Dance

...It is as if he had seen Nijinska's "Les Biches" and decided to do an undergraduate version of it using the Robbins format...

...Even with its slightly askew playing, the ballet did make a warm impression and on second viewing a week later seemed to have settled in a bit more...

...Lord only knows what Robbins, seated in the audience, thought...

...Jerome Robbins singlehandedly has created a vogue for ballets danced to Chopin's music, played by a pianist seated at the piano on stage...

...Company director Joffrey has been considerably less successful with his mounting of contemporary Argentianian choreographer Oscar Araiz's ballets...

...The danger continually exists for anyone, and dancer Dowell did not have the actor's tools to control the rhythm...

...Perhaps only a society with a highly defined class structure could automatically produce the dancers to do so...

...Anthony Dowell, a principal of-the Royal Ballet, appeared as guest narrator and was elegant if slightly bland...

...The text was originally written by Gertrude Stein as a play "They Must, Be Wedded, To Their Wife...

...The cadences of Stein's words defied his shaping and became routinely singsong...

...Beatriz Rodriguez danced the forlorn and perhaps slightly simple Julia as the specter at the feast in a somewhat more macabre vein than necessary, emphasizing the darker side relentlessly...

...It , was the second of three works she prepared for the company ; and is the most enduring...

...It was wrongheaded, muddled and—aside from the opening pictorial silhouette lighting—tediously unengaging to watch...

...The year of its creation, 1937, was a particularly felicitous one for Ashton, who also produced "Les Patineurs," a perennially fresh, witty ballet which is also in the Joffrey repertory...

...At present, with one or two exceptions, the dancers have tended to concentrate on steps and let the dramatic elements slip away...

...Lynn Glauber, returned last season from a stint with Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the 20th Century, was a humorous foil with nothing on her mind but a sleekly efficient way of presenting that goodnatured vacuity...

...While clearly based on the classic vocabulary, the ballet demands characterization to make its impact...

...DON McDONAGH (Don McDonagh has contributed extensively to the New York Times among other publications and is the author of How To Enjoy Ballet, published this month...

...They represent two of the most durable from among Ashton's pre-World War II works when he was in the process of forming the lyrical, neat, and dramatically nuanced stylistic approach that has become the legacy of the present Royal Ballet...

...The company mounted the latter's "A Wedding Bouquet" as its first novelty of the season...

...In the first performances it was sung, but it was subsequently recited by a narrator seated at the front of the stage in evening dress, occasionally sipping champagne...

...The dance is at once a work in itself and a comment on the style of ballet dancing in general...

...The mistress of the household staff, Webster, was presented with scolding accents rather than martinet sternness by Bonnie Wyckoff...

...He makes his Bridegroom, despite the formal wedding clothes, into a slightly seedy person at the center of an occasion that he might not ordinarily be invited to...

...The company takes to Tharp's work quite naturally and happily...

...She recognizes its purity but, as a modern dance choreographer, can't help twitting some of its conventions...

...The style was parodied brilliantly by Peter Anastos several seasons back in his "Yes Virginia Another Piano Ballet'' and no one has even come close to doing the real thing as well as Robbins...

...Araiz has set his dancers in party clothes on a round of sensual encounters that approach self-parody unintentionally...

...though Pepe, Julia's dog, was danced very perkily by Lisa Slagle and Jan Hanniford made much if not all out of the slightly tipsy Josephine...

...This is the first appearance of what will be a regular column...

...There are sad conflicts that surface in the midst of this small-town French wedding but are most effectively pointed when they only peep out from time to time...

...Dance CLASSIC STYLING OLD & NEW AT THE JOFFREY DESPITE the glittery, "with it" image of the Joffrey Ballet, its underpinnings and real base is the series of revivals of contemporary, for the most part, classics that have taken place almost from the founding of the company...

...It deals with competition, virtuoso display and the sheer work of dancing in pure dance terms, and one admires the off-handed flip assurance of Miss Rodriguez, Glenn Dufford and Jan Hanniford among others...

...Though the present production is rewarding, the company has yet wholly to grasp the understated humor of spoofed dignity that gives the ballet its special interest...

...Its creator Twyla Tharp approaches the classic vocabulary with warmth and also a little snideness...

...Those choreographers the company has drawn strongly upon have included George Balanchine, Agnes De Mille and in recent years Sir Frederick Ashton...

...On the whole the large cast—26 including narrator—failed to develop an ensemble tone in its dancing and one kept being made aware of the steps rather than the characters...

...Gary Chryst is an outstanding exception in his somewhat Chaplinesque presentation of the Bridegroom but then he is one of the handful of first-rate character dancers in the entire country...

...Among the regular repertory pieces, "As Time Goes By" continues to impress by its tough, funny gloss on classic styling...

...the composer, Lord Berners, extracted portions of it to be set musically...

...Fortunately the company never presents the merely new without something old and valuable like "A Wedding Bouquet" to balance off the more perishable offerings...

...In the past two years he has presented three of them and this latest "Chopin Preludes" reminds one of a shopping list of other and better works by a clutch of choreographers...

...While partnering in thepas de deux, he highlighted the elements of correct execution gone slightly awry, with resigned doggedness...