JOFFREY BALLET
The Joffrey is the preeminent repository of “historically important” dances of the 20th century as well as the country’s leading ballet exponent of modernist aesthetics. Their Chicago season included Cotillon, the reconstructions of Nijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune (1912) and Le sacre du printemps (1913), Massine’s Parade (1917), Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid (1938), Paul Taylor’s Cloven Kingdom (1976), the pas de deux from Robert Joffrey’s Remembrances (1973), and five dances by artistic director Arpino, choreographed over the last 20-odd years.
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Dancegoers and critics tend to place ballet style along a continuum between two extremes, the classical and the romantic: the New York City Ballet is America’s exemplar of classical style; American Ballet Theatre, our most characteristically romantic. The first is concerned with abstract qualities–purity of line, elegance, musicality; the second with affective qualities of expression and imagination. Dances, dancers, and companies usually tend toward one of these poles, but none can be purely one or the other. In Arpino’s aesthetic universe, line is less important than sheer muscular elasticity and extremes of elevation, extension, or speed; elaborateness is more interesting than elegance; the choreography is, at best, clear, straightforward music visualization, and its expressive range is defined by the collective libido of the late 20th century: pop modernism.
Arpino’s Viva Vivaldi! (1965) is less monotonous than Round of Angels but no less predictable. The dance caroms off every crescendo and slight accelerando of the score, the Concerto in D Major for Violin, Strings, and Cembalo; but at least the score inspires movement that covers a wider dynamic range than Round of Angels. Our cues are as clear as the dancers’: Viva Vivaldi! makes certain we know exactly when to gasp, applaud, cheer. The dance’s veneer of elegance–its arabesques and bows, its spangled dust and cream tutus–nearly covers its gimmicky splits, flailing arms, and furious footwork.
I’ve begun to think that only the Joffrey could dance Sacre so well. Archetypes are necessarily faceless: individuality makes them personally meaningful and culturally insignificant. Sacre’s relentless stomping, the pounding steps that mark the pulse of Stravinsky’s score even when that pulse slips far into the sonic background, does not allow for individual musicality: these steps must be painstakingly precise, or muddy. The movement itself–its slightly hunched torsos, small fists held close to the body, the legs excruciatingly bent and turned in, the jumps performed without preparatory plies, the sheer stamina involved in keeping such a running, spinning pace for so long–places extraordinary physical demands, nearly inhuman demands, on its dancers.
The Joffrey’s Billy the Kid is also dark, but it is the darkness of unresolved oedipal feelings rather than of alienation. The passage of 50 years has dated this once-daring Freudian ballet. The great generalized gestures of the introduction and the coda–movements suggesting whipping, riding, roping, scrubbing, lifting a skirt above a muddy street, scanning the horizon–cross the stage in a wavelike canon. The choreography of the intervening sections–the gunfight over a girl that claims the life of Billy’s innocent mother and determines his destiny, the campfire card games, romantic interludes, the shootings, escapes, and final ambush–is more interesting as theater than as dance.
