Ballet: Ritual in Rock

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A pair of spotlights, blue and red, rake the audience, while on the stage flickering, fleeting images play up and down a twisted backdrop that could suggest anything from a cavern to the corner of a mattress. One dancer (Maximiliano Zomosa) comes down the center aisle, up onto the stage, and slowly strips down to his shorts. Waiting for him, tightly sheathed in a paisley leotard, is Astarte (Trinette Singleton), goddess of the moon, love and fertility.

In the pit, a rock-'n'-roll quintet, its sounds brutally amplified, screeches and howls. The dancers enact their love ritual, while a filmed psychedelic view of their actions is projected—elongated, distorted and weirdly colored—on the wavering backdrop. "This is what we're doing," the action in the foreground seems to say. "And this is what we feel we're doing," proclaims the film. At the end, passions spent, the man walks through the billowing drop and out a series of backstage doors; Astarte recedes into the shadows, awaiting her next visitor. In his new Astarte, Choreographer-Director Robert Joffrey offers 30 minutes of disturbing, iconoclastic exhilaration. A long way from Swan Lake it may be, but his piece generates its own arresting message as it delves into the psychedelic experience with insight and dazzling originality.

Joffrey's own troupe, which last week concluded its third and longest (four weeks) season at Manhattan's City Center, is probably the one ballet company in the U.S. that commands the exuberance and inventiveness to bring off this kind of conception. Joffrey, 36, established his American Ballet Center as a dance school in New York in 1953, formed the company out of his best students three years later. After years of barnstorming, the group drifted into the helpful hands of Patroness Rebekah Harkness, but was dropped when she decided to form her own company (TIME, April 2, 1965). Today Joffrey and his dancers are the resident company at City Center, but they still hit the road, and may find a permanent summer slot at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash.

The message of Joffrey's company seems to be that youthful enthusiasm can easily atone for an occasional ensemble roughness. Its repertory is impressively varied, including several company-created works by Joffrey and Gerald Arpino that cover the field from delicate, classic grace (Viva Vivaldi, Pas des Déesses) to revivals of such historic works as Kurt Jooss's famous old antiwar shocker The Green Table.

Its oldest dancer is a stripling of 30 (compared with 40 at the New York City Ballet). Many of the cheers this season, in fact, went to a pair of wet-behind-the-ears gambolers, elfin Robert Blankshine, 18, and athletic Luis Fuente, 21. The company's cheekiness and dramatic flair help strengthen the cause of American ballet by leaps and bounds.