Winter in a pandemic. The roads obstructed with snow. The sight of the same street outside the same window inside the unchanging footprint of the apartment whose every corner and contour is saturated with a sickening familiarity. The scent of your own breath exhaled back through your mask, fogging windows frozen shut. A year, every day of which brings the same emergency home again. Vaccine. Variants.
At the Joffrey Ballet, a new Boléro by company artist Yoshihisa Arai, intended for the company’s spring gala, had just begun the creation process two weeks before the city entered lockdown. After a remote spring, the company returned to its studios in September. Now Arai’s piece, his second for the company (after a 2018 gala piece for men titled Afternoon Watch), will be its first performance in over a year’s time when it premieres online on February 26.
“It’s such a famous piece of music,” he says of Ravel’s score. “I didn’t want to compete with it too much. The music itself is so powerful, I just wanted to follow. I have one main girl dancing solo the entire piece. I told her, this finishes at the end with big notes, but I don’t want her to think this is the end. It is the end, but it is also the beginning of your life. The universe never stops; it is always circling around, like the big bang in the universe.” v
Through 3/2, joffrey.org, F
