Rebellious Teen Defies Father, Leaves Home; Debutante Engaged to Wealthy Bachelor; Priest Guilty of Sexual Misconduct, Torches Temple--They could be tabloid headlines, but in this case, surprise, they’re abbreviated synopses of Joffrey Ballet’s upcoming “Stories In Motion,” opening this Thursday night, September 18th at the Auditorium Theater and running only through Sunday, September 21st.
“In a day and age when we express ourselves on social media, it’s not very deep or honest,” says Ashley Wheater, artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet, lamenting the deficit in communication people are experiencing today. “We need to have empathy. Ultimately, we want to be able to identify with every character in this program. They are a reflection of our humanity and how we deal with things.”
Reflecting on his choice to produce an entire program of contemporary narrative ballets, Wheater emphasizes the importance of honesty in portrayal of dramatic roles and “the delicate balance of theater and expression.” It’s a challenge each of the dancers must meet head-on, says Wheater. “Dancers think sometimes, ‘if I do more, it’s going to be better,’ and it’s not necessarily the way it is.” Wheater’s aim is to perpetuate ballet as an art form with all the layers, stressing how crucial it is for the dancers to understand the characters and to trust them.
The three pieces on the program, Lilac Garden, Prodigal Son, and RaKU (Joffrey premiere), each tell a story about loss. Wheater finds that thought-provoking because “we’re losing track of what it means to lose something, or someone....Loss is a part of our lives.”
Antony Tudor’s Lilac Garden, choreographed in 1936, is set to Ernest Chausson’s “Poeme For Violin and Orchestra,” Opus 28. The story is “a tragedy of manners,” according to George Balanchine in his Complete Stories of the Great Ballets (1954). It reveals the complex emotional conflict between love and a society which dictates dutiful obligation in the lives of four intertwined individuals of the Edwardian era. Breaking from traditional ballet theme and structure, Tudor pioneered the use of the classical ballet idiom to plum the depths of the human psyche through compelling dance drama for modern day audiences. Without resorting to mime, Tudor combined ballet movement with psychological gesture to develop characters who were real people, in fully-realized relationships, engaged in compelling drama. “In the opening of Lilac Garden,” Wheater explained, “the first thing that happens is she (Caroline, the protagonist) takes a breath, and in that breath, we feel the tension of her situation.” The dancer doesn’t have to do anything more than breathe.
The simplicity of gesture also characterizes George Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, choreographed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1929, with a commissioned score by Sergei Prokofiev. It tells the story of a son who defies his father, leaving his secure home to strike out on his own. He falls in with a bad crowd, gets seduced by The Siren, succumbs to the temptations of gambling and drink, and returns home a broken soul. The libretto is based on the famous Biblical parable in the Gospel of Luke, but focuses most on the theme of sin and redemption implicit in the tale. Balanchine’s movement found inspiration in Byzantine icons, but he utilized classical ballet as the foundation for this radical departure from tradition. Looking at the work almost ninety years later, Wheater remarks on how the piece has withstood the test of time. “There’s so much contemporary movement in Prodigal Son. It’s still incredibly modern!”
Wheater steps out of his directorial shoes to dance the role of The Father, which he first performed when he retired from being a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. “It was a transformational moment for me because I realized how Balanchine allowed gesture and movement to express a hundred words....It’s simple, but it speaks volumes in terms of how we, the audience understand the people (on stage).” Losing his own father, with whom he was very close, at a young age has informed his interpretation of The Father. Having to say good-bye “is very hard and has a massive impact on you. We always carry that with us; you don’t forget.”
When Wheater knew that the Joffrey was going to do Prodigal Son, he said he wanted Edward Villella, recently retired director of the Miami City Ballet and former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, to come to Chicago to coach the Joffrey production. “To me, he was a revelation,” says Wheater. Villella, who began performing the role of The Son in Balanchine’s revival of the piece for NYCB in 1960, demanded acute specificity in the dancers’ integration of the movement with dramatic intention in every aspect of the choreography, even where the eyes are focused. “He’d say to them, ‘you’re trying to be a dancer, you’re trying to be a prince. You’re not a prince! You have to find the grit, the rawness in you and not be afraid to express it!”
Giving the audience a story is essential to Yuri Possokhov, who created RaKU in 2011 for the San Francisco Ballet where he is resident choreographer. Like Lilac Garden, RaKU opens with the central female character taking a breath. “How you breathe and how you think and feel come from the inside,” Wheater observes, “and so, to release a gesture, it takes it away from the extremities.”
Possokhov, like Tudor and Balanchine, lets the movement tell the story and shape the internal landscape of each character. In RaKU, the dancer’s back is to the audience, her arms extending slowly outward, but it is her spine that reveals her emotional vulnerability. The gesture foreshadows a story of love, loss, and danger as her beloved husband heads off to war and she is victimized by the jealous priest.
“People want to be involved,” Possokhov says of his predilection for what he calls “subject ballets.” Audiences want to have feelings, he says. “They are thirsty for this kind of ballet, and the more I see, they devour it.”
The story of RaKU is simple. “I like simple,” he says of his work, which combines a modern sensibility with folk forms that evoke the culture of imperial Japan during the Tokugawa era. The commissioned music by Shinji Eshima incorporates traditional Japanese folk instruments in a contemporary symphonic score that parallels the dramatic movement of the story. As with Prodigal Son, RaKU combines music and movement to evoke the ritualistic tone of an ancient tale, and yet it achieves emotional immediacy in the use of highly contemporary, impulse-driven gesture. Possokhov, a former principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, attributes some influence to the folk dance forms of the Caucasus, Georgia, and Armenia, which he learned as a student. Elements of Asian martial arts color the sword play and movement of the Palace Guards in position and energy, but, as with the music and dancing, modern sensibilities drive the texture of both dance and music composition. The kernal of history that fuels the story derives from the actual burning of a temple in Kyoto. The production uses photographs of the temple fire and its aftermath. “The love story came from our imagination,” Possokhov acknowledges with a modest chuckle. He used the story of love and loss to give dramatic shape to the movement, not emotional overlay. "Movement has to say itself what it is.”
As the Joffrey Ballet celebrates its twentieth anniversary in Chicago, Wheater sees the company as “really beautiful artists” who dance. “That’s so much more interesting than a ballet company.” With “Stories in Motion,” the Joffrey gives us ample opportunity to experience how classical ballet has evolved as a contemporary art form to become a vital medium for dramatic expression that speaks to today’s audiences.