DANCING IN SPACE

The Joffrey Ballet

Zellerbach Hall

University of California, Berkeley

A review by Christopher Bernard

What is greatness – moral, intellectual, artistic? It has a musty, old-fashioned sound, and is not exactly a fashionable idea just now, with our cultural hysterias against “elitism” of any kind, or perhaps ever was in a democratic culture with its sweet, egalitarian shibboleths. Nevertheless, the idea of greatness, saintliness, genius – of a superiority one cannot ignore but only acknowledge with humility and gratitude and admiration, even, in supreme cases, awe – periodically returns, because, like “truth” or “goodness,” it is a value that, however we may pretend we can do without it, at a certain point we discover that we can’t without collapsing into moral incoherence: nihilism, demoralization and despair.

In my own experience, artistic greatness, in particular, is partly discernible by the fact that the subject is more powerful, more beautiful, more astonishing or impressive than I remember it: that painting, this poem, this dance company, that book is more than I assimilated or knew; in some sense is permanently beyond me. It reminds me of what is often meant by “transcendent experience” – “artistic greatness” seems to mean a direct, sensuous experience of transcendence, piercing through the fog of distracted daily living in concentrated brilliance – and thus is an absolute value and not a category of relative merit.

I was provoked to these thoughts partly by the arrival in Berkeley over a recent weekend (and thanks to Cal Performances) of one of the country’s pre-eminent dance companies, a company that has, in the past, shown itself capable of reaching such heights with sometimes intimidating ease – the Joffrey Ballet, based in Chicago and not nearly a regular enough a visitor to the Bay Area and the finely tuned dance audiences we have here. And the company was indeed better than I remembered.

The Joffrey, originally under Robert Joffrey, then Gerald Arpino, and now Ashley Wheater, has mastered a lithe and muscular style of dancing that was on full display throughout a cast in which all of its member are presented as principals.

The performance I saw opened with Christopher Wheeldon’s “Commedia©” (yes, the copyright symbol is part of the title, as with other dances by Wheeldon; is this meant to prevent other choreographers from every using this title for one of their own works? Will someone now copyright “Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker”? One can only hope they will resist the temptation), a brittlely elegant dance-class piece mimicking the somewhat matte cheeriness of the Stravinsky score it is set to, the clever, if chilly Pulcinella. Never having warmed to the music, I found it hard to warm to the dance, admiring it too from afar, though the contributions of Yumi Kanazawa and Yuki Iwai were noteworthy, and above all that of Brooke Linford, which was of an altogether memorable lightness and grace.

Stephanie Martinez’s “Bliss!”, which followed, set to Dumbarton Oaks, a richer and more complex piece of Stravinsky’s, was a good deal of a looser, less self-conscious affair, spinning between beefcake machismo and winsome femininity, with strong contributions, again, by Iwai and Kawazawa and by Jonathan Dole, and with an almost hilarious riff on muscularity by a stunning Derrick Agnoletti.

If the performance had ended, or peaked, there, at the first intermission, I would have had an interesting afternoon, with some moments to savor and much to have enjoyed. But I wouldn’t have been prepared for what followed.

What followed? “Beyond the Shore” followed. But wait: this is a work, choreographed by Nicholas Blanc (long a staple at the San Francisco Ballet) and co-commissioned by Cal Performances, and so having a special relationship with the Bay Area. The dance is set to a thundering, highly theatrical score by Mason Bates (perhaps best known here for his work, a few years back, with the San Francisco Symphony), “The B-Sides,” originally commissioned by the Symphony. Blanc describes his dance as about “exploration as a metaphor for human nature,” which is certainly a good thought to hang on to as we are thrust into a series of dance adventures, one for each section of the music, as thrilling, compelling and complex as I hope to find in this or any other dance season, climaxing in a profoundly astonishing and deeply moving  pas de deux by Victoria Jaiani and Dylan Guttierez that took me to places dance has not taken me in a very long time indeed, in a section called “Gemini in the Solar Wind.” This was inspired by (and for once, the word is just, for this was in the deepest sense an inspiration) the famous 1960s Gemini spacewalk, recordings of the NASA communications from the walk being cleverly, and oddly movingly, incorporated into the music. The dance was a haunting and vivifying experience, demanding much of the entire company, which met the challenge with limber and dramatic success.

After being vaulted into outer space by “Beyond the Shore,” we put on the razz and came back to earth in the concluding, dance, “The Times Are Racing,” by Justin Peck, a choreographer I have had mixed feelings about till now but this time was completely won over. A sneaker dance if there ever was one, this work starts in a throbbing mob cluster of bodies exploding into a swirling disco-thon to a jammy score from Dan Deacon (moving from ironic, to joyous, to hopeful, to joyous, to ironic, from his hit album America) with an array of young dancers who seemed like they’d jettisoned ten years from the assertive maturity of the Blanc, and dressed up, or down, in sports punk togs from Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony, splashed with defiance – “Fight,” “Rebel,” “Change,” “Obey,” and of course “Defy” – and knocking them flat with a trip-hop stew of dance styles I soon gave up counting. Starting at a race, it only got faster, wilder, crazier, though whittled down at moments to knock-’em-out solos, especially from Edson Barbosa, that knocked out the audience too, till, speeding by like it would never stop, the dance spun out to succeeding heights of crazy, then spun back in on itself, whooshing back into its cluster like a deblossoming flower before collapsing in total exhaustion.

What a dance. What a performance. What a company.

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Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.