The Joffrey unveiled its new Anna Karenina this weekend before packed houses at the Auditorium Theatre. The product of an international team of luminaries, including choreographer Yuri Possokhov, set and costume designer Tom Pye, lighting designer David Finn, and projection designer Finn Ross, it’s the Joffrey’s first commissioned story ballet and for ambition alone deserves praise. It’s heroically danced by the company to a cinematic new score by Ilya Demutsky, with sumptuous costumes flashing against the muted blue of a minimalist set enhanced by a masterful use of lighting and projections—and if the making of a new piece of theater were the manufacture of spectacle, this rendition of the Tolstoy classic would take home prizes for the way it captures the story of its title character’s adultery, downfall, and demise in a series of arresting images.
Instead, the movement has a curiously static quality despite the plenitude of it; it indicates states but not the arc of narrative. We have a febrile Anna suffering possession of the legs, which lash spastically with a passion that seems to have infiltrated the sinew, and the men that crumple and toss her like paper. Yet even as image, her visually stunning suicide, presented as a shadow that looms larger and larger as the lights of the train race towards us, barely has a moment to register before the ballet incomprehensibly concludes with a frenetic bacchanal in (as the synopsis states) a “field with grain in the countryside,” where forkfuls of hay are vigorously tossed as loose-haired peasants frolic on the farm of Levin (given the last, lingering solo in the piece), whose tamed Kitty is perched atop a haystack in a vision of Oklahoma replete with giant clotheslines of billowing white sheets. Unfortunately it is beyond the scope of this review to surmise why. v
Through 2/24: Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Thu 2/21, 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells, 312-386-8905, joffrey.org, $35-$199.
