Copyright Chicago Tribune
There’s a first time for everything. The Joffrey Ballet makes its official Harris Theater debut this weekend, neatly tucking “Matters of the Heart” between “Carmen” and the upcoming “Nutcracker.” While Joffrey dancers have performed at the Harris for festivals, the two-decade-old venue in Millennium Park had never hosted the city’s landmark ballet company until now. Featuring contemporary works by choreographers Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Chanel DaSilva, “Matters of the Heart” is perfectly suited to the Harris, whose concrete floors and boldly colored lobbies are a whole different vibe from the Joffrey’s usual digs at the Lyric Opera House. Add the Main Squeeze — an American funk band that’s also Midwestern nice — playing live for DaSilva’s world premiere love letter to Chicago, and it’s almost like “Matters of the Heart” couldn’t be anywhere else. The evening opens with Ochoa’s “Broken Wings,” a ballet inspired by the life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Through a large collection of self-portraits (and many photographs of her), Kahlo let us know who she was, but she’s become a bit of a caricature. And “Broken Wings” falls prey to some of the triteness that has made Kahlo a mass-produced cultural sensation: the unibrow, the traditional clothing, the stormy marriage with fellow painter and known philanderer Diego Rivera, here depicted by dancer Dylan Gutierrez with a fake belly. “Broken Wings” spends most of its time in Kahlo’s imagination, using her colorful, surrealist self-portraits as a source of inspiration for scenic and costume designer Dieuweke van Reij and lighting designer Jim French’s striking world. An original score by Peter Salem, played live by the Chicago Philharmonic with Joffrey music director Scott Speck at the podium, is injected with stylings from Mexican folk music. Like Kahlo, Salem marries indigenous and colonial influences to find the complicated middle. I suspect that’s something Ochoa, whose parents are Colombian and Belgian, knows something about. Like her artistic team, she, too, beautifully captures the visual contrasts within Kahlo’s work, most evident in “Broken Wings’” ensembles. There is a quartet of dancing calaveras, a Greek chorus of Kahlo’s various self-portraits and a corps de ballet inspired by “Roots,” a painting of Kahlo reclining in a barren landscape with green-leafed shoots growing from within her chest cavity. In those moments, Ochoa thankfully drops the plot and allows us to sit in Kahlo’s imagination for a while. It’s where she spent a lot of her time. I wish this one-act ballet had more. Instead, the ballet taps in and out of Kahlo’s love life, which makes Kahlo, danced opening night by Anais Bueno, appear more of a victim in her unconventional marriage. Rivera’s wandering eye is just one source of agony for Kahlo. Another was her failing body, which never fully recovered from childhood polio and a debilitating bus accident that left her temporarily bed-bound as a young woman. “Broken Wings” entirely ignores Rivera and Kahlo’s politics — they met through mutual friends in the Mexican Communist Party. The ballet references a devastating miscarriage, with a haunting image of Bueno, legs spread toward the back wall, giving birth to a mess of red twine. Kahlo’s complex relationship with motherhood is perhaps most felt in the subtext. Bueno and Gutierrez’s pas de deux is accompanied by soprano Denis Vélez singing “La Llorona,” a Mexican folk tale about the ghost of a woman who roams near bodies of water weeping for the children she drowned in a fit of rage when her husband was unfaithful. Between all the pretty dancing, Ochoa seems to suddenly remember, oh, right, Kahlo was in a whole lot of pain nearly all of the time, scheduling in moments for Beuno to limp or keel over, primarily to grab her right ankle or knee, for some reason. I don’t want to minimize what Ochoa has accomplished. “Broken Wings,” commissioned in 2016 for the English National Ballet, is beautiful. And it feels especially important to point out how much stories about women, created by women, are needed in ballet. The B-side of “Matters of the Heart” is a new one-act ballet by DaSilva, her third for Joffrey’s main company. DaSilva is primarily a New Yorker, but “Wabash & You” is all Chicago, depicting a downtown meet-cute beneath the “L” tracks. Perhaps the only thing “Broken Wings” and “Wabash & You” have in common is that neither tells a happily-ever-after. The protagonist (Amanda Assucena) thinks Xavier Nuñez (who gives a career-best performance) might be “the one,” doodling daydreams of love and marriage in her journal and going through all the torment that comes from liking someone more than they apparently like you. After a night out at a jazz club (where the Main Squeeze is the featured entertainment), Assucena invites Nuñez to her place for a nightcap. He doesn’t leave until morning. I so badly wanted to love “Wabash & You,” and in moments, I did. DaSilva’s deft handling of not just the Main Squeeze’s music but the band’s equal presence with the dancers on stage, plus her adoration for this great city, are abundantly clear. DaSilva blends a grounded, contemporary vocabulary with dashes of classicism, and when they’re just dancing, “Wabash & You” is extraordinary. The more literal bits can get a bit hokey, especially when several dancers whip out their iPhones, but members of the cast, who have no “characters” and seem to show up fully as themselves, are totally here for a pedestrian, real, relatable story. And an evergreen girl-meets-boy-who-turns-out-to-be-not-it-after-all story serves, most of all, as a beautiful reminder that amid all the big things and stresses of the world, people are still meeting each other and falling madly in and out of love every day. Turns out, matters of the heart still matter. Oh, and be sure to stick around for the encore. Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic. Review: Joffrey Ballet presents “Matters of the Heart” (3 stars) When: Through Sunday Where: Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St. Running time: 2 hours with an intermission
