Plaster Bonbons

New York's Joffrey Ballet is often matchless for sheer glitter and sensuous invention. But virtuosity pursued for its own sake can be a vice, and showmanship pushed too far becomes a snare and a collusion. Of three new Joffrey offerings this spring, two, Confetti and Solarwind, are depressing cases in point.

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 to assorted flatulent noises--pings, creaks and suckings. The score, by Avant-Garde Composer Jacob Druckman, is entitled Animus III for Tape and Clarinet.

John Keats, it is said, used to take pepper just for the delight given by a freshwater chaser. Perhaps with a similar contrast in mind Jeffrey treats audiences to Pineapple Poll, a rarely seen romp created 19 years ago by John Cranko, now the director of the Stuttgart Ballet, to music of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Cheerful girls in peppermint stripes and ruffled panties collide with beerful British tars from H.M.S. Hot Cross Bun. Pineapple Poll herself appears and falls helplessly in love with Captain Belaye, an officer who combines the best qualities of Ralph Rackstraw, Captain Corcoran and Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B.

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 of the audience. By that standard, Cranko's Poll must be judged a hopping success.

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