ARPINO’S ‘SECRET PLACES,’ ‘KETTENTANZ’ DANCED

At the very least (and, sometimes, at the very most), the ballets of Gerald Arpino reveal the specific dancing strengths of the Joffrey Ballet in high relief.

On Sunday afternoon in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, for instance, Arpino’s familiar 1968 lyric duet “Secret Places” displayed again the sophisticated technical and expressive rapport of Dawn Caccamo and Glenn Edgerton.

This popular team has appeared recently in both good ballets (“Romeo and Juliet”) and bad (“Altered States”). Here, however, dancing to Mozart, Caccamo and Edgerton reached an exceptional level of purity because of the simplicity of Arpino’s conception: the concentration on dancing from a single impulse and sustaining this unanimity as if it were second nature.

In the same way, Arpino’s convivial 1971 group piece “Kettentanz” showcased the remarkable and by now well-known technical prowess of Mark Goldweber and David Palmer, Tina LeBlanc and Jodie Gates (among others) in a straightforward, spirited context.

The ballet told us nothing new about these dancers--as opposed to Nijinsky’s “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune” (on the same program) which showed or developed hidden facets of Palmer’s artistry--but it summarized the obvious astutely.

Occasionally, as with Leslie Carothers’ sensitive performance in the solo, it even held a small element of surprise: the suggestion that the dancer might be reshaping her hand-me-down choreography into a personal statement.

In “Faune,” Palmer emphasized deep loneliness and longing. For once, the character’s frequent shifts of position from right-profile to left-profile became statements of restless desire--and Palmer caressed the nymph’s scarf with such tenderness that you could almost share his vision of her body underneath it. An unexpectedly intimate, spectacularly individual portrayal.

“Birthday Variations” completed the program.