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The San Francisco Ballet is
wearing a review from last summer’s successful tour to Europe as a new title back
home. "One of the world’s top ballet companies" wrote someone in the Times
of London, so it must be so. The quotation is everywhere, on the front of the program, on
the posters, the website. It’s a little embarrassing that such an excellent
organization would need to flap its wings so much, like movie producers vying to get
noticed by the Academy. Better to just dance. Perhaps it’s just a West Coast-based
insecurity.
Helgi Tomasson has been at it for twenty years now. What he’s
actually done is raise a lot of money. The good news is, he knows how to spend it. This
young-looking company is filled with an international cast of up-and-coming stars,
first-rate production values, and a repertoire that is skillfully varied.
Program One of the 2005 season shows off, in one piece, what the San
Francisco Ballet is up to, in terms of the dancing. After a couple of rather moderate
offerings, the evening ends with Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. On view
is technique, star-power and practically the whole company working at full-bore, all in
thirty minutes of Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 in G.
After so much hoopla last season in the year of Balanchine’s 100th
anniversary, it’s satisfying to see a big Balanchine piece in a normal light. Here,
with Lorena Feijoo as the regal prima ballerina and Vadim Solomakha, her confident
partner, the pleasure is in watching some playful and fiendishly difficult dancing pulled
off with near ease. Feijoo had moments where the fifth set of pirouette combinations had a
shaky completion, but in general she knows how to lead a pack of tutus. Her bearing,
attack and technical command earn her the place up front. Solomakha’s partnering is
almost soft-edged. There is never a moment where he pulls himself into the stiffness one
sometimes sees the cavalier assume. His masculine counter to her lead is confident and
relaxed, the physical effort nearly transparent.
When the entire corps takes the stage, there is the opportunity to
admire what a band of individuals Tomasson has hired, many of them quite young. There are
Thai, Chinese, Cuban, Spanish, English, French and American dancers, and every one of them
is strongly trained in a slightly varied manner. There is no cookie-cutter uniformity,
even in the shape and size of the dancers (Bret Bauer towers in the male corps at
6’2" while many of the other men are a more standard 5’8").
Tomasson’s corps and company is a kind of casting theme and
variation. And to see all this dissimilarity dancing in perfect unison (and these dancers
can do unison, down to the height of every leg in every leap and arabesque and the
placement of the hands) is quite remarkable. The San Francisco Ballet is some kind of
metaphor for world harmony that never gets lived-out in the political arena.
The program opener, 7 for Eight, Tomasson’s own 2004
exploration of Bach, has some lovely moments, particularly in the expression of clarity
and presence by Yuan Yuan Tan and Yuri Possokhov, who seem to be the heart of the piece.
Having Balanchine as the other bookend to Tomasson on the program, however, shows off the
director’s choreographic shortcomings. Somehow Mr. B was always able to create
spatial interest as well as surprising uses of the classical vocabulary at practically
every moment, while Tomasson seems more concerned with steps than space, and spends many
passages of the colder, more mathematical music of Bach sending his dancers into flights
of less inspired choreography. Although Mr. T is no Mr. B, he does manage particularly
well, when choreographing for men (whom Balanchine basically ignored, artistically), to
delve into new frontiers. With this group of outstanding danseurs, it would be interesting
to see even more of a shift from traditional dominance of the toe-shoed gender in future
Tomasson works.
"…smile with my heart," a Lar Lubovitch piece originally
set on American Ballet Theatre in 2002, is basically a lovely duet to Richard Rogers’
"My Funny Valentine" expanded into a longer work, without the same artistic
inspiration. The central duet, performed by Tina leBlanc and Stephen Legate is just right,
with the bittersweet song played by a small group of instrumentalists onstage, lead by
pianist Michael McGraw. The rest of the piece lacks focus, particularly in the opening,
and the fault can clearly be laid on the musical score. Lubovitch commissioned composer
Marvin Laird to create music, "in the style of" Richard Rogers, and the result
is a murky, meandering, minor mess with occasional melodic reminders from the Rogers
songbook. How much clearer the choreography could have been if every section had offered,
like the "My Funny Valentine" duet, much more lyricism and less abstraction.
This is Musical Comedy, not a time for Avant Garde.
In the two other featured duets, one angry, one light, Katita Waldo and
Damian Smith used the floor and created real tension with a minimum of phony ballet angst
in the former, while Frances Chung, mysteriously plucked from the corps to dance with
Gonzalo Garcia in the later, looked perky but out of her league.
February 2, 2005 – Michael Wade Simpson
