The Joffrey Ballet
The Joffrey Ballet, which celebrated its 50th anniversary with the Cool Vibrations program at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago April 26 to May 7, is suffering from growing pains and experiencing a midlife crisis.
In its effort to appeal to younger audiences, The Joffrey is reviving old repertoire that appealed to a younger generation in its heyday. It’s no coincidence that the dancers portray high schoolers both in Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe, choreographed in 1973 to music by The Beach Boys, and in Donald Byrd’s newly commissioned Motown Suite with music by the Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.
Tharp’s seminal work, Deuce Coupe, in its latest reincarnation, looks dated, however. This dance changed the course of contemporary ballet but has lost its shock value.
The current crop of Joffrey dancers, though masterful technicians, just don’t get it. They add a lot of pizzazz and enthusiasm to their dancing, but without Tharp’s own dancers augmenting their ranks (as Deuce Coupe was performed originally), razzle-dazzle energy only goes so far. These new Joffrey dancers are too balletic. They fall into the intentionally loose movement without carrying it all the way through and hope for the best. Tharp deserves better. It doesn’t help that Heather Aagard, as “the ballerina” in the opening, wobbles in her arabesques and turns. She picks up speed and prowess as the dance progresses, however, growing quicksilver in her paces.
In the fall the Joffrey dancers looked superb, making quantum leaps from the classicism of Ashton’s The Dream to the wild, abandoned excesses of Arpino’s Celebration and the angular modernism of Jirí Kylián’s Return to a Strange Land. But the contrasts among those ballets are easy to see—and dance. The difference between Tharp and Byrd is much more subtle. More at ease with Byrd, the dancers bring their fun-loving attitude and athleticism to Motown Suite, which the audience eats up. Each song brings us a beautiful dancing moment by a different set of Joffrey dancers (or a spectacular individual), but it’s as fluffy and fulfilling as eating cotton candy.
The cast falls short in Laura Dean’s Sometimes It Snows in April, set to Prince’s music, looking almost dizzy as it turns and twists in a line that progresses across the stage in a brilliantly updated version of the repeated arabesques penchés in La Bayadère. But they make a comeback into the rousing finale. It’s easy to see why Dean’s dance—and The Joffrey dancing it—is such a crowd-pleaser. Dean also changed the course of ballet history with this section from the groundbreaking 1993 Billboards, but her choreography seems closer to the consciousness of today’s ballet audience.
Effie Mihopoulos is a Chicago arts critic, and a cultural commentator and interviewer with a community radio station.
