Flimsy Fun

Music is to dance what time is to life --indispensable, but often taken for granted. This, fortunately, is not the case with the City Center Jeffrey Ballet. There the accent is definitely on music. Not only does the company dance to Varese, Mayuzumi, blues, rock, jazz or electronic music, but it also picks up on even newer fashions with dizzying alacrity and brio. Indeed, there are times when the youthful Jeffrey troupe (average age: 20) suggests a band of teen-agers dancing in front of a pop-classical jukebox. That makes Jeffrey performances fun to watch--and hear. Alas, it frequently makes them somewhat flimsy and superficial.

Last week, early in its current six-week season in Manhattan, the Jeffrey was busy mixing fun with flimsiness to a sometimes annoying degree. Jive, by the talented young choreographer Eliot Feld, borrowed Morton Gould's Benny Goodmanesque Derivations for Clarinet and Band and set out to pay tribute to the jazz dances of the 1930s and 1940s. What it actually accomplished was to certify all over again that nobody, including Feld, can match Jerome Robbins (Interplay) at the art of choreographing to slick jazz.

Deuce Coupe, by Guest Choreographer Twyla Tharp, was set to a 30-minute anthology of recorded hits by the Beach Boys, sultans of surfdom in the early 1960s. Now enjoying a new wave of popularity, the Beach Boys have a distinctive style that combines close vocal harmony with innocent, unconcerned bounce. Deuce Coupe had little harmony and even less bounce. The choreography was an attempt to contrast classical ballet with the popular dances of the past decade or so. The result was a suspension not unlike the average salad dressing: it stayed together only when shaken frequently. The corps of boys and girls--drawn from both the Jeffrey and Tharp companies--did its best, wiggling and jerking in ways that sometimes recalled the old one-reeler days. But the result was too much of a campy, flippant "in" joke.

Fortunately, one could always concentrate on the novel doings upstage. There, standing before three huge, upwardly unwinding panels of paper, toiled a happy handful of subway graduates who used spray-paint cans to demonstrate that most up-to-date and with-it of minimal arts--graffiti.

More rewarding was the aptly named Jackpot by Gerald Arpino, the company's resident choreographer. It was a mod, witty duet that suggested a Greek god and goddess having a sexual romp in outer space. As the curtain lifted, a shower of colored star beams descended to reveal Glenn White flexing his muscles on a cube-shaped platform. From behind the cube popped the curvy figure of Erika Goodman, who led White on a merry chase that culminated twelve minutes later in a highly suggestive climax. The cube lit up, a smoke bomb went off, rubber balls soared through the air like mad meteorites and the lights cut off in a final blackout. Jackpot was gimmicky, erotic and decidedly brash. It was also, every minute of it, thoroughly charming. The humor that Arpino found in an electronic score called Synapse may or may not have been intended by Composer Jacob Druckman, but if he is wise, Druckman will claim it.

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