Little is more exciting in ballet or in any other facet of the arts than the emergence of a new talent brimming with potential, and that’s what the Joffrey Ballet delivered Wednesday evening in the Lyric Opera House with a compelling world premiere by Chanel DaSilva.
It was one of three distinctively styled works from past and present showcased on a mixed-repertory program titled “Beyond Borders” that runs for nine more performances through Oct. 23 and opens the Chicago-based company’s 2022-23 season.
DaSilva, an award-winning former dancer with the well-regarded Trey McIntyre Project in Boise, Idaho, was chosen as one of the 2020 winners of the Joffrey Academy of Dance’s Winning Works Choreographic Competition. It focuses on ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab and Native American) creative voices.
In addition to “B O R D E R S,” the work the Brooklyn, New York, native produced for Winning Works, the Joffrey performed another DaSilva piece last year as part of its virtual programming during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But “colōrem” on Wednesday night marked two simultaneous milestones. It is not only DaSilva’s high-profile debut on Joffrey’s subscription series, but it is also the first mainstage work created for the company by a Black woman.
DaSilva still has room to grow as a dancemaker, but she clearly already has a well-developed choreographic vision. In “colorem,” she showed the uncommon ability to conceive an inventive movement vocabulary, skillfully arrange and deploy 16 dancers and sustain interest across an entire work.
The piece is built around the notion of two sets of dancers wearing jarringly contrasting red and steel-gray unitards with gloves that covered their hands, obscuring an important expressive body part and taking away a certain element of their humanness.
The action takes place in a kind of stark white box, with the look and feel suggesting some cold, futuristic world, but it is hard not to see the work as a metaphor for the clashes around skin color so familiar to present-day society.
Cristina Spinei’s music, powered by marimba, piano and vibraphone, is driving, percussive and almost geometric. Much the same could be said about the movement, which is angled, precise and even rigid at times.
The red and gray performers dance with each other but they are apart as much as they are together. Only when Amanda Assucena, one of the clear stars of the evening, breaks free from the group, drawing a resistant Xavier Núñez into an athletic pas de deux, do the borders between the colors seemingly begin to melt.
Just as “Beyond Borders” welcomes a choreographic newcomer, it also celebrates an old master, Joffrey co-founder Gerald Arpino. In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the choreographer’s birth in 2023, the company is presenting his 1978 classic, “Suite Saint-Saëns,” which revels in the rich, romantic music of Camille Saint-Saëns.
In this sprightly re-staging by rehearsal director Suzanne Lopez, Arpino’s light, frolicsome neo-classicism seems vital and fresh and not dated in the least. Patterns swirl and overlap, as dancers in pastel-tinged tights and loose tutus constantly enter and exit against a blue-sky backdrop and shoot across the stage in the high-powered, exuberant final section.
There were plenty of stand-out individual performances in this work, including the crisp solos by Gayeon Jung in the opening section and the pas de trois in the Serenade second section, with Edson Barbosa deftly partnering Jeraldine Mendoza and Anais Bueno.
Rounding out the program is a revival of “Vespertine” by Liam Scarlett, who was a kind of dance-world wunderkind before he tragically took his own life in 2021 at age 35. Inspired by the chiaroscuro paintings of Caravaggio, this work takes place on a shadowy stage lit with 13 globe-like chandeliers, with the dancers entering and exiting dramatically via the darkness at the back of the stage.
Performed to spellbinding Renaissance and baroque music performed by a period-instrument ensemble that includes harpsichord, organ and theorbo, the work has a hushed, mysterious and sensual feel. A highlight is a lovely duet featuring two of the company’s reliable standouts — Victoria Jaiani and Alberto Velazquez.
