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Joffrey Artists Brooke Linford, Anais Bueno (center), and Christine Rocas in Yoshihisa Arai’s ‘Boléro.’

By Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune

You are left in no doubt. Behind the flesh-colored mask that contains her visibly pulsing breath, Anais Bueno is fighting against something.

With all her fury.

The million-dollar question of Yoshihisa Arai’s premiering “Boléro,” a gripping, high-stakes, live-to-streaming production that premiered Friday night and marks the unspeakably welcome return to performance of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, is the identity of the antagonist.

Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro,” a famously uniform, single-movement orchestral piece, originally conceived as a work for the ballet, has a claim to being the most popular classical work in history. A new performance is said to begin every 10 minutes, somewhere in the world. And since its copyright finally ran out in 2016, that is true more than ever, now, since you can use the “Boléro” to accompany anything you want.