Dance and Music Reviews : Jodie Gates in Joffrey Ballet ‘Sacre du Printemps’

Yarilo, the Sun-God, claimed a new victim in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Thursday: the Joffrey Ballet’s Jodie Gates, only the fourth dancer in history to be cast as the Chosen One in Vaslav Nijinsky’s epochal “Le Sacre du Printemps.”

Maria Piltz would have warned her that it wasn’t going to be easy--and both Beatriz Rodriguez and Carole Valleskey probably did. No matter. Gates met her grueling dance of death splendidly, emphasizing the sweeping arm motions and snapping back of the neck as well as the sacrificial virgin’s desperate and hopeless attempts to escape.

Gates’ sense of drama also informed the final series of turns, hair-flying and hands outstretched as if pleading--or clawing. But the collapse at the end proved strangely anticlimactic: the finish of a solo, not a painful, inevitable death. No doubt additional coaching and experience will enable Gates to solve the problem and make this a wholly successful interpretation.

Otherwise this repeat of the Joffrey’s Diaghilev program reunited forces previously reviewed--with the group dancing in the company’s new production of “Les Noces” again at a level that few companies anywhere could match.