On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance THE LAST JOFFREY PROJECT BY LAURA A. JACOBS The eighties have not been kind to classical ballet. George Balanchine, perhaps the greatest classical choreographer in history, died...
...He had long wanted to stage Nijinsky's Le Sacre duprintemps, and last year he was able to thanks to historians Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer...
...Yet his accomplishment stands as a monument to dance history, to remembering...
...In a later section, this Young Man re-enters with a glass of champagne, dazed, almost mindless...
...Joffrey was a more modest impresario than Diaghilev— for one thing, he didn't have as distinguished astableof artists...
...Cotillon was performed until 1946, when for obscure reasons it vanished from sight...
...Jerel Hilding was endearingly silly as the Master of Ceremonies, and Leslie Carothers brought a sharp glitter to the role of his counterpart and foil...
...It is arguably his company's most important reconstruction...
...His was the first ballet company to commission work from the likes of Twyla Tharp and Laura Dean, avant-garde choreographers (at least back then) who might have happily thrown egg on his face...
...LeBlanc startles by giving us everything we wanted, and then startles again by wanting nothing for herself...
...The seamlessness of the development was made possible by LeBlanc's generous musicality and her clean, unforced epaulement...
...Three years after Cotillon's premiere, Lincoln Kirstein observed: "If Balanchine never read Proust, it is of no importance...
...No doubt he was partly inspired by Tamara Toumanova, the soulful 13-year-old "Baby Ballerina" whom he made the heart of his Cotillon...
...The Royal Ballet's Sir Frederick Ashton— the only one of Balanchine's contemporaries who could be called his peer in depth and facility, if not vision—passed away in his sleep just a few months ago...
...Having dovetailed pictorial invention and classical technique, he was sure-footedly proceeding to explore his most bewitching subject—female fantasy and desire...
...Choreographed in 1932, this was the first work Balanchine made for the newly-formed Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, a company out to prove that ballet did not die in 1929 with Diaghilev...
...they don't hang together logically, nor are they meant to...
...At least that is what happens on the surface...
...Cotillon divides into eight sections, beginning with the Young Girl at her toilette, and ending with her spiritually alone, at the center of two circles —the eye of a gyre...
...Wrists pressed to the forehead seem to signify dangerous imagining...
...When the Friend of the Young Girl enters, she almost immediately makes passes at the heroine's beau...
...And where would the Joffrey be without Tina LeBlanc, who couldn't be more unlike Toumanova, yet who made a passionate, immediately sympathetic Young Girl...
...He was shortly followed by Edwin Denby, the great and gentle critic who first championed Balanchine's genius in print, and it was the end of an era for the New York City Ballet...
...For daring Joffrey was...
...I used to think they might erode a hardwon classical technique in the way Oleg Vinogradov's egregious, over-acrobatic dances have at the Kirov: perform them too often and the ear dulls, reflexes thicken...
...But the ballet is stranger and more spirited than that...
...The book Kochno provided for Cotillon three years later was quite similar...
...Dance is, after all, an art form that is eminently corruptible at best and self-erasing at worst...
...He absorbed from Chabrier's brilliant music the acrid perfume of adolescence...
...La Vivandière is a work of mid-19thcentury sweetness and symmetry, yet LeBlanc was not sweet in it...
...Commissions weren't the whole story, though...
...The Young Girl watches him, bewildered, and falls to the floor...
...Its disappearance is somewhat surprising, since the work was well thought of...
...Then this attitude gave way to gentleness, and a slow-growing rapture...
...George Balanchine, perhaps the greatest classical choreographer in history, died in the spring of 1983...
...One can only imagine that Joffrey indulged Arpino as compensation for the more difficult and daring projects he himself set the company...
...What a jolt, then, to see the reconstructed Cotillon, which is anything but soft-focus...
...an arm is raised forward, palm up, in an attempt to forestall time...
...Throughout the ballet strange games are played, strange looks are exchanged, and secrets are kept...
...But the harm Arpino does falls not so much on the dancers as on audiences, who respond wholeheartedly to the accessibility, the clear conscience, the sheer pace of his ballets...
...Though projected through a distinctly Russian lens, these are the poetics of all dance...
...It was a trio of Diaghilev productions—Petrouchka, Le Spectre de la rose and L'Après-midi d'un faune —that lured Nureyev into the company as a guest artist, and no doubt Joffrey's mounting them had something to do with the renewal of interest in the founder of the Ballets Russes and his amazing coterie...
...Arpino's ballets are singularly unmusical and heavy-handed—here saccharine, there self-consciously trendy...
...Each dance has a ready conceit—puppets, primitives, a Pan figure—that enables it to make a point about the relationship of spirit to flesh, of human to earth and homeland, of foot to floor...
...It expressed in a curiously fugitive and juvenile movement intimacy, desolation, the heart's tenderness and savagery [and] also insight into the eternity of a moment of grace...
...She graces Joffrey's memory...
...Denby called it "the glory of the [Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo's] repertory," and wrote: "The piece profoundly affected the imagination of the young people of my generation...
...LeBlanc is a small, old-fashioned dancer, endowed with tiny, delicatetoed feet that are as well-sprung as Cupid's arrow...
...LeBlanc danced up a storm in the Joffrey's run at City Center, giving us one consummate performance after another...
...Jolting, too, is the episodic nature of the ballet...
...At first, rather, she was correct, meticulously so...
...Petrouchka's Georgian dancers find themselves parodied in Le Sacre's circling girls and arm-linked threesomes...
...She was a luminous Titania in Ashton's The Dream, but it took La Vivandière pas de six to show all sides of her...
...One imagines a ballet endowed with a misty, uncertain, even mordant atmosphere...
...So yes, Cotillon is about a girl's first brush with selfish society, and yes, it has the glare of Old World decadence...
...The choreography conveys much more, though, thanks to the romantic iconography that Balanchine was later to perfect in Serenade and La Sonnambula...
...Cotillon also displays Balanchine's early command of his characteristically expressive corps groupings and floor patterns...
...Joffrey was not a great choreographer...
...Just as important were the restorations of old dances, a Joffrey practice that can be traced back to the choreographer's "Diaghilev evenings" in the late '70s...
...And this past March, after a long illness, Robert Joffrey died...
...This was particularly evident in his choice of Gerald Arpino as house choreographer...
...The stage is brightly lit, ready for action that is lively, at times hysterical...
...Look at the New York City Ballet: Not six years after Balanchine's death it is an institution in turmoil, a company that is already forgetting how to dance its founder's ballets properly...
...the chic but comparatively conservative sets and costumes were Christian Bérard's...
...But he was no less acquisitive...
...divinity felt by young dancers at their first ball...
...Stravinsky's Le Sacre score hints at his music for Petrouchka, waiting to be born...
...Le Sacre now takes the place of Michel Fokine's Parade on the Diaghilev bill, a substitution that has an undeniable logic...
...Bringing together Fokine's Petrouchka (created for Nijinsky), Nijinsky's L'Après-midi, with its final orgasmic gesture, and the convulsively modernist Le Sacre in a single program gives one a sense of the compression and momentum of a formidable creative period in ballet...
...Well before these, in 1929, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo premiered a work of his calledLeBal, with a book by Boris Kochno, music by Vittorio Rieti, and surrealist sets and costumes by Giorgio de Chirico...
...With each performance of Cotillon at City Center this season the Joffrey dancers became more dramatically meshed, more sensitive to tone and gestural subtlety...
...The Hand of Fate pas de deux, danced by a Cavalier and a woman in black, was done just competently enough so that it could be seen as a sublime creation, one of Balanchine's most voluptuously repressed duets...
...As artistic director of the company that bore his name, moreover, he frequently showed a lack of critical acuity...
...Bérard's recreated costumes are canary yellow, palomino peach and various gem tones—sapphire, ruby, emerald, and opalescent pink and blue...
...In the super-fast diagonal work her steps rang clear as bells, and her phrases held like spinnakers slowly filling with air...
...Folly, with its attendant virtues andills, is in theair...
...a hand hoods the eyes as if against a heartstopping vision...
...It is hard to think of a photo from dance history more evocative than the dreamy still of the young Toumanova in Cotillon seated in a cloud of tulle, eyes downcast, her sad black pony-tail falling over one shoulder...
...The set, also meant to be faithful to the original, features simple white loges and folding screens—not overly atmospheric...
...Nonetheless, she danced the allegro of La Vivandière with such bite that the tone was practically husky...
...The ballroom scenes in between move with a whoosh and a clatter...
...How fitting, then, that Joffrey's last project was the reconstruction of Balanchine's early and much sighed-over ColilIon...
...Joffrey's repertory is perhaps open to the charge of nostalgia—can Petrouchka ever really live again without a Nijinsky to animate it...
...Was Joffrey also quietly saying that his company would not die without him...
...In both cases their first efforts for the company turned out to be their best: Tharp's Deuce Coupe was a moving evocation of adolescent emotion, and Dean's Night sharp-wittedly cornered all that is reductive in classical technique...
...Balanchine, it seems, really wanted to do Le Bal again, perhaps to do it right...
...Indeed, one can hear in it the first statement of a theme that Balanchine always played in a minor key: romance as a state of profound disturbance, where intimations of death lurk at every tum...
...In his six-decade career Balanchine would be drawn to the ballroom time and again to create such haunting and masterful dances as La Valse, La Sonnambula, Liebeslieder Walzer, and Vienna Waltzes...
...When the white-bearded Old Sage of Le Sacre is momentously lowered to kiss the ground, the image overlies the climax of L'Après-midi, in which the Faune makes contact with the earth in a rather more unsettling manner...
...The dances speak to one another...
...Here, however, the music was by Emmanuel Chabrier, with Rieti doing some of the orchestrations...
Vol. 71 • November 1988 • No. 20
