Word: arpino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CITY CENTER JOFFREY BALLET. From half a dozen dancers practicing in a former chocolate factory, the Jeffrey has grown into a troupe of 43. In 1967, Choreographer Robert Jeffrey created Astarte, the first multimedia ballet. But it was Associate Director Gerald Arpino's Trinity (1970), a contemporary barn dance set to the throbbing sounds of a rock band, that roused a Leningrad audience to 36 curtain calls and a 27-minute ovation during last fall's Russian tour. Summer activities include a West Coast tour in June...
More rewarding was the aptly named Jackpot by Gerald Arpino, the company's resident choreographer. It was a mod, witty duet that suggested a Greek god and goddess having a sexual romp in outer space. As the curtain lifted, a shower of colored star beams descended to reveal Glenn White flexing his muscles on a cube-shaped platform. From behind the cube popped the curvy figure of Erika Goodman, who led White on a merry chase that culminated twelve minutes later in a highly suggestive climax. The cube lit up, a smoke bomb went off, rubber balls soared through...
...discotheque. Still a popular item in the company's often scintillating but insubstantial repertory is Director Robert Jeffrey's Astarte, a mixed-media tour de force duet that throbs to an ear-pounding score by a group called the Crome Syrcus. Another audience favorite is Choreographer Gerald Arpino's exuberant, medieval-rock celebration. Trinity. Last week, as part of its fall season at Manhattan's City Center, the troupe gave the première of yet another rock ballet, Margo Sappington's Weewis...
Triumphs and Disasters. While Joffrey has been cultivating talent, the man who has done most to give the company a style is Arpino, a close friend and longtime collaborator. Joffrey contends that a resident choreographer is essential for a company seeking definition and consistency. There is some dispute in ballet circles, though, about whether Arpino is the best man possible for that purpose. He is wildly uneven, capable of lasting triumphs like his muscular tribute to masculine athleticism, Olympics, but also given to pretentious disasters like The Poppet, an epicene parody of Arthur Miller's The Crucible...
...Arpino is responsible for roughly half the works in the large and varied repertory of 36 items-perhaps too large for the company's size (between 38 and 40 dancers). Reflecting Joffrey's scholarly catholic taste, pieces by other choreographers range from delicate snippets of 19th century Danish court-style ballet (Bournonville's William Tell Variations) to an intelligently danced but dramatically muzzy re-creation of Petrouchka, to the somber, erotic psychodrama of Todd Bolender's The Still Point (new with the company this season...