Looking Beyond Seventy-Five—Part One

San Francisco Ballet
“New Works Festival,” Part One
War Memorial Opera House
San Francisco, California
April 22-May 6, 2008

by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano, 2008

I have a modest proposal.  Let’s have a festival of new ballet with two restrictions: no pas de deux’s, and choreographers have to use the classical language that dancers spend so many years perfecting. The result might be quite different from the one produced by San Francisco Ballet’s New Works Festival which closed the company’s 75th anniversary season. The work might not be better; it most certainly would be different.

For all of the praise that Helgi Tomasson gets for his innovative programming, for this trio of evenings of world premieres, he played it safe. He is more adventuresome during the regular season. Yet despite my desire for conceptually more challenging work, Tomasson’s selections presented a rich mix of how choreographers are looking at ballet in the 21st century. For the most part, these specific dance makers do use the classical vocabulary in one form or another. They are Julia Adam, Val Caniparoli, Jorma Elo, Margaret Jenkins, James Kudelka, Mark Morris, Yuri Possokhov, Paul Taylor, Stanton Welch and Christopher Wheeldon. Only one of them premiered a clunker, Taylor with the formulaic “Changes.”

Part One of this overview looks at work by Possokhov, Jenkins, Kudelka, Adam and Morris. Their rethinking of conceptual frameworks resulted in choreography that bears repeated viewing. Part Two will present perspectives on Welch, Wheeldon, Elo and Caniparoli who invested their primary energies in pas de deux’s.

Possokhov’s lovely and ever so accessible “Fusion” juxtaposed four men from the corps (Martyn Garside, Garen Scribner, Benjamin Stewart, Matthew Stewart) with four Principal couples in a ballet in which style suggested modes of being. He set the choreography for the male quartet to an arrangement for the Kronos Quartet of a darkly moody score by Bollywood composer Rahul Dev Burman. Sandra Woodall garbed the dancers in Sufi-like skirts and caps for Dervish-derived choreography. The inspiration for the couples--in sleek unitards--came from British composer Graham Fitkin’s jaunty, jazz-inflected rhythms.   

Structurally, “Fusion” is conventional in the way Possokhov deployed the corpsmen, often in unisons. The four couples were given individualized ballet-based pas de deux. None of the duets for Kristin Long/ Gennadi Nedvigin, Lorena Feijoo/Joan Boada, Vanessa Zahorian/ Jaime Garcia Castilla and Yuan Yuan Tan/Damian Smith offered new perspectives on these artists.

Tan, who has become an ardent, wonderfully giving performer was ideally partnered by the omni-present Smith. Refined and pristine Nedvigin complemented Long’s quick-silvery soubrette. Boada and Feijoo’s swirling lifts and overhead splits added a notes of bravura showmanship.

Touches of originality included Tan scrambling to get off stage through a corpsmen’s chain link barrier, only to be thrown back at them. In an all-male section, the dancers engaged in a playful dancing competition, including arm-wrestling and chest bumping. The two different performance styles subtly raised questions around male dancing.

“Fusion” could easily have become a ponderous East/West, communal/ individual, youth/experience investigation. While those issues bubbled below the surface, Possokhov’s touch was light. He seemed more interested in co-existence than “fusion.” Unfortunately, at the end he couldn’t resist giving the four Principal men the Sufis’ opening belly-danced inspired torso isolations. It sounded a false note.

Nedvigine and Long returned in one of the Festival’s more controversial works, Julia Adam’s deconstruction of “Sleeping Beauty.” Cooly received, I found “A rose by any other name” enchanting. Adam turned these highly trained ballet dancers into stiff-legged, two dimensional figurines. Perhaps, they were inspired perhaps by friezes, perhaps by Asian Puppet Theater. But she also preserved line, legibility and a high degree of stylization. This cool contemporary fairy tale was fresh, detailed and elegantly realized. I kept thinking of Maguy Marin’s “Cinderella

The work additionally offered an unusual perspective on SFB dancers. I never thought of Nedvigine having a flair for comedy, or Lily Rogers as particularly regal. Nedvigine danced both the Lilac Fairy and the Prince; four corpsmen doubled as awkward puppy dog suitors and fairies. Brett Bauer was a narcisstic Beauty; Kendall Teague a stumbling Grace; Garside a birdcage-embracing Song. Daniel Devision’s Generosity distributed money and Scribner—my favorite—as a finger-pointing Temperament told everyone to clean up the place.

The inside references were clear, some more amusing than others.  Still, Adam handled her material ever so deftly. The suitors with their outstretched arms stalked like toy soldiers or aw-shucks middle school boys having to ask a girl to dance. Aurora, bourred around like a little robot and got into a girl fight with Carabosse, a part in which Elizabeth Miner shone in a fulminating solo. A stately funeral procession was undercut by the King’s (Helimets) not very royal behavior.

“rose” has issues with lengths. The Prince takes forever to awaken Aurora, flopping her limbs around like a demented Romeo. Some of the blackouts interrupt the flow too much. More serious is the use of selections from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Surprisingly, some of them worked well; in other parts the connection between music and dance jarred.

The one real risk Tomasson took for this Festival was in commissioning Margaret Jenkins. In her long career, the San Francisco-based artist has made a single ballet, “Sightings” in 1991 for Oakland Ballet.

“Thread,” with a shimmering orchestral score by longtime collaborator Paul Dresher and superb design and lighting by Alexander Nichols, is one of Jenkins’ finest works. Loosely based on the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, it tells a story of searching, finding, abandonment and finally acceptance

But Jenkins has a slippery way with narrative. The labyrinth is not a place but people. The “monster” easily oozes from the darkish labyrinth through the open door in Nichols’ transparent screen into the luminously lit Greece. That’s where Ariadne (a gloriously wild Pauli Magierek) initially spins her thread. Smith, in imitation of her language, carefully tries to wind his way through the shifting sands of a dozen dancers who precariously hold on to balances or try to find a place to put a foot down.

Turmoil increases as bodies shoot out of gnarled entanglements like flames. Dancers embrace the floor in quick rolls but also take to the air. They engage each other fluidly and intricately, diving and twitching, dragging themselves like beached seals. Nicolas Blanc streaks through like a comet. A limb-twisting duet for Molly Smolen and James Sofranko ends with her carrying him on her back like a burden of guilt.

James Kudelka’s “The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful” doesn’t go anywhere. It hovers like a dark cloud, or a bout of depression that gets worse by the minute. The work is gloomy; but it’s also daring in way it focuses on atmosphere alone.

Set on a symphonic elaboration on Cesar Frank by Rodney Sherman, Kudelka employed ten women in tiny, flesh-colored feather tutus as disheveled as their hairstyles. The dancers flutter on point like a flock of birds, or limp as if having broken a wing. In stasis, their shoulders slump, their  heads droop. If they were flowers, they badly needed water.

The choreography—double lines, semi circles, diagonals and huddles-- recalled the corps of “Swan Lake” and second act “Giselle.’’ In last gasp efforts dancers broke out of the lines only to be sucked back into this collective mourning. They looked like ghosts. I couldn’t help but think of them as memories of a now “dead” 19th century repertoire.

Frances Chung, for once not her bubbly self, and Elana Altman were the soloists to be partnered by Garside and Orza. In camouflage paint and blond wigs, the men wore James Searle’s calf-length military coats. Their rounded arms appeared stuck in a chug-like back and forth movement. They used them like claws on the women. They limped, propelling themselves forward with a wind-milling arm. They picked the women up likes corpses, to deposit them willy-nilly. 

The contrast between the women’s frailty and the impersonal force with which these robots manipulated them chilled. Whether the note of misogyny was intended or not, I couldn’t decide.

Very late—too late to be felt as integral to what had preceded—a pas de deux for Vilanoba and Tan, in a contemporary red dress and high heels, almost seemed like an afterthought. She fiercely flailed against his iron grip and his ability to shape and throw her at will. At one point she tried to “break” his arm open. But in the end, he grabbed her up, straightened her out over his knees and plopped her down. Another a piece of dead something?

Mark Morris deliciously exuberant “Joyride,” to John Adams’ original score, “Son of Chamber Symphony,” started with two supine dancers’ raised leg giving the down beat for a wild journey across the music’s ricocheting textures and shifting rhythms. The eight dancers furiously pirouetted and jeted across Adams skittering landscape, one which also elicited easy ambling walks and loosely swinging arms. Even some Grouch Marx walks. Some of the hands-on-hip poses looked like they might have come off a catwalk, maybe no surprise given Isaac Mizrahi’s  glamorous metallic body suits. A couple of times a frozen bow’s inclined head and open arms seemed inspired by Morris’ own curtain calls.

More than structural integrity, it was the bounty of Morris’ references that kept the attention riveted. “Joyride’s” emotionally richest section occurred in the four pas de deux’s. Morris reconfigured them as intimate encounters between equals even if a couple met on different sides of the stage, as did Sofranko and Miner. Rory Hohenstein and Jennifer Stahl, a study in symmetry circled each other like interlocking rings. Nedvigine arched over Van Patten as if part of the same rainbow. When she went into a developpé, he gave up his solid two-footed stance and offered her a crisp tendu. Molat and the much featured Dana Genshaft completed the cast.

Photos, from top (all by Erik Tomasson):
Photo No. 1:  Gennadi Nedvigin, Joan Boada and Jaime Garcia Castillo in Possokhov's 
"Fusion".
Photo No. 2: San Francisco Ballet in Adam’s “A rose by any other name”
Photo No. 3: San Francisoc Ballet in Jenkins’ “Thread”
Photo No. 4: Pierre-Francois Vilanoba and Yuan Yuan Tan in Kudelka’s “The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful”
Photo No. 5: Pascal Molat and Elizabeth Miner in Morris’ “Joyride”