Verve, Nerve and Fervor

By John T. Elson

Up from the orchestra floats a vaguely medieval sound: thick, sonorous and brassy. The dancers parade in solemn sequence across the softly lit stage, looking rather like harlequins in leotards. When they reach the footlights, the mood is suddenly jolted by a more familiar noise: the harsh twang of amplified guitars and the racketing thump of a rock beat. What follows this seemingly incongruous prelude is a swirling, eye-and ear-catching panoply of ballet maneuvers, from chastely classic lifts to Broadway shuffles, set to an eclectic score (by Alan Raph and Lee Holdridge) that blends the modish and the modal. The climax is a joyous, foot-stamping, yet thoroughly unblasphemous rock version of the Ite, missa est chant that ends the Latin Mass. At the diminuendo finale, the dancers lay rows of votive lights across the stage and drift silently, monkishly, into the wings.

Plotless and perhaps even pointless, Gerald Arpino's Trinity nonetheless represents a throbbing fusion of classic dance with the sound of now. It perfectly epitomizes the jaunty style and passionate, youthful temperament of the New York City Center's Joffrey Ballet.

Improvised Air. Young in the age of its dancers (the average is 22) as well as its history, the Joffrey (founded in 1956) has always had a nervous, half-improvised air about it, which may reflect the fact that it has no superstars and has been plagued by a distressingly high turnover in personnel. Last month, midway through its fall season at Manhattan's glum, ungraceful City Center, the company abruptly dismissed its fiery Spanish lead dancer, Luis Fuente; after several months of differences, Fuente irked management by suddenly and arbitrarily departing from the choreography in a meticulous Joffrey revival of Leonide Massine's classic, The Three-Cornered Hat.

The company is kept alive and kicking largely because of the talent-spotting skills of its founding artistic director, Seattle-born Robert Joffrey, 39. Widely regarded as one of the best teachers and coaches in the U.S., Joffrey has a knack for signing up promising unknowns and guiding them to maturity. This season a whole platoon of new young dancers has been turning in pleasurably kinetic and graceful performances. Erika Goodman and Chartel Arthur, both 22, have developed into perky, quicksilver ballerinas with a feathery, light-operatic flair. Alone or with partners, Edward Verso, 28, is a willowy athlete who displays a sure gift for comic characterization and shares many of the company's tougher dramatic roles with a small 20-year-old human dynamo who leaps under the name of Gary Chryst.

In many ways, though, the most impressive of Joffrey's discoveries is huge (6 ft. 4 in.) Trinidad-born Christian Holder, 21. Blessed with a lean, rubbery face and with limbs of astonishing flexibility, Holder has a good actor's ability to turn his towering physique to dramatic effect. As the puppet villain in Petrouchka, he presents the quaint spectacle of a black performing in blackface and shows a notable gift for deadpan comedy. His terrorizing, primitive presence as Death in Kurt Jooss's antiwar tract, The Green Table, dominates the stage and sends chills through even a sophisticated dance audience.

Triumphs and Disasters. While Joffrey has been cultivating talent, the man who has done most to give the company a style is Arpino, a close friend and longtime collaborator. Joffrey contends that a resident choreographer is essential for a company seeking definition and consistency. There is some dispute in ballet circles, though, about whether Arpino is the best man possible for that purpose. He is wildly uneven, capable of lasting triumphs like his muscular tribute to masculine athleticism, Olympics, but also given to pretentious disasters like The Poppet, an epicene parody of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

Arpino is responsible for roughly half the works in the large and varied repertory of 36 items--perhaps too large for the company's size (between 38 and 40 dancers). Reflecting Joffrey's scholarly catholic taste, pieces by other choreographers range from delicate snippets of 19th century Danish court-style ballet (Bournonville's William Tell Variations) to an intelligently danced but dramatically muzzy re-creation of Petrouchka, to the somber, erotic psychodrama of Todd Bolender's The Still Point (new with the company this season).

Joffrey possesses a shrewd, show-bizzy instinct, not merely for what his dancers can manage but for what his audiences will swallow. So far he has avoided full-length ballets in the Russian tradition on the grounds that a Swan Lake or a Giselle would expose more of the company's faults than its virtues. Nonetheless, the question remains as to how long this promising fancy-free troupe can survive on nerve, verve and youthful fervor. When will it undertake major pieces that demand dramatic development rather than mere disciplined dazzle?

John T. Elson

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