DANCE REVIEW : Joffrey in Arpino’s ‘Viva Vivaldi’

“Viva Vivaldi” is one of Gerald Arpino’s strangest and most fascinating Joffrey Ballet showpieces. Created in 1965 and revived this season, it contains duets of great originality as well as group passages just as slick and empty as Arpino’s recent output. A real back-to-the-future oddity.

For starters, it’s curious that Arpino made a Spanish-style divertissement from the Venetian composer’s Concerto in D for violin, strings and cembalo. And those two moody, intimate duets--each of them ornamented by three subsidiary dancers--are puzzling too, structurally and spatially, very imaginative but expressively enigmatic, even private.

On Wednesday, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the first duet involved Elizabeth Parkinson and Ashley Wheater along with three male soloists, while the second featured Julie Janus and Tom Mossbrucker plus three women. But the formal parallels soon dissolved as each sequence developed its own pattern of principal and group interaction and its unique emotional implications.

In the two bravura sections, however, (one dominated by Jodie Gates and Carole Valleskey, the other by Edward Stierle and Carl Corry), we saw what has become Arpino’s M.O.: high-velocity, hard-sell step combinations imposed at random on cast and score. And here the ballet blurred into all the generalized neoclassical bonbons to come, and they into one another. Let’s see, there’s “Suite Vivaldi” and “Viva Saint-Saens,” “Italian Rain” and “Light Confetti,” “Reflections of Angels, and “Ketten-something” . . .

All the dancing had flair and charm, but Mossbrucker was the major surprise: unexpectedly somber and even self-absorbed. A sense of mystery always makes an artist interesting, but the quality can be startling when combined with all-American surfer-boy looks. If the underwater fantasy “Sea Shadow” (Tuesday) depended on this juxtaposition, “Viva Vivaldi” showed Mossbrucker sustaining it in a non-dramatic context and making it doubly compelling.

Allen Lewis conducted stylishly, with guitarist Stuart Fox and violinist Kenneth Yerke the capable soloists. Completing the program: Paul Taylor’s “Cloven Kingdom” and Eugene Loring’s “Billy the Kid,” both reviewed during the Joffrey Ballet’s recent engagement in Costa Mesa.