Review: Joffrey Ballet’s virtual, bursting ‘Boléro’ brings us a rite of spring
You are left in no doubt. Behind the flesh-colored mask that contains her visibly pulsing breath, Anais Bueno is fighting against something.
With all her fury.
The million-dollar question of Yoshihisa Arai’s premiering “Boléro,” a gripping, high-stakes, live-to-streaming production that premiered Friday night and marks the unspeakably welcome return to performance of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, is the identity of the antagonist.
Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro,” a famously uniform, single-movement orchestral piece, originally conceived as a work for the ballet, has a claim to being the most popular classical work in history. A new performance is said to begin every 10 minutes, somewhere in the world. And since its copyright finally ran out in 2016, that is true more than ever, now, since you can use the “Boléro” to accompany anything you want.
Sexual matters long have been popular thematic interpretations, given that the work is structured as an exciting crescendo, replete with so repetitive a structure that what is to come feels inevitable.
And yet here we are in the dog days of a pandemic.
Arai’s choreography is thus a piece for the camera, inevitably. The downsides of consuming balletic performance on your MacBook are obvious and have been previously explored, ad infinitum. The upsides include the revelations of close-ups in high definition and the chance to watch the dancers from above, a sort of Busby Berkeley take on the Gerald Arpino Black Box Theatre in Joffrey Tower.
Most notably, though, the camera that stands in for the audience allows Bueno, whose work is a tour-de-force, to focus her waves of emotional energy on a specific spot, rather than the usual dissipation in a large auditorium. That alone is worth every minute of the 16 or so required to complete this experience.
“See?,” she seems to be saying at the end, as her breath comes in waves and her mask strains like a pulsing concertina. “See?”
I watched the piece several times over the weekend, mostly trying to decide if Bueno was propelling or being propelled, which is a pandemic question of far greater application than dance.
Since the designer Temur Suluashvili has costumed Bueno only in a white, business-like shirt, and the rest of the company in black bottoms, it felt at times likes this was a deconstruction of the lost rhythms of the office. It could be read as an ironic commentary on the complacent inevitability Ravel tried to instill in his formatively rigorous “Boléro,” given the disruption of viral interventions. If your head goes there, you’ll likely see Bueno as a kind of resistance fighter, repelling the ravages of the moment on the body.
Arai’s work on the whole company certainly implies movement arriving uninvited. And surprising the vessel.
On other views, though, I saw her with more radical agency, attempting a kind of redefinition of the corporal moment, a striving for individuation behind the mask; a refutation of subjugation, you might say.
If you go with the recovery narrative, which is one of my favorites, it’s a bit like the Joffrey has arrived to say that spring, and the warmth of summer, are inevitably going to burst out from the ground, bringing us all back together as communal individuals in a new world. The masks become the earth, the body the sprouts, the tonal explosion, rebirth.
That’s a lot to pack into a quarter hour. But then these dancers have been cooped up. And we’re all ready to burst.
“Boléro” streams through March 2; free (no reservations are required) at joffrey.org.
‘Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
