JOFFREY REVIVES ‘MOOR’S PAVANE,’ ‘CONFETTI’

Bracketed by two company staples--Agnes de Mille’s always welcome “Rodeo” and Gerald Arpino’s nearly inescapable “Suite Saint-Saens”--the Joffrey Ballet introduced two relative novelties, Saturday in the Pavilion.

A modern-dance distillation of “Othello” to music by Purcell, Jose Limon’s “The Moor’s Pavane” has been performed locally by the Limon company and American Ballet Theatre, among others, but never before by the Joffrey.

Staged by Jennifer Scanlon, the Joffrey production preserved far more of Limon’s crucial positional oddities and vital sense of weight than the balleticized Ballet Theatre version--without sacrificing the work’s emotional force. A fine job.

Luis Perez had most of the nobility and anguish of the Moor in focus Saturday (though the transition between realistic gesture and stylized mime occasionally seeemed clumsy), and Tom Mossbrucker found the contorted evil of the Iago character as comfortable a fit as the breezy, warmhearted Champion Roper in “Rodeo”--quite a range.

Denise Jackson made a warm, ladylike Moor’s Wife, and Beatriz Rodriguez a powerful mate for Mossbrucker--though she seemed strangely remote emotionally after Jackson’s murder.

The revival of Arpino’s cheery, mindless 1970 sextet “Confetti” proved that he once allowed only one thing to happen on stage at any given instant--rather than the 20 different things occurring simultaneously in “Suite Saint-Saens” and more recent creations. It also reminded us that his, um, taste for setting bravura technical fireworks to soft, dark music is scarcely new.

Dancing to, and sometimes against, Rossini’s “Semiramide” overture, an attractive cast headed by Glenn Edgerton and Dawn Caccamo sold “Confetti” with unstinting amounts of skill and tact. Allan Lewis conducted both the Purcell and Rossini scores capably.