Word: arpino
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...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...
Plotless and perhaps even pointless, Gerald Arpino's Trinity nonetheless represents a throbbing fusion of classic dance with the sound of now. It perfectly epitomizes the jaunty style and passionate, youthful temperament of the New York City Center's Joffrey Ballet...
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...
Confetti, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is, among other things, a "plaster bonbon." The definition is cruelly apt as a description of Gerald Arpino's creation, which turns three couples loose to the overture of Rossini's Semiramide. Arpino's brilliant passages of dance invention and his dancers' great innovative skills leave the music behind. The ballet becomes a mere gymnastic feat. Solarwind is different-not a confection gone slickly sour but a modish sci-fi convention pursued without rhyme or reason. In a cosmic mood, Arpino sends his dancers blasting around the stage...