Dance Review : Joffrey Ballet Dances Balanchine’s ‘Cotillon’ at Pavilion

It may be a minority viewpoint, but George Balanchine’s long-lost “Cotillon” is missing something essential in Millicent Hodson’s two-year-old reconstruction for the Joffrey Ballet.

No, the performance wasn’t at fault Wednesday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion--except maybe for rough playing of the Chabrier score. The problem seemed some dimension beyond the dancing in this increasingly sinster 1932 ballroom ballet.

Back in the ‘30s, British ballet historian Cyril Beaumont (among others) marveled at the ballet’s atmosphere.

“It emanates a curious, bitter-sweet perfume,” he wrote, “a mingling of elegant sophistication with the shyness of adolescence which is most attractive . . . “

Well, all the Joffrey production emanates is disinfectant: Everything is bright, scrubbed, without shadows or implications or any sense of why “Cotillon” captured the imaginations of its original audiences.

Tina LeBlanc is properly vulnerable as the Young Girl, Beatriz Rodriguez properly enigmatic as the Hand of Fate femme fatale, Carole Valleskey and Deborah Dawn properly effervescent as leading celebrants--and their beaux (Edward Stierle, Glen Harris and Douglas Martin) prove only marginally less proper.

Yet the haunting power of Balanchine’s “La Valse” or “La Sonnambula” (direct descendants of “Cotillon”) never exists here, even in embryo. Curious.

Completing the program: a repeat of “Lacrymosa” and the first local “Billy the Kid” by Tom Mossbrucker, a dancer often cast as languorous male sylphs in such ballets as “Light Rain” and “Sea Shadow,” back in the days when the Joffrey danced works by Gerald Arpino

Not this time. Mossbrucker gives an extremely detailed and commanding performance, sentimental only when Billy momentarily fantasizes about another life in that final pas de deux with his dream-sweetheart. Otherwise, he creates a real, baby-faced killer, dangerous from that crooked little smile all the way to his abrupt, assaultive stalk.

Valleskey emphasizes sweetness as both mother and sweetheart. Martin makes a noble, sympathetic Garrett--not that different from his portrayal of Billy last week. As King Lear once asked, which is the thief, which is the justice?