"Haffner Symphony," "Underskin," "Russian Seasons,"
San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House
San Francisco, CA
April 13, 2010
by Rita Felciano
Copyright © Rita Felciano, 2010
Programming is a skill that experience perhaps can teach. But it also takes a good dose of intuition to know what will work in terms of variety within coherence. You want to please and challenge the eye, the ear and the heart of your artists as well as your audience while keeping in mind the available human and financial capital. In his years at SFB, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson has proved himself an exceptionally good juggler. With the help of Martin West at the podium, Program VI showed how dancers will rise to the challenge of good music and good choreography.
The 26-year old Mozart had shaped the "Haffner Symphony" from a serenade written at the occasion of Sigmund Haffner's -- son of Salzburg's much beloved mayor -- elevation into the aristocracy. Tomasson took a gossamer approach to this sunny music yet shaped his choreography with a clean and sure touch. Refined attacks, though not always realized attacks by the corps women in this performance, elegant lines and a sense of poise and well-being overlaid the music like a piece of lace. Santo Loquasto's smoky blue set recalled a formal park; the dancers gave it life.
Vannessa Zahorian danced the ballerina role exquisitely. She was "Haffner's" reigning princess, supported by a garland of young friends. When she walked in, shadowed by two of them, she graciously acknowledged their presence but also took it for granted. Zahorian's phrasing recalled spun sugar; developpés and port de bras opened like buds. The attention to detail riveted. Even something as small as a couple of transitional cross steps received full attention. Partnered by Daniel Deivison, the not-yet-secure Steven Morse and Anthony Spaulding, she gave herself to the lifts as if breathing rarefied air.
Davit Karapetyan is a very different dancer, more self-centered though equally proficient. Coming down from an elevation, you'd think he was landing on foam but it's in the way he speeds up and slows down turns, that you see a dancer in easy control of his instrument. With Dores Andre -- who is dancing a lot this season -- the radiant Courtney Elizabeth and Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun, Karapetyan proved himself correct though a bit overly reserved. His technically impeccable partnering of Zahorian also felt slightly cool. Tomasson's take on "Haffner" rides on a current of social ease; Karapetyan, excellent dancer that he is, didn't quite fit in.
For "Underskin," his first work for SFB, Renato Zanella, former Ballet Director of the Vienna State Opera, chose the string orchestra version of Schoenberg's "Verklaerte Nacht." If Mozart at 26 was already highly experienced, for Schoenberg, at age 25, this was opus 4. Yet, it's one of his most beloved works. Zanella seemed primarily interested in its projection of a dark luminosity; he did well enough by it. But as if to counter-act the music's late romanticism, Anne Marie Legenstein's woods -- spindly beams, perhaps rescued from construction site -- and fish scale body armor for the female soloists and faintly S&M leather and tattoos for the men, suggested unease and an edginess that the choreography only partly reflected. The most consonant direct response to Schoenberg came from David Finn's shadowy lighting which often swallowed the dancers.
At first viewing Zanella's choreography looked serviceable enough for the stated context of this being a ballet about a search inside the human soul. The woods being the soul. But without program notes, would we have known that slinky, hip-thrusting, high-kicking Elana Altman, encased in a snake-skin body stocking, represented "coincidence or chance"? She opened the ballet, shot through a few more times only to disappear forever.
"Underskin" was well danced; the production has a pleasing feeling tone, but the choreography didn't show much of a personal Zanella signature. Even a concept-driven ballet stands not the ideas which generated it but on the quality of their translation into dance.
The corps wove itself ably through "Underskin's" three primary duets; a unison section for the men in which they leaned far back as if pushed by a strong wind, looked good. The first duet for Garcia Castilla and Elizabeth's had an easy pull in their interlacing and lifts. Maria Kotchekova and Pascal Molat's showcased her spunk and the ability to seem to be yielding even as she pulls away.
The most emotionally involving dancing came from Katita Waldo and corps member Quinn Wharton, the first time he has partnered her, if memory serves correctly. Wharton excels in character roles but here he showed another side of himself. He supported Waldo securely and solicitously. Hand-holds, cupping gestures, overhead lifts and low to the ground turns suggested a deep emotional commitment but also an egalitarian relationship. At the end Waldo was left kneeling alone; it made you wonder whether what had preceded, had been a memory or a dream.
Alexei Ratmansky's "Russian Seasons" entered SFB's repertoire last year. It offered an even more satisfying second perspective. Leonid Desyatnikov's score, which includes a solo violin as well as Russian folk songs beautifully interpreted by Susannah Poret, sounded like a richly colored carpet where one could perceive all types of patterns. Galina Solovyeva's single color costume--with pillbox hats for formal occasions like church--imposed a sense of commonality while setting up the tensions that boy-girl relationships bring with them. The choreography reflected that sense of abundance.
Ratmansky evokes a world -- long gone in its specifics, but much alive in its emotional resonance -- with chiseled, sometimes overlapping vignettes that reflect the jealousies, meanness, indifference and loneliness as well as the teasing, flirting and exuberance that are part of ordinary life anywhere. Sofiane Sylve's frustrated throwing of arms and low strides with upturned feet looked uncannily like Olive Oyl, a character not from Russian but American folklore. Katita, a bundle of misery picking flowers recalled Andrew Wyeth; the way the other women rejected her felt like high school all over. Lorena Feijo seemed something of a virago who turned into a haunting spirit. Damian Smith, turning his solitary rhythmic somersaults, was every bit the rolling stone, the outsider. When he and Waldo turned up in the dream-like final scene, perhaps in wedding white, they suggested emergence from a world they were leaving behind.