BALLET REVIEW : ‘Billy the Kid,’ Joffrey Style

In “Billy the Kid,” “Rodeo” and “Appalachian Spring”--those enduring American dance milestones with classic Aaron Copland scores--there are moments when the troubled central characters gaze across the frontier and all their yearnings, feelings of isolation, even their futures are reflected back in music of profound tenderness.

This moment of expectancy and resignation is gloriously realized by Glenn Edgerton in the problematic new staging of “Billy the Kid” by the Joffrey Ballet, a staging introduced to local audiences Tuesday on a mixed bill at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Edgerton has always been a notably thoughtful, imaginative dancer. And though his portrayal of Billy is otherwise multilayered and sharply defined, there are times when he wisely does nothing more than let the music flow over him, allowing Copland to express what Billy cannot.

In this ballet, music is landscape, character, destiny--so the dancer who can absorb it, make it his subtext, becomes the mythic outlaw in a way that can’t be explained by acting alone. Edgerton understands: He is eloquent just listening.

In “Billy the Kid,” Eugene Loring told deeper truths than Agnes de Mille in “Rodeo” and aimed for a wider scope than Martha Graham in “Appalachian Spring,” but, 50 years after its creation, his choreography seems most remarkable for its daring stylization--its way of enlarging documentary details of behavior into bold social statements.

Against Jared French’s formal frieze of cacti, the ballet often looks like a ‘30s poster or mural come to life--though, unfortunately, Patrice L. Whiteside’s Joffrey production is often stronger on specifics of movement design than on dramatic thrust. We see Loring’s innovations in stance and vocabulary lovingly reproduced, but somehow they seem disconnected from a dynamic concept.

Compared to the familiar American Ballet Theatre production, for example, the celebrated winning-of-the-West procession that opens and closes the ballet looked curiously static on Tuesday: full of the meticulously etched gesture and mime that ABT usually smudges, but utterly lacking in forward momentum. It’s as if Manifest Destiny had bogged down somewhere east of Topeka.

Still, there was always the sensitivity and sardonic power of Edgerton--though, ironically, he was not originally announced to dance the Tuesday performance (due to a scheduling error).

As Alias, a composite of Billy’s victims, Peter Narbutas deftly created a gallery of intriguing character sketches and, in the dual role of Billy’s doomed mother and dream-sweetheart, Jodie Gates neatly balanced down-to-earth authority against otherworldly lyricism.

Alas, Douglas Martin seemed pretty vacant as Pat Garrett (is that final salute to the former friend he has just murdered sincere, ironic or merely staged by Whiteside?). John Miner conducted with an emphasis on lush sonorities, but also with some odd tempos.

The program (opening night of a seven-performance engagement in Segerstrom Hall) also included two company staples choreographed in the late 1970s: Paul Taylor’s satiric “Cloven Kingdom” (originally created for Taylor’s modern-dance ensemble) and Gerald Arpino’s showpiece “Suite Saint-Saens.”

Using courtly music by Corelli interrupted by bursts of antic percussion composed by Henry Cowell and Malloy Miller, “Cloven Kingdom” contrasts elegant social pretense with galvanic, animalistic impulse.

We’re in a ballroom, we’re in a disco, we’re in the zoo. But we also may be on Parnassus as well, for who are those four women in their geometric, mirrored headdresses except Muses inspiring new and strange permutations in the group rituals? A very quirky work, full of defiantly idiosyncratic movement.

In contrast, “Suite Saint-Saens” is a very slick collage of bravura classical step-combinations, sequenced for a kind of random, impersonal dazzle.

Nineteen dancers constantly zoom through dappled light, punch out a virtuoso stunt and then leave as others arrive. You never have to worry about what it means and it only begins to bother you if you really like these dancers--if you enjoy watching Leslie Carothers or Carole Valleskey or Edward Stierle and wish that Arpino was using them as artists rather than exclamation points.

Anyway, for the record, the Joffrey danced “Suite Saint-Saens” splendidly on Tuesday. Indeed, this may be the best company in the world at dignifying neoclassical kitsch. But, then, it’s had more practice.