JOFFREY BALLET : FLAWED REPERTORY NOVELTIES

Ever since early in this century, when Isadora Duncan and Mikhail Fokine dared to create dances to music by Chopin and other avatars of the classical pantheon, dance makers have been free to choose accompaniments from the full concert hall repertory. But, as two new Joffrey Ballet productions demonstrated on Wednesday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, this freedom can leave choreographers and dancers looking awfully inadequate.

Joffrey associate director Gerald Arpino usually choreographs to pop scores (as in “Light Rain”) or collections of classical tidbits shuffled and arranged for his purposes (as in “Suite Saint-Saens”). In “Reflections,” however, Arpino took on Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, a score with a sophistication and a structural integrity that he could not seem to comprehend, much less reflect.

Right from the beginning, Arpino set hectic, high-pressure bravura dancing against the most muted, intimate and transparent passages in the score. There were flashy air turns in near silence, bold, showy lifts against the sweetest, most restrained music and, indeed, moments when the loudest, fastest thing you heard was the dancers clomping across the stage in another mindless mass sortie.

This profound disassociation between sight and sound made even the best executed performances seem somehow disreputable. Leslie Carothers has forged a career rising above Arpino choreography and in both this plotless 1971 divertissement and his “Light Rain” (on the same program), she danced with more taste, class and even musicality than would seem possible under the circumstances.

Dawn Caccamo and Glenn Edgerton gave a typically slurpy Arpino pas de deux every atom of their considerable skill and rapport, while Deborah Dawn, Dominique Angel, Lauren Rouse and Tina LeBlanc did what they could with a really dismal series of pointe variations. But, inevitably, Arpino provided a far less authentic experience than Tchaikovsky--despite moments of less than ideal coordination between the technically uneven cellist (Frederick Zlotkin) and the fine orchestra led by Jonathan McPhee.

Choreographed in 1981 for the Stuttgart Ballet, Jiri Kylian’s “Forgotten Land” revealed strong family ties to his liturgical works for Netherlands Dance Theatre: the triad groupings, the pieta poses, the cruciform motifs, the sense of a crisis of faith occurring within a quasi-religious group ritual.

Against a stormy seascape by John Macfarlane, Kylian conveyed the anguish in Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem (powerfully played under Allan Lewis) through brilliantly sustained duets and ensembles--his vocabulary a fusion of balletic lyricism and weighty, contorted modern dance influences.

Kylian’s Netherlands ensemble has met this kind of technical and expressive challenge with an understated but nearly tangible intensity, its dancing always the externalization of inner need. In contrast, the Joffrey production (staged by Roslyn Anderson) reduced “Forgotten Land” to its formal elements and often seemed an arbitrary, lightweight gloss on Britten’s soulful achievement.

Beatriz Rodriguez alone supplied what was needed: a performance of unsparing personal commitment. The extraordinary tension in her back made every leap and lift in the first section a stab of pain. Moreover, her rhythmic sense and ability to infuse even rapid motion with weight kept the showiest passages free of the taint of empty display that her colleagues’ performances continually invited.

Both here and in William Forsythe’s “Love Songs” on Wednesday, Rodriguez brought to music that didn’t need dancing a special depth and urgency. She became the embodiment of the music--all of it, form and content. This was the lesson/mission of Duncan and Fokine, one still evidently unlearned in some of our most prestigious ballet companies.