Story ballets traditionally drew on classic, centuries-old stories like “Don Quixote” or “Sleeping Beauty” and followed a well-established formula, with pantomime and formally structured grand pas de deux.
But contemporary choreographers are rethinking and reshaping this venerable dance form — few in more startling and potent fashion than Cathy Marston, a British choreographer who has served as director of Switzerland’s Ballett Zürich since 2023.
The Joffrey Ballet has presented four previous works by her, including “Of Mice and Men” in 2022, and Thursday evening it opened its 2024-25 season with the North American premiere of her powerful adaptation of Ian McEwan’s best-selling 2001 novel, “Atonement.”
As the title suggests, the work in very basic terms, is a story of atonement, though it is not clear that atonement is ever fully achieved. A 13-year-old girl living in 1935 on an estate in England witnesses a nighttime rape and literally points the finger at whom she believes did it.
She places the palms of her outstretched hands together in a dramatic, damning gesture that conjures a pointed gun, which metaphorically it is, swinging them through the air and directing them at the would-be perpetrator — one of the ballet’s most memorable movement motifs.
On a deeper level, “Atonement” asks: What is truth? What is fiction? What actually happened vs. what our memory and our built-in penchant for personal storytelling lead us to adamantly believe happened? And can we ever fully make up for past mistakes?
It is at once stark and sensual, shifting and surprising, with the biggest twist coming at the end when an epilogue makes clear that we have been experiencing a kind of ballet within a ballet or, perhaps more accurately, a ballet about a ballet.
If it all sounds a bit confounding, it can be, especially considering how easy it is to mix up some of the characters, and that’s why the unexpected yet essential epilogue helps so much, because it ties up many loose ends — but not all. Some of the answers are inevitably elusive.
That 13-year-old has become the ballet choreographer (an artist in the novel) she dreamed to be (the older and younger versions appear side by side), narrating this final section with a recorded voiceover and making clear that she shaped and manipulated this memory ballet within a ballet. Typically, dance shouldn’t need and shouldn’t have narration, but it works here.
There is much to praise about this affecting, deeply thought-provoking work, but it is possible to point to certain weaknesses, especially in the pacing. The opening act, which sets up all that is to follow, and some of the ensemble sections in the second act arguably run a bit long.
“Atonement” picks up momentum as it goes along, really getting its dramatic legs with the crime at the end of Act 1, building intensity with the raw, boldly etched expressionistic sections in Act 2 and forcefully culminating with the epilogue.
Marston is a master storyteller who uses a sharply delineated, often emphatic style of movement that is rooted in classical ballet but has a fresh, contemporary feel. Particularly striking, for example, is her exaggeratedly regimented and martial-like combinations for the soldiers in Act 2.
The cast is uniformly strong, starting with Yumi Kanazawa as Briony Tallis, convincingly conveying the youthful eagerness and naïve self-assuredness of the wannabe choreographer in Act 1 and her transformative maturity in Act 2.
But the real stars of this production are Alberto Velazquez and Amanda Assucena. The former portrays Robbie, the always-dreaming son of the housekeeper, Grace Turner (Anais Bueno). A wonderfully agile, fluid dancer, he twists and turns with his journal held above him at one point in a chair and kind of somersaults to the floor in one long, smooth motion.
As Briony’s older sister, Cecilia, Assucena has a kind of magnetic presence with a real sense of physical projection, with her expressive arms and athletic legs. As part of a youthful affair, seemingly more imagined than real, they dance a beautiful, sensual duet, including a spectacular lift in which she is splayed fully extended sideways on his back.
The sets by Michael Levine were simple and effective, a giant mural backdrop in Act 1 with just a couple of screens and few pieces of furniture, and, creating a kind of hermetic realm, a curtain that wraps across the back of the stage in Act 2 and is sometimes slid partially across the front at points in the action.
Composer Laura Rossi, who is best known for her work in movies and televisions, created an appropriately cinematic, mood-setting and richly orchestrated score for “Atonement” with expressive doses of harp, piano and mixed percussion. The Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra ably brought it to life under guest conductor Robert McConnell.