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 h.