Joffrey choreographer brings a bit of Baroque whimsy to Orchestra Hall

It’s been a while since the Chicago Symphony Orchestra shared its stage with dancers from Chicago’s leading dance companies. 

For nine seasons, beginning in 2004, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago was the CSO’s annual dance partner. The Joffrey Ballet made its CSO debut in spring 2019, in choreography set to two Stravinsky pieces, a suite from the ballet Pulcinella and the Concerto in E-flat for Chamber Orchestra (Dumbarton Oaks).

With two world-premiere works, the Joffrey will be back in Symphony Center for the CSO’s Nov. 10-12 subscription concerts. And once again, only one of the two pieces will be music expressly written for dance. British choreographer Cathy Marston will set Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, a lushly romantic, non-programmatic serenade the composer wrote as a Christmas/birthday present for his wife, Cosima. In contrast, Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa will be working with a suite of dances from Platée, a full-length comic opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau was a giant of French Baroque opera and ballet, and the suite bristles with highly danceable tunes and rhythms.

“I love story-telling,” Lopez Ochoa said. “So I thought I would do the suite and make a very short version of the opera, which,” she added with a cheerful laugh, “is so convoluted.” The plot involves Platée, an excessively unattractive, frog-like water nymph who’s convinced that the supreme god, Jupiter, is madly in love with her. By the end of a prologue and three acts populated by gods, goddesses, assorted humans and animals, Platée recognizes her error. 

“I have four main characters, Platée and Jupiter; Juno, Jupiter’s wife, who is never happy, she’s always jealous. And then Cupid. Then I have the world of Jupiter, which is the wind, so I have eight wind nymphs, and the world of Platée, which are 10 frogs. I’m telling the story in 19 minutes,” she said triumphantly. The chamber-sized version of the CSO, conducted by Baroque specialist Harry Bicket, will be behind the dancers, giving them what Lopez Ochoa calls “a very wide, panoramic” stage space. 

“Platée is a non-binary character with real emotions, so I didn’t want to make it too comical. The story is really comical enough.” — Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Gender roles were especially fluid in 18th-century opera, and at the opera’s premiere at Versailles Palace in 1745, the title role was sung by a male character actor with a high tenor voice.

“The role was always sung by a man in drag,” Lopez Ochoa said. “The Joffrey has a non-binary dancer, Fernando Duarte, and they agreed to be dressed as a woman and to play the character without being a drag queen, which is over the top. This is a non-binary character with real emotions, so I didn’t want to make it too comical. The story is really comical enough.”

Opera singers — and audiences — are used to women playing male roles and vice versa. That crossover is still rare in ballet, said Lopez Ochoa, especially since only female dancers regularly dance en pointe.

“I did say to Fernando they had to make an effort to really work on the [pointe shoe] technique,” Lopez Ochoa said. “Otherwise, it would look too much like Les Ballets Trockadero [de Monte Carlo], where it’s men in pointe shoes, and their intention is to make the audience laugh about men dancing in pointe shoes. I didn’t want that. I want the audience to think, ‘Oh, she’s a little odd — a little masculine, but actually very elegant.’ The character is quite vain and very full of herself: ‘Of course Jupiter is going to fall in love with me.’ A man has to play that part without it being too comical.” 

Lopez Ochoa did make one major plot change. Her ballet ends more happily for Platée, while Rameau’s opera ends with the wedding guests laughing at the humiliated nymph.

“This I found a little harsh,” she said. “I wasn’t comfortable with that ending. I didn’t want to end with everyone laughing at her.” Without giving away the surprise, the CSO audience can expect a comical twist that might have made Rameau smile. 

Lopez Ochoa is director of the contemporary classical summer program at the School of Jacobs Pillow, a long-established dance festival and school in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. She works extensively around the world and has set dances for theater, opera and musical theater, as well as ballet. Unlike many contemporary choreographers, her dances often have a story line.

“I always have a bit of theatrical elements in my work,” Lopez Ochoa said. “To me, the dancers always enter a character,” whether that character is a bird, a frog or a human being. “It’s a little in my DNA to tell stories. I like human nature, how complex we can be. And how our relationships can be complex and always have a subtext.” 

She made her Joffrey debut in 2015 with Mammatus, a fast-paced ballet set to propulsive music by Michael Gordon. “I had black birds,” she said, “so the dancers had to move in a certain way.”

Happy to be working with the Joffrey again, Lopez Ochoa was once again struck by the company’s technical prowess, especially since 12 new dancers are new to the roster this season.  

“I love the Joffrey Ballet,” she said. “It’s the second time I’ve been here. They’re so fast, they’re so generous and open to the process. And they’re good,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re sooo good.”