Few choreographers get the distinction of being ‘quintessentially American’. Balanchine (though he was Georgian!) is one such choreographer. As is Jerome Robbins, whose West Side Story has enjoyed three revivals since its 1957 debut. There’s Martha Graham, “The Mother of American Modern Dance”, and Alvin Ailey whose contributions to American arts and culture were recently honored at the Whitney’s “Edges of Ailey” exhibition last year. All behemoth names in the dance world. However, starting in the 1960s, it could be argued there was another person who ascended amongst these ranks: Gerald (Gerry) Arpino, co-founder and resident choreographer of the Joffrey Ballet Chicago.
In considering his contribution to American ballet, the Joyce Theater curated a festival of Arpino’s most popular works in early October. Among these include his romantic Birthday Variations, the elegiac Round of Angels, and Sea Shadow, a watery homage to the mythological Ondine. Due to a ticketing mix-up I was fortunate enough to see both programs—- all in all, seven of Arpino’s works.
For Program One, I slipped into an aisle very near to the front of the stage. I was seated next to two women, one of whom I asked to borrow a pen from. “Have you seen any of Arpino’s works before?” I ventured. The more talkative of the two responded, “no,” that she only really goes to see New York City Ballet but that she’s trying to “branch out”. Perhaps the Arpino festival was meant to serve as an unexpected departure from the norm. I wondered quietly if that would be the case.
The first program featured four works: Confetti (1970), L’Air D’Esprit (1973), Round of Angels (1983), and Birthday Variations (1986) performed by Colorado-based company AVID (Artistic Ventures in Dance), guests artists Misa Kuranaga and Angelo Greco, The Joffrey Ballet, and Oklahoma City Ballet, respectively.
Confetti (1970) came first. Three dancers (Emily Speed, Sara Jumper, and Melody Mennite) emerged in variously hued tutus. Flashes of canary-yellow, peachy-pink and a subdued orange spotted the stage. The women showed off their precise footwork and willowy épaulement. The men followed en suite. Thomas Caleb Roberts, Elias Re, and Julian Goodwin-Ferris displayed their to-be-expected strength and easy ballon. Confetti felt like an excerpt from a feature-length ballet, possibly Bourneville’s Napoli (1842). The dancers grit through utterly unforgiving transitional steps and, if I remember correctly, a number of gargouillades. Confetti is energetic and, technically speaking, a true feat of a ballet. Mid-way through the piece, the men emerge with tambourines, a staple of many story ballet ‘peasant scenes’. I wondered at the relevance of a decontextualized ‘peasant scene’ as the men struck the tambourines in unison. That said, the piece delivered what felt like a celebration. Confetti was jubilant and straightforward.
As the curtain closed and the lights came up, The City-Ballet devotee leaned over to me and said “Didn’t you feel that that was a bit outdated?” It did feel outdated, but I held my cards close: “I think that’s sort of a central question surrounding his work right now—- whether or not it’s still relevant.” “What’s interesting,” she muses, “is that Balanchine and Robbins’ works do [hold up].”
L’Air D’Esprit (1973) followed. A romantic duet between guest artists Misa Kuranaga (Principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet) and Angelo Greco (Principal dancer with Houston Ballet). L’Air D’Esprit is easy on the eyes. The piece didn’t ask too much of its audience, only that we sink into Kuranaga and Greco’s lovers’ make believe. Together they were effortless, as all pros are, allowing me to forget that ballet is very hard.
Round of Angels (1983) opens with dancers writhing sardine-like on the ground. A captivating Jeraldine Mendoza emerges as the focal point of the piece; she shows off her high extension and flexible back as a corps of men flit about her. Set to Mahler’s 5th Symphony Adagietto, the choreography features all of the score’s emotionality. The musical choice was fitting, as the piece was choreographed as an homage to Arpino’s longtime collaborator and friend, James R. Howell, who died of AIDS in 1982. Round of Angels offered what I felt to be the only ‘true’ point of sentimentality in the entire program– it felt markedly different, for example, from L’Air D’Esprit where sentiment is merely theatrical: convincing but piece-bound. In the final swell of Mahler’s adagietto, it’s clear that Round of Angels’ sentiment outlasts the 12 minute run time.
Birthday Variations (1983) was a sprightly bookend to Confetti. Set to Verdi’s opera-ballet music, Birthday Variations was commissioned by Becky D’Angelo as a birthday present to her husband Dino, owner of the Chicago Civic Opera House and lifelong lover of Verdi. It is unsurprising, then, that Birthday Variations feels very much like a birthday present to a man. The piece opens with five women (Paige Russell, Mayu Odaka, Leah Reifer, Falnnery Werner, and Anna Tateda) surrounding a sole male dancer, the infectious Alejandro González. The women bend backwards one at a time, their chins pointing up to the rafters as their eyes reach back to find the audience. They lunge toward González as if bowing to him, espousing reverence or loyalty. One dancer emerges as his favorite (the dancer in pink) who, I imagine, is a stand-in for both the commissioner and her Verdi-loving-beloved. Like L’Air D’Esprit, Birthday Variations has the suggestion of a love story without descending into anything particularly narrative. It is digestible and pretty. In addition to its structuring– 5 solos followed by a pas de deux– the pastel costuming lends the piece a balletic ‘quintessentialness’.
If the first program evidenced Arpino’s contribution to classical ballet, the second program highlighted his choreographic range. Opening again with Confetti (danced this time by Madeline Bez, Amanda Carrick, Lilit Hogtanian, Thomas Caleb Roberts, Julian Goodwn-Ferrris, and Ethan Schweitzer-Gaslin), the second program featured a nod to the choreographer’s interest in neoclassicism with a performance of Valentine (1971): a “battle of the sexes” set to a live score performed by cellist Kebra-Seyoun Charles. Danced by AVID founder Emily Speed and the towering Fabrice Camels, Valentine has the cartoonish quality of Looney-Tunes brawl. In addition to movement, both Charles and the dancers vocalize at random, offering onomatopoeic pfffffts and ughhhhhhs to the accompanying cello suite. These comedic vocalizations ring out as a tiny Speed tries to out-maneuver a 6 foot 6 Camels. At one point Camels holds a palm to Speed’s head as she ‘tries with all her might’ to break past him. She huffs in frustration as Camels looks out at the audience disinterestedly. Valentine as ballet-comedy is enacted via Speed’s ‘feminine’ disposition. The audience is meant to find humor in her comparative physical smallness. A world in which women’s only recourse to ‘indomitable maleness’ is ingenuity: men are brute force, women are all cunning. A timeless theme (so long as men and women continue to exist in relation to one another), but a dull, or perhaps dated, one, choreographically speaking– at least when it’s reduced to a literal “battles of the sexes”. That said, Valentine is innocuous. It doesn’t offend, it just shows its age.
The most anticipated performance of the night (everywhere I turned people seemed to be discussing it) was Dance Theatre of Harlem’s performance of Sea Shadow (1962). Wendy Perron, long-time dancer, writer, and editor who happened to be seated next to me, first saw the piece in 1963 and was looking forward to its present restaging; a first for Dance Theatre of Harlem. Kamala Saara (the nymph) and Kouadio Davis (her besotted, mortal lover) luxuriated in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. The piece begins with Davis in repose. He is stoic and strong; a steadfast counter to Saara’s tenderness. The pair cathect on stage as if no one is around to see. Saara presses her body against Davis’s. Together they mimic the action of diving into a body of water. It closes in this way, Saara lying gingerly atop of Davis, arms treading water. Saara leans in to peck Davis on the cheek as the curtain comes down.
The piece brought to mind Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun (1953) for its quiet elegance. I’m not the first to make this connection. An excerpt from Lewis Segal’s review of Sea Shadow published in the Los Angeles Times in 1989 reads: “Their exploratory relationship and the liquidity of the movement style suggest Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun with an undertow of Ashton’s Ondine.” The facile swoopings and surgings in Sea Shadow seem to me perfectly expressive of the mythological Ondine’s plain request of her mortal lover: fidelity. Arpino’s facsimile to Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun, Sea Shadow pays expert attention to the emotional swells of the music, capturing, in every gentle caress or look, Ravel’s oceanic depth.
The last piece, Light Rain (1981), felt tethered to the year of its creation, 1981. Its ambiguously “Eastern” score by San Francisco-based musicians Douglas Adams and Russ Gauthier is reflective of choreographers’ increasing interest in multiculturalism that seems to have begun in the 80s. “The music,” the program reads, “was new for its time—- an Eastern/Western fusion that sets the backdrop for Arpino’s dynamic and sexual ode to youth and all its passions.” Foregoing the dreamy romanticism of Sea Shadow, Light Rain plays with jazzy shoulder moments and overtly sexual partnering passes. The wonderfully exacting Katlyn Addison (Principal Dancer with Ballet West) rag-dolled through a Balanchine-esque Slaughter on 10th Avenue sequence. Addison’s legs darted up into the air as she lost herself in a throw-away backward bend, supported by fellow Ballet West Principal Dancer Hadriel Diniz. To close their pas de deux, Hadriel laid on his back, head to the audience with legs in a middle split, while Addison laid over him. Balancing on Diniz’s pelvis, Addison arched her back and arms backward to touch her toes. This kamasutra pose provoked laughter from the audience. With a gaudy 80’s sensibility, Arpino’s Light Rain suggests that ostentation, not subtlety, is what’s sexy.
On the Arpino festival, New York Times dance critic Brian Seibert wrote: “… the seven works spread across two programs were a little disappointing. Largely missing were the turned-on, Age of Aquarius, fourth-dimension pieces that made Arpino’s name. Without them, the festival was a bit mystifying, a celebration of mediocrity and a time capsule for a vision of ballet even more dated than I had anticipated.” I understand Seibert’s disappointment. The decontextualized Confetti felt off the mark. As did Valentine, whose commentary on gender fell a bit flat, especially considering the ballet world’s attempt to move past its gendered self-conception, however nominal it may be.
And yet, Seibert’s appraisal misses out on some of the fine tuning. Arpino’s Round of Angels was one of the first dances to respond to the AIDS crisis. I was surprised that there was no mention of this, nor of James R. Howell, in the Joyce’s programming. In light of recent federal cuts and stop-work orders to programs like USAID and PEPFAR, programs which have been instrumental in abating HIV and AIDS globally, the topic takes on renewed gravity. Particularly as countries face what one humanitarian has called “a global health massacre”. In light of this, Round of Angels emerges as a prescient reminder of the historical and continued hopeful role of dance in response to global politics/foreign policy.
I reflect, also, on the technical difficulty and range of Arpino’s works. Where some delight in high-energy, highly-sexed throw away sequences, others require a level of technical proficiency that wows. Surely these works stretched dancers in new and demanding ways at the time of their creation.
While Arpino’s choreographic bravura has lost some of its sheen, one thing remains true: his works spark discussion. Leaving the Joyce, I stopped briefly on the sidewalk to finish jotting down my thoughts. A gentleman asked if I was writing about the performance. “How do you even begin to write about dance!?” I believe I mumbled something about “the feelings I’m left with” and, as Perron said to me during intermission, the use of many verbs. I ended up walking down the street with the incredulous gentleman and during our walk down 8th Ave, I learned he came from North Carolina, where he primarily sees modern dance. He tries to visit The Joyce every time he’s in New York. I asked which of the works was his favorite. While he appreciated them all, he liked Sea Shadow the best because it was “quiet and slow.” I enjoyed it for these reasons, too. His reception of Arpino’s works was much different from the City-Ballet devotees who I encountered in the first program, different also from Wendy Perron, who recounted seeing (and loving) the New York premiere of Sea Shadow in 1963. My friend Kaia went to see the festival– her attendance marked her second time ever seeing a dance performance–and made up wonderfully imaginative stories for both Confetti and Birthday Variations. In pieces I dismissed as lacking context or originality, Kaia found an opportunity for narrative vibrancy.
For those newer to the ballet, Arpino offers a welcome palatability. For others his works serve as affirmation of Balanchine or Robbins’ ‘rightful’ monopoly on American ballet history. As one New York Times critic wrote in a 1981 review of Light Rain, Arpino’s works often feature a “built-in obsolescence”. Arpino’s choreographic inspirations (anti-war protests in the 60s or the sexual liberation movement), in tandem with his affinity for all things aesthetically ‘en-vogue’, render his works too culturally specific to be timeless. A Stravinsky ballet, for example, isn’t bound to a “1930s sensibility” in the way that Light Rain is inescapably in dialogue with the rise of 80s synth-pop and multiculturalism. That said, Arpino’s works remain sites of expressive possibility, and for the historically minded, offer a cherished look into ballets from the 1960s through the 80s. Perhaps the value of Arpino’s works in 2025 lies not so much in their reproduction as evidence of his “enduring relevance”— that seems beside the point— but rather as cultural touchstones. Pillars by which we can better articulate the historical trajectory of the art form and its enduring relevance.
Photo of L’Air D’Esprit featuring Misa Kuranaga and Angelo Greco by Steven Pisano.
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