Love on the Rock

By * John T. Elson

There are times when an evening with the City Center Jeffrey Ballet looks and sounds more like a late night at a 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 premiere of yet another rock ballet, Margo Sappington's Weewis.

A Joffrey alumna, Miss Sappington both created and performed in the nude adagio of Oh!, Calcutta! She clearly has an eye for the unexplored erotic potential of the body in ballet. Weewis --the title's meaning is still its creator's secret--presents three couples who appear to exemplify the varying moods of love (definitely profane). The first couple (Gary Chryst and James Dunne) is composed of two Latinate boys in candy-striped leotards, who shuck and jive about the stage like bodega gauchos trying out for a revival of West Side Story. They end their number with a casually homoerotic hands-on-shoulders embrace.

Couple No. 2 (Christian Holder and Rebecca Wright), in revealing skin-toned body suits that appear to have been glued on, carry out a lyrical sequence of serpentine, limb-entangling maneuvers that resemble moving illustrations for a graduate course in the Kamasutra. The third duo (Susan Magno and Tony Catanzaro) assay an updated version of that dreadful comic cliche of Pigalle nightclubs, an apache dance. The will-they, won't-they jousting ends, amusingly enough, when the girl resoundingly slaps her passionate but reluctant lover. He swats her one right back.

If only because of the youthful, limber bodies of the Jeffrey dancers, Weewis is often lovely to look at. But like so much other contemporary choreography, it is limited in its impact to fleeting moments. Logic, emotional consistency and meaning are sacrificed to shallow audience appeal.

A clear case of the same sort of show biz is another new work in the Jeffrey repertory, Alvin Ailey's The Mingus Dancers, based on a grouping of ponderously orchestrated pieces by fabled Jazz Bassist Charlie Mingus. The work is an odd mixture of five abstractly modern sections and four stagey "vaudeville" routines, some comic, some gloomily Brechtian in flavor. They include a morose parade of grinning soldiers in clownlike, whiteface makeup, a lady from Spain heel-clacking through a campy flamenco, a pair of policemen mock-dueling with nightsticks. The vaudevilles have no discernible relationship to the abstract sequences--nor, for that matter, to the spirit of the music --yet in the finale, the policemen suddenly break in on the corps, busting heads with nightsticks.

It is a vivid enough evocation of "police brutality," but it is also a Keystone copout. Why do the vaudevillian police suddenly attack the other dancers? Why does the Spanish lady's flamenco collapse into a laugh-creating parody of itself? The answer, of course, is that those actions titillate theatrically--for an instant. Ballet, an art of linear grace and movement, is even less a medium of pure intellect than painting or opera. But it is not made relevant by playing games with half-digested references to yesterday's headlines.

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