Word: joffreys
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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...
Improvised Air. Young in the age of its dancers (the average is 22) as well as its history, the Joffrey (founded in 1956) has always had a nervous, half-improvised air about it, which may reflect the fact that it has no superstars and has been plagued by a distressingly high turnover in personnel. Last month, midway through its fall season at Manhattan's glum, ungraceful City Center, the company abruptly dismissed its fiery Spanish lead dancer, Luis Fuente; after several months of differences, Fuente irked management by suddenly and arbitrarily departing from the choreography in a meticulous Joffrey...
...company is kept alive and kicking largely because of the talent-spotting skills of its founding artistic director, Seattle-born Robert Joffrey, 39. Widely regarded as one of the best teachers and coaches in the U.S., Joffrey has a knack for signing up promising unknowns and guiding them to maturity. This season a whole platoon of new young dancers has been turning in pleasurably kinetic and graceful performances. Erika Goodman and Chartel Arthur, both 22, have developed into perky, quicksilver ballerinas with a feathery, light-operatic flair. Alone or with partners, Edward Verso, 28, is a willowy athlete who displays...
...many ways, though, the most impressive of Joffrey's discoveries is huge (6 ft. 4 in.) Trinidad-born Christian Holder, 21. Blessed with a lean, rubbery face and with limbs of astonishing flexibility, Holder has a good actor's ability to turn his towering physique to dramatic effect. As the puppet villain in Petrouchka, he presents the quaint spectacle of a black performing in blackface and shows a notable gift for deadpan comedy. His terrorizing, primitive presence as Death in Kurt Jooss's antiwar tract, The Green Table, dominates the stage and sends chills through even...
Restaged for Joffrey by David Blair (who danced the original Captain Belaye in London), the work produces unabashed delight in the mutiny, wholesale though ladylike transvestism, and twin marriages that follow, courtesy of W.S. Gilbert. As Poll, Charthel Arthur falls in love more energetically than anyone m recent memory. As dashing Captain Belaye, the man whose Apollonian suavity, superb condescension and sheer sexiness cause all the trouble, Edward Verso turns a comic role into a major characterization. One rude criterion for establishing a ballet's worth is the impulse to dance that it stirs in an average member...