Reflections on The Green Table
Journeys and Reflections, performed by Ballet West, Salt Lake City, April 2017.
LOOKING OUT from the plane over the Great Salt Lake, I see celadon shifting into mustard as the sun ricochets off the water’s shallow surface. Pastels bleed together, at times cutting each other off in sharp edges. It’s Friday, April 14, and I descend from the sky to the streets of downtown Salt Lake City to watch the evening program of Ballet West at the Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theater.
My trip is organized around , the third ballet in the program “Journeys and Reflections” at Ballet West. At its world premiere in Paris on July 3, 1932, immediately earned a first prize award for its choreographer, Kurt Jooss, and even impressed Hitler, who asked Jooss to choreograph for the new German society. Jooss refused to comply with Hitler’s request to dismiss all Jews from his company, and the entire group went into exile in the UK in 1933, only returning to Germany in 1949. Robert Joffrey saw an Argentinian company performing on tour in Seattle in the 1950s and introduced it into the repertoire of the Joffrey Ballet in the late Sixties; the company performed it many times in Berkeley during the Viet Nam War. I am curious to see how this legendary anti-war performance piece, created in response to the rising anti-Semitism and burgeoning fascism in Weimar Germany, will be staged by Ballet West eighty-five years after its creation, in an America that now, I need to watch the other two ballets first.
