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The Joffrey Ballet "All Stars"
By Laura Molzahn
The Joffrey just keeps pulling rabbits out of its hat. Under the direction of Ashley Wheater, it has rarely repeated even the most successful pieces it's commissioned or acquired.
The fall "All Stars" program, which opened on Wednesday, must have been a bitch to put together, though. Of the four works, all by New York City Ballet choreographers, three were company premieres. But overall the Joffrey dancers met the challenge --- and they'll be pulling this particular rabbit out of their hat (aided by the Chicago Sinfonietta) at the Auditorium through October 24.
With a dance apiece from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 2000s, "All Stars" invites a historical perspective. Yet George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Christopher Wheeldon are such unique, versatile choreographers that comparisons are odious.
Still, there's an implied evolution to Balanchine's "Stravinsky Violin Concerto," choreographed in 1972. Though he'd used the same Stravinsky music for 1941's "Balustrade," he couldn't remember the choreography and came up with completely new stuff for NYCB's '72 Stravinsky festival --- and pointedly commented that this was a dance for the 70s. Though at first Balanchine seems to accede to the egalitarian feminism of the era, perhaps with tongue in cheek, eventually he embraces his own unrepentant way of loving women. A sexy way, I'd add, but not particularly PC.
The first two sections of "Stravinsky Violin Concerto" set up the highly emotional third. The piece begins with two men and two women dancing one at a time against various geometrical formations of eight male and eight female dancers severely outfitted in black and white. Stravinsky's "Toccata" may be whimsical, but the dancers are all business, briskly hopping, skipping, or running with arms extended airplane-style. The next section, to the more sinuous, melancholy "Aria 1," is a duet showing signs of trouble. The woman takes the lead at times, turning the man, and he makes her the center of the universe in a supported full-circle pivot in arabesque. Then, with their legs entwined but facing away from each other, they run their hands up invisible walls. They’re trapped.
The third section is another duet, set to the even more melancholy "Aria 2." But despite a few signs of alienation --- the couple take a ballroom stance but look away from each other --- once they unite, they stay united. When this man turns this woman, she's ensconced within his arms, his hands firm yet light at her waist and ribs; when they look out together, it's over his extended arm and within the embracing circumference of the other. When he puts his hand over her eyes at the end, then supports her in a backbend that makes her face invisible to us, the obliteration is consensual and erotic. On opening night, husband-and-wife Victoria Jaiani and Temur Suluashvili gave charged performances.
The fourth section, to Stravinsky's "Capriccio" finale, returns us to the ensemble but lightens the mood with a little jokey step to the blat of a tuba, folk-dance hops and taps that prefigure Mark Morris, and allusions to Cossack dance, folded arms held high.
Balanchine's 1964 "Tarantella" is also based on folkloric dance, in this case Italian, but mines a more theatrical vein. With cheesy grins and sly glances, the two dancers stage a courtship competition of swift turns and blazing steps. You don’t believe in the romance for a second, but on opening night Yumelia Garcia was suitably pert and Derrick Agnoletti strong and taut.
Wheeldon, NYCB's resident choreographer from 2001 to 2008, shows his kinship to Balanchine in his 2005 "After the Rain," especially in the final duet. Writing in the New York Times in 2005, John Rockwell mentioned that the title "refers somehow to Mr. Wheeldon’s sadness at working for the last time with Jock Soto." The piece does seem elegiac. Its opening --- with the three couples lined up front to back facing us, the women in a deep arabesque penchee --- suggests the inexorable sweep of a second hand (remember those?) around a clock face, especially given the occasional chiming in Arvo Part's spare, moving "Tabula Rasa." Backward entrances are like a rewind.
I found the opening ensemble section, previously performed only by NYCB and Wheeldon's company Morphoses, more interesting choreographically than the frequently done closing duet, set to Part’s less compelling "Spiegel im Spiegel" ("Mirror in the Mirror"). But on opening night Jaiani and Fabrice Calmels blew the place apart in the final duet, her wispy, pliable frame a striking contrast with his power. He's the ship, she's the figurehead; Balanchine would have loved it.
The program closes with Robbins's 1956 comic ballet, "The Concert (Or, The Perils of Everybody)," set to Chopin excerpts played in part by a gloomy, self-important onstage pianist (impressively whiskered Paul James Lewis). Though some of the character-based humor gets old, other bits seem indestructible: a female sextet beset by mistakes and belligerent individualism, a dance with umbrellas that winds down to dismal cowering, a butterfly battle complete with fisticuffs.
