How Now, Town Clown?

By John T. Elson

The City Center Jeffrey Ballet likes to promote itself as the Mod Squad of dance. That self-styled reputation for being with it is amply justified by the success of such signature works as the multimedia Astarte and Trinity, still the best and brightest of rock ballets. But Founder-Director Robert Jeffrey also has a particular feeling for one of dance's golden eras--the years when Serge Diaghilev imperiously directed the Ballets Russes. Periodically Jeffrey attempts to revive a neglected 20th century classic first performed by Diaghilev's legendary troupe.

Last week, to open its fall Manhattan season at City Center, the Jeffrey company restaged the original 1920 Ballets Russes production of Pulcinella.

Originally, it was a typically all-star Diaghilev collaboration. The score, based on Pergolesi themes, is landmark Stravinsky--his first explorative venture into neoclassicism. Pablo Picasso designed the sets and costumes, and the choreography was by Leonide Massine, who succeeded Nijinsky as Diaghilev's premier danseur. Massine, now 78, danced the title role at the Paris opening, and he was on hand to help Jeffrey reconstruct the work.

Clearly a lot of TLC went into the staging of Pulcinella, but to uncertain effect. Rouben Ter-Arutunian has tastefully re-created Picasso's costumes and his imposing backdrop--a blue-gray cubist evocation of a moonlit street in 18th century Naples. The vital young Jeffrey dancers, moreover, prance through the one-act ballet as if caught up in a marathon tarantella. But breathing life into this Pulcinella is rather like trying to revive a dead tree by gluing fallen leaves back onto its limbs.

Essentially, the problem is the choreography. It is almost as much mime as ballet. The story is a complicated slap stick tale about a flirtatious town clown, his enemies and his inamorata (complete with mistaken identities, a fake death and an implausibly happy ending) that defies compression as well as credibility. Massine's scenario is too highly stylized to allow for many low jinks; the result is commedia dell'arte without any comedy, Punch-and-Judy minus the punch. The occasional moments of raffish humor are all provided by quick-legged Gary Chryst, 24, who leaps, whirls, jigs and flutters through the title role like a madcap superball. It is difficult to believe that Massine himself was ever any better.

Pulcinella is the Jeffrey company's first near-miss after a string of Diaghilev revival hits. Last spring, for example, the troupe offered a restaging of Massine's Parade--about a bizarre Paris street fair--that is a very model of How to Do It Right. Dating from 1917, this nose-thumbing effort to epater les bourgeois was another all-star spectacular; conceived by Poet Jean Cocteau, it had jaunty Picasso sets and costumes --including a pah-- of cubist constructions that might fairly be described as architecture on the move--and a maundering score by Erik Satie punctuated by typewriter sounds, gunshots and tidbits of ragtime.

Once daringly avantgarde, Parade today seems as revolutionary as, say, Coppelia. The Jeffrey dancers--notably Gary Chryst, who has frequently performed the original Massine role of the Chinese conjurer--have been wondrously successful in recapturing the setting and style of the original, and the work itself is performed in an engagingly ambivalent manner that seems to be saying both "Here it is, folks," and "Don't take all this too seriously." A little more of that frolicsome spirit might have helped Pulcinella. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other old Ballets Russes masterpieces just waiting for the Jeffrey treatment. Anyone for Zephyr et Flore? "JohnT.EIson

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