DANCE : Chicago Hope : ‘The Joffrey will never close,’ Artistic Director Gerard Arpino vows--but it came pretty close, until the Windy City made the homeless troupe an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Although the Joffrey Ballet “Nutcracker” might not look any different from last year when it opens Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the company has in fact changed radically during the past 12 months.

Faced with the same crisis in arts funding that has afflicted nearly every American cultural institution, the Joffrey has scaled back its number of dancers from 43 to 30--with options to hire the additional personnel needed for such large-scale projects as “The Nutcracker.”

In addition, the 25-year-old Joffrey II apprentice company has been disbanded. The company’s relationship with its dancers has improved: A long-standing dispute with the American Guild of Musical Artists (the dancers’ union) over money owed the dancers has ended with an undisclosed settlement.

The biggest change, of course, is reflected in the company’s new name: the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. After a year in which his company scarcely existed as a performing entity, moving from New York to a new home in the Midwest has infused Artistic Director Gerald Arpino with youthful energy, optimism and a sense of relief.

“It’s been a great transition period, let’s say that,” Arpino says, looking relaxed and fit in a quick L.A. visit between rehearsals in Chicago. And if starting over at age 67 sounds like a daunting prospect, Arpino immediately points out that in his 39-year association with the company he helped found with the late Robert Joffrey, there have been plenty of new beginnings.

Among them: the period four years ago when the financially shaky Los Angeles Music Center suddenly ousted the Joffrey as a bicoastal resident company after eight years there.

That rejection still hurts.

“This was a great place,” Arpino says wistfully, letting his gaze sweep his hotel room as if he were standing in front of the Pavilion. “In truth, I always thought this was the town the Joffrey should be in. And I don’t think the board that we had in the first two years in L.A. [1983-84] will ever be equaled.”

So what happened? “Politics,” he answers. “It’s all politics.” He declines to elaborate, saying, “That’ll be in my book--you’ll have to buy the book.” Unfortunately, Arpino’s book isn’t yet written, much less published. But he’s more forthcoming on the seriousness of the company’s financial predicament in early 1995 and the toll it took.

“I think the most difficult thing was having to leave [New York] City Center,” he says, speaking of the struggle to meet the rent on the company offices and the consequences when the money wasn’t there soon enough. “After some 20-odd years, for City Center not to allow a company to remain that was fighting to stay alive was indicative of how hard times are. For everyone. It was like closing a chapter in my life. Or someone dying.”

But Arpino denies rumors that the Joffrey Ballet itself nearly died.

“Chicago was one alternative,” he says, “but I could also have gone right back to my school [on 6th Avenue in New York] and formed another company. I have studios and an office there, so I could have started over this year just the way we did when the Harkness [support] folded.” That new beginning took place in 1964 when Robert Joffrey and Rebekah Harkness disagreed over artistic matters and she withdrew her sponsorship. The company bounced back within a year.

“The Joffrey will never close,” Arpino says emphatically.

The move has occupied the company for most of the year. To start, there were four months of negotiations with Daniel Duell’s Ballet Chicago to merge the two companies. It nearly happened, Arpino says, but two weeks before merger day, conversations with Duell led Arpino to conclude that the two institutions were artistically incompatible.

Duell, after all, came from New York City Ballet and pursues a Balanchine-based aesthetic. And Arpino isn’t about to abandon the Joffrey’s trademark eclecticism--with everything from classics of the Diaghilev era to examples of avant-garde modern dance sharing a place in the repertory.

“I realized that this wasn’t going to be to the benefit of either company,” Arpino recalls. “And, to tell you the truth, I really couldn’t accept the demise of another company. I’ve never wanted that.”

He is well aware that not everyone believes him. Los Angeles Ballet Artistic Director John Clifford has blamed the Joffrey for the demise of his company, which existed for 10 years until the mid-’80s and then disintegrated two years after the Joffrey became a Music Center resident. In the wake of his unsuccessful attempt this year to revive LAB, Clifford brought up his old charges in the November issue of Dance magazine.

“That poor boy,” Arpino says. “I’ve always felt that major cities can support more than one company. Look how many New York supports.”

He knows, however, that Chicago is a notably tough town for resident ballet companies, and he will have to build a constituency there while making sure that the Joffrey stays true to its identity as a national rather than a regional company. He says he’s ready.

Being based in “the heartland,” as he puts it, and being a smaller company both make the Joffrey more mobile than it used to be. “We’ll be able to perform in L.A. even more than when we were [in residence here part time].” Arpino also expects that the Joffrey will be getting back to New York regularly.

Not immediately, though. Besides Chicago and Los Angeles, the 1995-96 season will find the Joffrey visiting Washington, Minneapolis, Omaha and Vienna, Va., plus Europe, Asia and the Middle East. But not the Big Apple.

However, it would take more than that small fact to dampen Arpino’s enthusiasm, since he likens the company’s current size and artistic stance to the glory days of the 1960s when the Joffrey dancers numbered 22 and nearly everybody danced in every work; when the company appeared on the very first PBS “Dance in America” episode and made its first visit to Russia.

“People always define what the Joffrey is in terms of the repertory,” he says. “But we’re not about repertory. Whatever else we’ve done, the Joffrey has always been about what is happening in our society at that time. Social consciousness. That’s that’s the way I think, the way Bob and I always thought. And that’ll be true in Chicago as well.”

Unlike recession-stricken L.A., the Windy City has a lot to offer the Joffrey at this moment--starting with a prestigious new board and an expanding arts community.

“They’re building a theater that will seat 15 or 16 hundred, a theater just for dance,” Arpino says, “and Disney’s coming in and going to do things as well.”

In addition, the Joffrey will have its own studios for the first time-- 20,000 square feet on North Wabash Avenue--plus a realistic, no-frills budget of $5 million for its first year. Sixty percent of that budget is expected to come from earned income and, of the remaining (contributed) amount, $900,000 has already been pledged.

“The next two years, it’ll be snug [financially],” Arpino says. “But we’ll have a school in Chicago eventually. And I’d like to get the size of the company up to 50, because there are some things you can’t do without a large number of dancers.”

Frederick Ashton’s “Cinderella,” for example--a ballet the Joffrey had announced before financial necessity led the company to launch another full-evening project instead: the four-part rock extravaganza “Billboards” to music by Prince. “Cinderella” would have cost $1.4 million and required 54 dancers and a live orchestra; “Billboards” is danced to tape by a cast of 25 to 30. And, of course, it brings in an audience that would never go to a traditional story ballet.

Arpino says that “Cinderella” is still “on the back burner”--in part because he has found that negotiating performance rights with a choreographer’s estate can be more troublesome and expensive than dealing with that choreographer during his or her lifetime. The old Joffrey had contracts for performance rights that the new corporate entity must renegotiate. And times have changed.

“It’s the same with Jooss,” Arpino says, referring to the late German Kurt Jooss. “We’re easygoing as choreographers: givers. But the minute things are left in trusts and so forth, they become almost impossible.”

No surprise then that the company’s new repertory showcases young American choreographers. The coming season will include premieres by Ralph Lemon and Alonzo King; new acquisitions from Randy Duncan, Bill T. Jones, Vicente Nebrada and Cynthia Quinn; and a work by Los Angeles’ own Mehmet Sander so unusual in its gymnastic demands that the Joffrey cast gets special “hazard pay” under union rules, Arpino says.

In addition, Arpino is planning revivals of “Billboards” and the familiar Romantic-era reconstruction “La Vivandiere” pas de six. And he’s planning to present his own “Suite Saint-Saens,” “Secret Places,” “Kettentantz” and “Light Rain.”

There’s no new Arpino choreography, however, and he says he is frustrated that running the Joffrey requires “spending time doing everything except what I formed the company to do.”

“But, on the other hand,” he says, “I’ve got a cushion of 60 to 70 ballets and can take time off [from choreography] to be an artistic director.”

Arpino says he wanted to revive “As Time Goes By,” one of Twyla Tharp’s works for the company. “But I can’t afford her. Her price is so exorbitant that she’s out of my league.” (Tharp reportedly demands $125,000 per piece.)

Because the Joffrey commissioned Tharp’s first choreography for a ballet company, Arpino admits to some bitterness about the situation, but he seems most frustrated about the status of dance itself in American life.

“It’s still an art form that has not truly become equal to the symphony and the opera,” he says. “It’s always been ephemeral, difficult, and I think that’s because of the men in our society.

“Unless men are dragged to dance performances by their girlfriends, you’re not going to get them there. I come from an American family with a baseball-football mentality, and dance was all the things that a man didn’t do.

“I remember the National Organization of Italian-American Women giving me a distinguished achievement award in Washington in 1987. And when I got up to accept my award, I said, ‘You know, I really deserve this award because all the men out there made it so damn difficult for me to become an artist.’ ”

* Joffrey Ballet, “The Nutcracker,” Dorothy Chandler Pavilion , Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Wednesday through Dec. 27, 8 p.m.; Thursday, Friday, and Saturday plus Dec. 26, 2 p.m. (No performances Dec. 24 and 25.) $15-$60. (213) 972-7211.