Reviews
Joffrey takes an Arpino journey
’60s-vintage ‘The Clowns’ highlights choreographer’s taste for experimentation
BY SID SMITH
Tribune arts critic
Published April 29, 2005
So often, yesteryear’s social commentary and avant-garde fancy make for
pretty tired art today: When was the last time someone successfully revived
a work by those 1960s experimentalists, the Living Theatre?
Gerald Arpino’s “The Clowns,” born of the chaos and adventurism of 1968,
is a rare exception, partly because it shares so much stylistically with other
experimental choreographers associated with the Joffrey Ballet, Kurt Jooss and
Vaslav Nijinsky among them.
“Clowns,” a condemnation of nuclear weaponry and a comment on the folly of
those who invented it, is very much of its time. The absurdist scenario is right
out of Samuel Beckett, while the dysfunctional circus characters echo the era of
Marcel Marceau and Fellini’s “81/2.” The stunning special effects and props,
gargantuan balloons and man-eating plastic pouches, by Vernon Lobb and Kip Coburn,
are signposts of the ’60s multimedia “happening.”
But “The Clowns” holds up as expressionistic parable, its references broad
and multilayered enough that even its now-somewhat-hokey sound effects can’t rob
it of its noteworthy role as forerunner to so much performance art and dance
theater of the ’80s and ’90s.
Its content is a nearly non-linear parade of clown-like creatures enacting
circus acrobatics as if under a chaotic, deranged and grotesque big top. The
lead clown, a buoyant and commanding Calvin Kitten at Wednesday’s opening,
begins in darkness and desolation, revives his dead compatriots, but then
gradually loses favor until the cycle of devastation and solitude repeats itself.
Until then, he and his comrades play with giant balloons and inflated wedges of
plastic that lead to sculptural fruition in Arpino’s finale, a conceptual artist’s atom
bomb that, aided by strobe lighting, swallows up the ensemble.
“The Clowns,” one of Arpino’s darkest and least forgiving works, joins a spring
lineup at the Auditorium Theatre that grandly shows off his versatility. Offerings
include the breathless showstopper, “Confetti,” and his misty, starlit elegy, “Round of Angels,”
an early artistic response to the AIDS crisis. “Viva Vivaldi” is the sensuous and fun-loving opener.
Kitten, a whirling dervish in technique and a freaky pantomime in acting, heads the excellent
“Clowns” cast whose occasional slips Wednesday fit with the rest of the madness. Other standouts
included Ikolo Griffin and Kitten again in “Vivaldi”; sinewy, poetic Victoria Jaiani in “Angels;”
and Julianne Kepley, Jennifer Goodman and the dynamic Heather Aagard in “Confetti.”
The Joffrey performs through May 8 at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress Pkwy.; phone 312-902-1500.