped with his entire company only eighteen hours before he would have been forced into a concentration camp. Ballets Jooss, now in exile, began to tour extensively outside of Germany. It was on one of the company's early American tours that The Green Table first touched the life of Robert Joffrey.