by Leigh Witchel
A choreographer is not without honor, except in his hometown. Gerald Arpino, a native New Yorker, didn’t get much honor here. His centennial celebration in Chicago put on by The Gerald Arpino Foundation, made the case that he deserved better, and we in New York could give him a closer look.
The centennial consisted of two performances at the Auditorium Theatre. Nine works were mounted by seven companies. Only one short pas de deux, “L’Air d’Esprit,” was repeated. Both shows opened with a brief video introduction featuring the foundation’s president, Kim Sagami, and a moment to honor the Joffrey alumni in the audience.
Arpino’s own company, The Joffrey Ballet, performed two works, one on each show. “Round of Angels,” was created in 1983 to the adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony. It was inspired by a 19th century lithograph and dedicated to James Howell, a former company member and Arpino’s assistant, who died of AIDS the year prior. The original cast had several familiar names if you were seeing ballet in the 1980s, or even after. James Canfield (who partnered Patricia Miller), Glenn Edgerton and Tom Mossbrucker all went on to run companies themselves. The group was completed by Jerry Kokich, Daniel Baudendistel and in his one premiere during his short tenure with the company, Ron Reagan, Jr.
The original unitards by A. Christina Giannini were plain steel gray. They had been amped up slightly in reconstruction with some detailing at the chest. Six men began on ground under a starry sky, reaching and rolling. Jeraldine Mendoza was hidden behind them for a reveal. All but Dylan Gutierrez left; he hauled Mendoza as she stretched. Mendoza had a very arched back and feet like bananas, and like Miller, she was small enough to be carried endlessly.
Gutierrez, who first attracted notice at his appearances at the Kennedy Center with the Royal Ballet School 15 years ago, was the tender forklift that the choreography required. He turned her with a single hand, then partnered her on his knees before two other men carried Mendoza off. All the men returned to lift and carry her, at the apex Gutierrez had her upside down in a full overhead press.
This was Arpino’s take related to Balanchine’s “The Unanswered Question” and Ashton’s “Illuminations”: the woman as suspended goddess. Arpino demanded partnering skills; if you’re a guy and you have a mind to do Arpino’s choreography, you had best be able to haul. Still, the last lift Gutierrez had to do bringing Mendoza to his shoulder made her feel less like a goddess and him more like a beast of burden. He did a final carry round, and pressed her off.
Ballet West, run by Joffrey alumnus Adam Sklute, was the other company that performed two works. “RUTH, Ricordi per Due” was made two decades later in 2004, when the company was firmly established in Chicago. It was commissioned by Barbara Levy Kipper, a major Chicago arts patron who is also a photographer and collector. It demonstrated a recurring theme: even when it came to darker emotions such as grief, Arpino was a showman.
Hadriel Diniz backed on to the stage in silence. Katlyn Addison stood in the shadows at back, draped with a shroud that in another reveal, turned out to be her skirt.
Arpino choose Albinoni’s painfully familiar adagio, but his skill was not playing to the cognoscenti, rather knowing what was going to work in a big theater. Addison fell on Diniz, and he hauled and tossed her. He pressed her – Look Ma, no hands – as the duet went from one tough lift to the next. Finally, she left him once again at the center to ponder at the end.
If you could turn a requiem into a spectacular, it would be this. Arpino had craft to back up the crass – he could always make something that held together and got applause. Still, the Arpino we saw at the centennial was a showman. If we got (or imagined) a tantalizing glimmer of Balanchine’s private feelings in his ballets, what Arpino did was outward facing, gauged by how it would land. Even if he made a memorial to a friend it did not feel as if his personal feelings were on display.
The other work The Joffrey performed was a lesson in how Arpino constructed a dance. “Suite Saint-Saëns,” made in 1978, began with the cast racing in on diagonals. If you had your Balanchine goggles on, there was no rhyme or reason, but Arpino was working with different priorities.
Giannini’s costumes were again simple, the men in blousy t-shirts, the women in leotards and spray-painted skirts. There were seven couples, no make that eight. Actually, there were ten couples and a solo female. Arpino’s brain didn’t do symmetry, but it did do movement patterns. In the Caprice Valse, seven couples danced and suddenly an eighth streaked across the stage, but the woman left while Hyuma Kiyosawa stayed. He raced round and started to lead a quartet.
You’d think what would come next would be the big pas de deux. That’s what it would be in Balanchineland. But Arpino faked us out by starting off with an entry for a couple, and then there were two couples, then four, one couple pair doing a double duet side by side, the other in opposite corners.
And in came another couple, then another . . .
I gave up.
It wasn’t chaos and structure wasn’t the point. Balanchine, like Mendelssohn, was a technician who knew the rules so beautifully. Arpino was about effects. He wasn’t creating a landscape onstage. Arpino was filling the stage with motion. And both men were effective in leading you where they wanted you to go.
The dance coalesced back to entrances and exits, with your eyes catching movement sparkling all over. Arpino rarely directed your focus in a group dance, something was happening everywhere on stage.
To a big waltz, a woman was tossed to her partner, which led into a complex male duet followed by a pas de deux. Structure didn’t matter, effect did. An adagio wasn’t a private world revealed onstage, it was public, to make you happy.
The big duet wowed with yet another one-armed overhead press, another sign we were not in Balanchineland, where overhead lifts are extremely rare. Arpino used them profligately – there was another one to exit. One point the centennial brought home was how much technique and strength Arpino required from his dancers, and dancing his ballets kept them strong. How we described Joffrey dancers when taking ballet class in NYC in the 1980s: “Oh yes, they can do.”
The company saw itself as “all star/no star” and the traditional pyramid hierarchy that emulated a monarchy and court was not assimilated into Arpino’s work. The couple we would have thought of as the ballerina and her partner reentered with another couple to share the stage. Again the man pressed his partner overhead.
If an Arpino entry wasn’t concerned with structure, an Arpino finale really wasn’t. Everyone came in, did a trick and left, followed by hair-raising partnered tosses. If you thought everyone was onstage by this point, you were wrong. Somehow more people arrived. Everyone raced, and did a million jetés. Even the curtain call involved racing across the diagonal. This was not a recapitulation, it was a series of exclamation points. But you were rarely able to predict what would come next.
“Reflections,” first done in 1971 and rechoreographed by Arpino in 1985 after it had been out of rep for nearly a decade, gave us a look at Eugene Ballet, which has been led by Toni Pimble since its founding in 1978.
Set to Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme for Violincello and Orchestra,” “Reflections” opened the Sunday matinee and gave another look at how Arpino built dances. The opening theme was for seven women, with a complex asymmetrical layering that sometimes moved into duets. Danielle Tolmie was often solo at the center, but she’d vanish into the ensemble.
A series of solos to the variations came next, Hayley Tavonatti’s made of walks and hops on pointe, after a trio, Sara Stockwell’s was avid kicks forward and slides. Three women from the opening made another transition, then Tolmie had a variation, which led to three duets, the first for Sam Neale and Tavonatti.
After the duet, Nina Nicotera did tricky turns on a cadenza but ceded the stage to Jade McAnally before the variation ended. Koatsu Yashima took up the music, and passed it to Tolmie, who then did a duet with Mark Tucker. The demarcation between sections was much fuzzier for Arpino, but also for Tchaikovsky than in, for example, “Theme and Variations.” Both men were fine here with some bleed in the transitions.
As the piece moved into a solo for Joshua Downard, after a long cello cadenza there was a final demanding duet for Downard and Sarah Kosterman with tricky lifts and promenades, and yet another overhead torch lift. Everyone returned for the exuberant finale, quick turns and a pose to end.
Because “Reflections” seemed to have many fewer bones in its corseting, it felt as if you needed to know who the original cast was, and something about them. For the record, in 1985 for the remade version (which is assumedly what was staged) The New York Times mentioned Leslie Carothers, Tina LeBlanc, Lauren Rouse, the current company director Ashley Wheater, Dominique Angel, Deborah Dawn, Dawn Caccamo, Peter Narbutas and Edgerton, with the seventh woman unfortunately unmentioned. Like Ashton, how many of Arpino’s choices were influenced by who he had in front of him at the moment?
The festival was curated with a sense of variation, not just musically and stylistically, but visually. “Reflections” was the chiffon piece. It was good to get a look at Eugene Ballet as well. Though they started out with polish, as the demanding ballet went on, they had more trouble and nerves. “Reflections” isn’t easy and it was the limit of what they could get through.
Like Jerome Robbins, Arpino was interested in ballet as a current, topical art, and was willing to experiment. “Valentine,” from 1971, used an unorthodox score for double bass by Jacob Druckman, whom Arpino worked with several times.
“Valentine” was a lighthearted take on the battle of the sexes, but the framing of it and the novelty of the score took the edge off that stereotype. The dance, which has the bassist Charles Paul so involved it is rightfully a trio, was also performed by longtime Joffrey stalwart emeritus Fabrice Calmels and Larissa Gerszke, whose credits included Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Besides unitards, the two wore boxing shorts and satin robes with their last names emblazoned on the back. Paul was dressed like a referee.
The dancers mimed boxing arms and the occasional boxing move. Everyone participated in the score; the bassist spoke and sometimes the dancers did as well. The movement was broad, with Gerszke jamming and shifting her feet, and Calmels hauling her around the stage supine over his head.
Calmels put his hand on Gerszke’s forehead to stop her; she wailed after. From there, he placed her in a handstand, from which she split open her legs, then rolled onto his back. Everyone collapsed spasming at the ending, including the bassist.
The man’s part concentrated on partnering, and Calmels was in good shape for 43. Gerszke kept up with the acting, but occasionally got caught in the deluge of turns, and at one moment accidentally crumpled off pointe.
As experimental as “Valentine” arguably could have been, it was played for comedy, but that’s how contemporary reviews described it as well. But again, Arpino seemed to see it through the prism of the audience: what could he deliver?
“Sea Shadow” was one of Arpino’s earliest works, from 1962. Cory Stearns and Hee Seo from American Ballet Theatre performed the pas de deux, based on the Ondine myth, and having another Robbins connection. The duet is set to the adagio from Ravel’s Concerto in G Major for Piano and Orchestra, which Robbins used 13 years after for “In G Major.”
The stage was simply dressed, with a few poles and rocks to suggest the shore. Stearns was shirtless, with green tights. In solitude, he stretched, contracted and balanced. He picked up a large shell, listened to it then spun it away.
Seo, appeared from behind a rock as if from nowhere – Arpino was using reveals from early on. Seo drifted across the stage and posed languidly at a pole, using it to do a penchée, then did a split.
Seo got on top of Stearns and they arched back. From his first works, he used tons of toting and carrying, often one-handed. They lay back down and he pressed her into a bird lift (which was iffy). They embraced and rolled. Seeming to swim, she rode on his back as the curtain closed.
It could have been the performance, but for a ballet inspired by Ondine, what wasn’t there was a sense of danger. “Sea Shadow” was small-scale and, perhaps unsurprisingly for something made when starting out, was more of a vignette, with pose-to-pose movement rather than phrases.
The ballerina of the weekend was Misa Kuranaga, who came from San Francisco Ballet with Wei Wang and leveled up two performances of 1978’s “L’Air d’Esprit.” The music was listed as being by Adam from a little-seen part of “Giselle,” but it may actually be the interpolated music by Minkus for an Act 1 pas de deux in Petipa’s 1884 production of the ballet.
The pas de deux began with Wang carrying Kuranaga all the way across the stage in another torch lift, leaving, then carrying her in once again. A year prior, Ashton used the same overhead lift at the start of his “Voices of Spring” duet, but he was pulling our legs with the excess. Arpino knew we’d eat it up.
Kuranaga has no Joffrey experience in her bio (she trained in Japan, then at the School of American Ballet, and danced in Boston before SFB), but she had the softly curved arms and the stillness in her carriage for romantic pastiche down. At the apex of the pas de deux, she came at Wang twice for another bird lift. Then he pressed her overhead, and tossed her up on his back to conclude. The partnering may have been tote and carry, but she wasn’t his cargo. He was her crane service. If anyone was objectified here, it was him.
The man’s variation was one magic trick after another; Wang raced into assemblés and double sauts de basques. It was hard as hell. Kuranaga’s variation started with a slow, leisurely arabesque – fakeout! She exploded into gargouillades like popcorn. Kuranaga ripped through the rest of the short solo, into a diagonal of single to double step-over turns, to head for where Wang would appear, solely so he could carry her off.
And then she came back on to milk the bow.
During the finale Wang did God knows how many turns and stayed on balance. You know the moment when something turns into a circus and you just don’t care? Arpino knew his audience and how to make an applause machine. Kuranaga and Wang knew how to put it over. This was pastiche, but turbo-charged pastiche. But looking more closely, it was also incredibly demanding. As was almost everything during the centennial. Not only did Arpino’s work require strength, it also maintained it.
The centennial opened with the most pleasant surprise and argument for what Arpino’s choreography can do, 1986’s “Birthday Variations.” A 19th century pastiche that was commissioned by a donor as a birthday present for her husband, it was staged for Oklahoma City Ballet by two members of the original cast, Edgerton and Cameron Basden. Turnabout is fair play, this time Arpino used music Robbins had used first, from Verdi including selections of “I Vespri Siciliani” that Robbins had used in “The Four Seasons. Oklahoma City Ballet is another company New York never sees, and it was a pleasure to get a peek at.
Context: 1986 was a time when the Joffrey was pushing forward. They had mounted Cranko’s “Romeo and Juliet” as part of their ‘84-’85 season; ABT debuted MacMillan’s in 1985. It seemed as if ABT and Joffrey were coming neck and neck. The look and strength of The Joffrey owed both to Arpino and the company’s ballet master, Scott Barnard, who – according to every Joffrey dancer I had a conversation with during those years – was a tough, demanding, and effective drill sergeant.
Again, the piece began in a rush of entrances and exits, to coalesce into a tableau of five ballerinas surrounding the man. The women posed decorously as if in a lithograph, then Alejandro Gonzáles picked up one of the women, swung her round in the air and then brought her to the floor. It felt arguably like a break out of the style, but Arpino’s retort might have been that didn’t matter because it worked.
The ballet had the breathless quality we saw all weekend. Gonzáles carried Paige Russell out in a torch lift as the others ran, then there were more entrances and exits. The partnering demands were also encapsulated. Gonzáles seemed to always have a woman overhead. He had to be a moose, and he was.
His solo, skipping and beating, was to music Robbins used for a male quartet in the “Summer” section of “The Four Seasons.” Gonzáles skimmed through it easily, which led to a chain of variations that was more neatly divided than the ones we saw in “Reflections.”
The second variation, originally done by Basden, was skirt flipping and tough pointe work, and Mayu Odaka did it full out with strong feet. The brute strength and attack felt very 1980s Joffrey. This cast could also do.
BOOM! Leah Reiter shot straight up into the air to begin her solo, created on Victoria Pasquale. Arpino’s variations seemed tailored to the strengths of the original cast, but as Ashton or Balanchine did in their suites of solos in “Birthday Offering” and “Divertimento No. 15” he showcased varied techniques and temperaments. And they didn’t look like someone else’s work.
The pas de deux, originally done for Edgerton and Caccamo, was both delicate and rough. Gonzáles need to yank Russell across the stage and on him to make a lift work, and from there, into another one-armed torch lift. Even in tulle the effect wasn’t gossamer, but huge. Russell waved her arms decoratively and Gonzáles dragged her back to vanish into the shadows.
The next solo, danced by Anna Tateda featured balances into turns. The Oklahoma City dancers were all impressively strong. You would have had to have been to do Jodie Gates’ part. LeBlanc was the company technician in the 1980s, and to follow Tateda, Flannery Werner did LeBlanc’s solo of one tricky enchaînement after another, piqués to fouettés at the close, immediately followed by another dancer racing onstage in backwards pas courus.
It ended with a finale we would see many times over the weekend, everyone racing in tour jetés in who knows what pattern before Werner went to center and did fouettés changing spot, something I still recall LeBlanc doing almost 40 years ago. The ballet ended with Gonzáles pressing Rusell overhead to a pop to a fish.
Yes, it sounds crass on paper. And that’s how some critics felt about it. But it worked, and the Oklahoma dancers were making the best case for it. Arpino, with the company he helped steer, was making strong dancers. His powers weren’t as a classicist, but as a showman with a keen sense of craft, knowing through instinct and experience what an audience wanted to see, and when. After 40 years, that shouldn’t be a dirty word. Arpino was unapologetic; what would Robbins have been if he hadn’t so often been trying to be Balanchine?
The centennial wasn’t trying to make a comparative argument about Arpino. It was showing us some of his best works and saying they were worth keeping around. The only moment in the weekend that could have caused eye-rolling was on the video introduction, when Wheater said, “How we honor someone who is no longer here is to dance their ballets.”
In 2016, the company withdrew Robert Joffrey’s production of “The Nutcracker” from repertory in favor of a new one by Christopher Wheeldon. It was Joffrey’s last work, historically valuable for preserving aspects of the 1940 Ballet Russe production with additional work by Arpino, and staging by Barnard and George Verdak.
In 2017, there were no works by Arpino or Joffrey in the season brochure.
In 2018, there were no works by Arpino or Joffrey in the season brochure.
In 2019, there were no works by Arpino or Joffrey in the season brochure.
Skipping the pandemic, the company advertised “Birthday Variations” for the 2021 season.
In 2022 the season brochure included “Suite Saint-Saëns”
This year there is again nothing.
Though the company participated in a major way in this celebration, it did not produce it. The mammoth job and heavy lifting was done, and done well, by the foundation bearing Arpino’s name.
Ballet West closed out the centennial with a dance they performed at home earlier in the year, “Light Rain.” This one is unapologetically crass, (Milliskin! Bare Chests! Orientalism!)
Emily Adams played the goddess role harder than she did in Salt Lake, swaying in plié, going upside down and splitting beyond 180°. She focused in for the kill in her duet with Diniz, and he dragged her round in a split. The final pose of their duet, on the last note of a hypnotic pastiche of Arabic music on Western pop instruments, was P.T. Barnum meets the Lido de Paris meets Chippendales.
The finale that sent us home was so very Jerry, with a frenzy of motion and a potpourri of solos. Everyone leaped on and filled the space, and there were flattering moments for one dancer after another. Vinicius Lima won the Golden Hips award this outing, and everyone ended in the same sparkly clump they began in. It was cheap, it worked and the dancers didn’t bother to apologize. After two shows of seeing what Arpino could do, it felt fitting to accept all his work for what it did, not what it didn’t. Commandment number one of Arpino’s ballets: Sell it.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
Arpino Chicago Centennial Celebration – The Gerald Arpino Foundation
Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, IL
September 23-4, 2023
Cover: Ballet West in “Light Rain.” Photo © Cheryl Mann Productions.
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