JOFFREY BALLET
This year the Joffrey has revived Bronislava Nijinska’s Les noces (“The Wedding”), and its inclusion on a program at the Auditorium with her brother Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune (1912) and Sacre made for a serious evening indeed. Les noces has been revived periodically since it premiered in Paris in 1923, so it hasn’t caused the same kind of sensation as the revival of Nijinsky’s Sacre, which hadn’t been seen for more than 70 years. But Nijinska’s Les noces is at least as shocking as her brother’s more famous work, and it’s far more modern.
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Before I saw Sacre, I’d always wondered how this music, which sounded to me like a glorious traffic accident, could represent anything natural much less springlike. After seeing it danced, I realized I’d had in mind a conventional pastoral, a genre Sacre turns on its head. Typically the pastoral, an urban invention, reads into country life all the naturalness and innocence unavailable in “civilized” society. But in Sacre, Stravinsky and Nijinsky read into country life all the brutality and materialism of 20th-century life in the city. Though Sacre is clearly an outdoor dance, our sense of the surrounding huge, feverishly growing vegetable world bathed in harsh sunlight only makes these rites seem more cruel.
Sacre, for all its power, gives the impression of a distant time and place. Les noces, which evokes Soviet Russia (Nijinska was living in Russia during the Revolution), is the here and now. Nijinska has an abstract painter’s taste for suggestive simplicity–one or two strokes bring out a whole complex of feelings. The mother’s brief solo in the third tableau, which ends with her kneeling in the same position of resigned submission the bride had held in the dance’s opening, quietly limns her grief. The bride and bridegroom’s dance, which takes place on a raised stage at the rear, just above the heads of the corps, happens in bursts of widely separated, simple movement: there’s a brief chase; the groom frames the bride’s head with his arms, as it had been framed in the first tableau by her friends’ arms; they hold hands; they embrace; the bride walks away, spreads her arms, and wraps them around herself. Once the bride and bridegroom enter the bedroom, and the double doors are closed behind them, the two mothers stand and face the doors, their backs to us: Are they guarding the door, listening for the sounds of consummation? Or ready to rush in and retrieve their children from a new and terrifying situation? Their simple standing before the doors has more resonance than the knocking knees of the Chosen One in Sacre, which evoke nothing so much as a silent movie.
For this engagement the Joffrey also revived Arpino’s 1970 Trinity, which has not been seen in Chicago since 1982. This singlemindedly bright, happy paean to rock and the age of Aquarius hasn’t worn well. Critic Arlene Croce’s thoughts on the dance, published in 1971, are irresistible: “The vocabulary of movement is so small yet so propulsive that watching the ballet is like getting a love letter from an illiterate, all in capitals.” When it comes to love letters, context is everything. The context for Trinity is gone, and if anyone’s heart beat faster some 20 years ago upon receiving this letter, we may wonder why today.
