When it comes to variety, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago is downright fearless.
Since relocating from New York City to here four years ago, the company has offered a virtual blitzkrieg from its enormous storehouse, serving up revival after revival complemented by the occasional new piece. Diligently, tirelessly, the company has provided what amounts to an ongoing festival of classics, from such large-scale masterpieces as Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo” and Leonide Massine’s “Les Presages” to such intimate gems as Robert Joffrey’s “Pas de Deesses.” The impressive, expressionistic “The Green Table” returned last season, while “Light Rain,” “Round of Angels” and “Touch Me” are but a few of the revivals from current artistic director Gerald Arpino.
The troupe’s upcoming engagement Thursday through March 28 at the Auditorium Theatre, launching this year’s abbreviated and more loosely organized spring festival of dance, is no exception. The versatility is almost staggering: a world premiere from contemporary dancemaker Laura Dean, one of the troupe’s most reliable sources of new works; a return of Charles Moulton’s sports-tinged showpiece “Panoramagram”; a new revival of “Monotones I and II” by one of the great masters of 20th Century ballet, the late Sir Frederick Ashton; “La Vivandiere Pas de Six” by 19th Century virtuoso Arthur Saint-Leon; the pas de deux from Joffrey’s “Remembrances”; four revivals from Arpino and the addition to the company’s repertory of two works by modern dance mischief maker David Parsons, including his masterful, sleight-of-hand illusion “Caught.”
Instead of losing steam or resting on its laurels, the company continues to diversify its offerings in a way that should please both newcomers and repeat viewers alike, fulfilling an important mission of a resident ballet company to offer a cornucopia of familiar works and experiments.
Encased in all this is an interesting threesome: Dean’s brand new work, Moulton’s re-staging of his “Panoramagram” and a revival staged by Lynn Wallis, a former dancer who worked with Ashton in London. They offer glimpses of three very different challenges faced by choreographers and companies.
Dean’s piece, “Creative Force,” set to music by Rockford-born composer John Zeretzke, is proof that modern dance, while abstract, can be decidedly about something, in this case something profound. “I’ve always been interested in what’s going on in astronomy and physics,” Dean explains. “I started reading Albert Einstein when I was very young.
“For many years, we thought the universe had a chaotic look, that it was random. But we’ve gotten stronger and better telescopes and technology, and in the last 10 to 15 years, astronomers have been concluding that there’s a very intelligent pattern to the universe. It looks a little bit like lace.
“There’s a universal intelligence,” Dean concludes, “and we’re just a part of that.”
Beyond the obvious theological implications, Dean sees in these ideas a metaphor for dance as an enterprise blending individual dancer, ensemble and overall work.
“I’ve always in my choreography had a love of grand design and pattern, but at the same time a love for the individual inside of that,” she says. “That is precisely what we are. We’ve been placed in this grand design, and it’s up to us to decide what to do with it.”
Dean’s prior work for the Joffrey includes the luminous “Force Field” in the late ’80s, a work distinguished by its whirling dervish imagery. Dean says she incorporates some of that signature movement in the new “Creative Force.” “Spinning is a central fact of the universe,” she notes. “Not only are the planets spinning, but the galaxies are spinning, too, and the Milky Way, our galaxy, is in a spiral pattern. Even our DNA is a spiral. Whatever that universal force is, I feel a kinship.”
In contrast, Moulton’s 1991 “Panoramagram” focuses on the more lighthearted imagery of athletics. Its 18 dancers stand shoulder to shoulder, in three ascending rows, an imaginative square that could easily stand for a section of stadium bleachers.
They pass dozens of handballs to each other throughout, creating a series of inventive optical patterns. There’s one section in which a soloist stands atop a tall tower and plunges dramatically into the arms of those below.
“I don’t know that you could say the work is about anything,” Moulton says. “But I’ve been working with precision ball passing since the beginning of my career and using game vocabulary. It’s about integrating that with the dance. I also staged this work in Milwaukee, and it seems everyone takes away a different idea of what it means.”
Recapturing something originally created on mostly different dancers eight years ago is not as hard as it might seem, however. “It has actually been quite wonderful,” says Moulton, who came here to re-create the work with the current company. “We reconstructed from videotape, which has been a valuable tool my whole career, but at the same time I don’t stymie their creative input. They bring their own charm to the work. It’s like doing revivals of operas or plays. You can put a different spin on it.”
Wallis, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet Touring Company and now artistic director of the Royal Academy of Dancing, an educational enterprise, faced a different task: reviving a work not originally her own. Fortunately, she first saw Ashton’s “Monotones II” at its dress rehearsal in 1965, and much later, as assistant ballet mistress for the Royal Ballet Opera School, she rehearsed students in the work before Ashton came in to offer a little last-minute advice.
“I was always bowled over by it,” she says. “From the first, I thought it was one of the most beautiful works I’d ever seen.”
The two “Monotones” components were actually created by Ashton in reverse: He premiered “Monotones I” a year after what’s now known as “II.” Both are set to music by Erik Satie, and both are trios: “I” features two women and a man and “II” boasts two men and a woman.
“I feel part of what I can do is impart some understanding I have from having heard the words of the choreographer,” Wallis says. “It’s not easy. Trying to re-create something through words is very difficult, and every dancer is different. You have to let it breathe, but you can’t let it go totally out of context. It has to be in the frame of what the choreographer intended while allowing the dancer to feel it, too.”
She doesn’t use prior videotapes of the work as reference (“Though there’s no reason why you shouldn’t”), but she sometimes tapes dancers so they can get a look at themselves in the context of the overall piece. “The company has a large repertoire to rehearse and put together,” she says. “You have to remember that time is of the essence.”
Unlike Dean and Moulton, she isn’t interested in choreographing her own work. “I teach but I don’t choreograph,” she says. “I tried it once but felt others were much better.”
