sarma

Gerald Arpino's new ballet, The Clowns, for the City Center Joffrey Ballet is no merry circus romp; it is a delicate, but chilling little parable of the cyclic destruction and rebirth of mankind. The ballet is preceded by sounds of an explosion, and the curtain opens on a heap of white clown bodies. More (these are dummies) fall from the sky. One who has survived (Robert Blankshine) carefully piles all the bodies on the heap. While he is dancing and miming a combination of despair and elation, one girl clown comes to life and dances with him - a silly, happy duet punctuated by little kissing noises. In a macabre parody of growing plants, the other clowns come alive, and the hero welcomes them joyfully. They put on brightly colored ruffles, false noses, wigs, baggy pants, ribbons. They're turned on-doing a lifetime of tricks, all the standard gags: double takes, pratfalls, flat-footed jumps, collisions, acrobatic feats. Hershy Kay's music, with some of the wind instruments miked, becomes nastily, stridently gay. Hurdy-gurdies and calliopes out of tune. The action gets a more and more disorderly and unchoreographed look. The clowns get hold of some plastic pillows with long obscene nozzles. If a clown fails on a pillow, the nozzle inflates. Bang, you're dead! The hero enters walking in a long plastic tube that trails behind him like a discarded cocoon. It too becomes a weapon; the others turn on him and try to strangle him with it. A still more formidable plastic shape looms upstage. It fills with air, becomes a huge bubble, beyond control. The clowns are drawn into it and trapped inside. Although the hero has been flung right onto the top of the bubble, he rises again-still alive-as the plastic contracts and crushes to the floor the clowns flailing about inside it.

Gerald Arpino has chosen the clown symbol wisely. If you want to show the human race coming alive, you are stuck with the problem of how to dance "life" without resorting to balletic clichés for labor, love, repose, etc. But when clowns come to life, life is represented by what they do best: clowning. The cliché is so obvious that it acquires a kind of dignity and depth. Also the clown figure trails behind him a cloud of metaphors, not only the romantic concept of the breaking heart behind the grinning mask, but-grimmer and older-the central figure of the Saturnalia. Isn't it the fool, after all, who is ritually murdered and resurrected in the winter solstice mummers' play-as Tammuz, as Dionysus, as Christ?

So the hero is mankind; the others are men. The clown that Blankshine plays so well seems somehow a cut above his fellows, because Arpino has given him the strangely beautiful weeping eyes, the elegant and futile hand gestures, the innocent silliness of a classic Pierrot. Also 18 because he "dances." The others are real circus vulgarians-brash, sloppy, lovable, cruel. He is the ideal clown, they the mob of manifestations. And here is the third point in favor of the clown metaphor: this innocent Pierrot is an ideal "man" for ballet-as a heroic, muscular figure may be for sculpture or a questing intellectual for literature. Ballet cannot properly show a Noah chosen for ' moral rectitude. This hero rides out the flood through sensitivity, gallantry skill, and beauty. Each artist must deal with the holocaust in his own way.

I've always considered this ballet a fine example of what, I believe, Arlene Croce was the first to term "pop dance." It is alluring and sleekly theatrical-topical in its subject matter and trendy in its materials. The first time I saw it, it produced a powerful and instantaneous high and left me with some images I still cherish. But its impact lessened slightly with each viewing. Should have known better. After all, you don't usually re-read detective stories, even those you loved.