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This is the ballet that was the clearest hit of the Discovery Program and prompted Jerry Arpino to commission Adam to create a work for the Chicago Joffrey Ballet.

As I may have written before, Adam had the perspicacity to tap into the universal human experience of the nightmare. Aligning one’s self with the collective unconscious is bound to make any one respond, and she does an excellent job with it. She also chose an incredible artist as her protagonist, Tina LeBlanc, whose skill and size admitted of almost any inflection of the mental maze, manipulation and the horrendous experience of sonomulent exhaustion and frustration, which climaxes the piece. The lead must carry the piece as surely as anyone attempting Giselle or Swan Lake.

The music is in the minimalist tradition, slowly making its effect by repetition and ever so slight variations and emphasis. Several men, hunched over on all fours form the initial bed from which the heroine rises, dances with the man in her dreams, and then encounters three women in a diaphanous tube, garbed in semi-classical Grecian style, off beat versions of the three Fates/ Graces, whatever the context provides.

Then the bed breaks up into four male figures who move around and frustrate her attempts to reach her dream hero. The level is getting higher, and the heroine begins climbing and falling back, climbing and falling back as the stage is suddenly blacked out and the audience, in utter relief, begins to clap madly.

For the final matinee of this program Vanessa Zahorian, ably supported by Benjamin Pierce, made her debut in the role which has been singularly Tina’s throughout both seasons. She has the same straightforward attack, a fresh, steady regard, and is slightly taller. Her interpretation is tentative, but moments occurred when Zahorian was truly regarding her inner landscape in a manner distinctly her own, a distinct sign of promise.

L’Arlesienne (1974)
Composer: Georges Bizet
Choreography: Roland Petit, staged by Luigi Bonino
Scenic Design: Rene Allio
Costumes: Christine Laurent
Lighting: Jean-Michael Desire
Pierre Francois Vilanoba; Lucia LaCarra
Vadim Solomakha; Julie Diana

Petit is a master in dramatic solos and pas de deux and he has created a fine dramatic role for the ill-fated young man with an idee fixe on a woman he encountered by chance either in Arles or from Arles. Petit’s interpretation seems set in the days when peasants lived confined to their soil, travel by carriage was difficult at best, and a visit to a nearby town with some degree of sophistication could be mind shattering to the son of the petit bourgeoisie. Add the intensity of climate and the layers of ancient cultures in Provence and the set up is inevitable. The corps de ballet, men and women, are used as the collective mass living according to custom and attired wonderfully in costumes evoking 19th century Provence. Petit has not wasted time on secondary roles.

Steps are frequently executed with little body inflection, except perhaps from side to side in lines or circles. All the virtuosity and suppleness is given to the hapless heroine, Vivette, who must witness, support and enduring the increasing mental dislocation of Frederi. Each role provided them is remarkable, but the lion’s share belongs to Frederi.

If I had my choice, I would have cast Vilanoba with Diana and La Carra with Solomakha, for the texture and forms of emotion would have produced a tighter drama. Vilanoba’s Frederi was quite pulled from within, while Solomakha’s had easy access to surface emotion. I felt Vilanoba might have stepped from the pages of Jean Giano or Maurice Pagnol. La Carra’s emotion also seemed to surface more easily, while Diana had a soft internal quality which made her comprehend cause and effect and the impact on them both.

Symphony in Three Movements (1972)
Composer: Igor Stravinsky
Choreography: George Balanchine
Staged: Richard Tanner
Original Lighting: Ronald Bates

When the curtain rises on this product of The New York City Ballet’s Stravinsky ballets, nothing could be more typical of later Balanchine style than the row of smiling ponytailed corps de ballet in glistening white Milliskin on a diagonal from upstage left to downstage right.

There were some wonderful, almost gutsy partnerships, “I dare yous”, and “well, now, you don’t say,” which seem to typify Balanchine’s ideas in allegro, Lorena Feijoo and Parrish Maynard, Kristin Long with Christopher Stowell, and a delightful first of Julie Diana paired with Yuri Possokhov.

The dancers and the audience all seemed to enjoy it, but oh, those ponytails with Milliskin!