Joffrey Ballet dances to varied tones of ‘Unique Voices’

The Joffrey Ballet enjoyed unprecedented success with its two most recent full-length “story ballets” — Christopher Wheeldon’s innovative “Swan Lake” and the company’s ever popular version of “The Nutcracker.” But now comes the nut that’s often the hardest to crack: attracting audiences to a mixed repertoire program.

“Unique Voices,” running Feb. 11-22 at the Auditorium Theatre, should make the whole process an easy sell. It will feature the company premieres of the work of three contemporary choreographers — James Kudelka, Stanton Welch and Alexander Ekman — who possess very different aesthetics, yet are equally creative in the ways they are able to put a 21st century stamp on classical ballet.

Consider “The Man in Black,” by Kudelka, longtime artistic director (now artist-in-residence) of the National Ballet of Canada. His suite of dances to songs sung by Johnny Cash (with the dancers in cowboy boots) should be a major lure. “Maninyas,” by Welch, the Australian-bred choreographer who is artistic director of the Houston Ballet, is anchored by complex pas de deux that explore the nature of intimate relationships. And topping it all off is Ekman’s “Tulle,” a fiendishly energetic full company work that both applauds and satirizes ballet. Ekman is the mischievous, highly theatrical Swedish-bred artist (now with the Nederlands Dans Theater), who created a stir when the Joffrey performed “Episode 31,” his audacious multimedia piece, a couple of seasons back.

“The Joffrey Ballet — and I credit Robert Joffrey for this — has never been limited by a particular language of dance, and has always had an open door for work that goes beyond the traditional,” said artistic director Ashley Wheater. “I think it’s very important to make the art form new, and not limit ourselves to the great 19th century classics and Balanchine.”

“The ‘Unique Voices’ program is incredibly challenging for the dancers,” Wheater noted. “‘Maninyas’ has such a depth of raw emotion, from great drive to intense calmness. Kudelka is a very cerebral, complex choreographer and his ‘Man in Black’ is a beautifully crafted piece that commands your attention with its intimacy and quiet, and its demand for synchrony. And ‘Tulle’ is so clever in the way it tries to explain the art of ballet — quoting from the romantic classics, but then breaking out in a circus atmosphere, and incorporating an LED screen on three walls, with video and spoken word elements.”

Here is a closer look at each of the three works:

“The Man in Black”: Set to six cover songs Cash recorded late in his life for producer Rick Rubin, this piece features three men and one woman. Its genesis was an invitation from the artistic director of Columbus-based Ballet Met to do a ballet to pop music. His appreciation for the film “Walk the Line” was another inspiration.

As Kudelka explained: “I wasn’t interested in the prison song music represented in the film, but then I discovered Cash’s work with Rubin, and suddenly a whole new world opened up to me. The age in his voice is very moving, and there is a kind of privacy in his delivery. The songs he chose had deep meaning to him at that late stage of his life — as if he were singing to himself. And remarkably there were songs from my own early years (with Canadian content) to choose from, including those by Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson. I selected The Beatles’ ‘In My Life’ and ‘Hurt’ by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, which was new to me and is astonishing. The old English folk song ‘Sam Hall’ was suggested. And I used the old blues song, ‘Farther Up the Road.’ The challenge was to get the order right. I listened to many different combinations while driving my car, and it was interesting to see how the tempo relationships shifted. ”

“I choreographed a song a day for five days, in order, and then returned several months later to do the final song, which was inspired by line dancing, and an amazing YouTube video of a Sicilian line dancing group that seemed to fit really well with the idea of going down a road. If anything, this ballet is about loss after living a long life of work and loving and joy and disappointment. It is about the loss of prowess, of shifting times and the death of loves and friends, and about how blind we are to the truth until it is too late. The four dancers remain on stage for the whole piece in what is a very quiet but quite virtuosic feat of concentration, and a generosity of spirit.”

“In the rehearsal process I often have to talk a lot about how the walking in the piece is part of the dance of it — not something you do to prepare to dance. And I emphasize that these characters are people of few words, not a quartet of depressed cowboys. I grew up on a farm, and I live in the country now, and sometimes you have to explain to people what it is like to be able to see a long distance across fields and rolling hills.”

“Maninyas”: Welch’s piece for five couples takes its title from a score by Australian composer Ross Edwards and refers to an isolated part of northern Australia with a wild landscape. The music, a violin concerto that also involves a great deal of percussion, and draws on aboriginal culture in its use of chantlike melodies and rhythms, features a massive hand-painted silk “veil” that the dancers emerge from and move through. According to Welch: “The ballet is about how you can love someone, yet not fit with that person, and then you find someone who has been around all the time and realize there is a fit, and that person brings you a certain calm. It was one of the first dances I made — in my early 20s — and it had to do with my own relationship at the time. The dancers really have to put themselves into the piece completely, bringing great athleticism and speed as well as emotion as they explore the sometimes frightening process of revealing oneself, layer by layer, to another person.”

“Tulle”: Set to the music of Swedish composer Mikael Karlsson, “Tulle” (whose title is taken from the netting fabric used for ballet’s classical tutus), reflects Ekman’s love-hate relationship with ballet, an art that has fascinated him since his mother took him to a performance at the age of 5 and he was, as he recalls it, “glued to his seat.” As anyone who saw “Episode 31” will recall, the choreographer has a flair for absurdist theater, but he prefers to explain it this way: “To me it’s not so absurd; I just mirror how weird life is, letting the audience observe it in a different way, and maybe question it. As for ballet, it has two sides: It’s an amazing and extremely difficult art, and I have great respect for those who do it. But if you’ve ever heard an audience cheer at certain flashy moments, you realize there also is an aspect of circus to it.”