Program 1 - “7 for Eight,” “Magrittomania,” “Pas/Parts 2016”
Program 2 - “Rubies,” “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Fearful Symmetries”
San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House
San Francisco, CA
February 5-6, 2016
by Leigh Witchel
copyright © Leigh Witchel, 2016
San Francisco Ballet kicked off its repertory season with a cool revival and a hot new ballet.
John Adams’ “Fearful Symmetries” has driven ballets before; the one best known to New Yorkers is Peter Martins’ 1990 work, which built a parallel juggernaut to the massive, pulsing score.
Luke Ingham and Lorena Feijoo in “Fearful Symmetries.” Photo © Erik Tomasson.
The ballet opened with Sofiane Sylve, dressed elegantly in a cocktail dress and soft slippers, on the floor crawling toward us. She turned away and rolled her shoulder sinuously to Adam’s Big Band saxophones. With the kind of psychological perspicacity he’s shown before, Scarlett zeroed in on Sylve’s character and gave her a role that only someone with her cool authority could put over: A Virgil of the landscape of desire.
From her solo, the piece moved into various groups and couples who arrived from the smoke and darkness at the back, sometimes walking, often running at full tilt. Midway through, Joseph Walsh strutted out in black briefs and what looked like a leather jacket. Bantam weight and cocky, he put himself on display for us, ending a virtuoso variation with an attitude-filled gesture or turning away from us and grinding his hips. He led a group of men stomping out of tours as if they were toughs from “West Side Story.” He doffed the jacket later on to wear only briefs and transparent skin-tight sleeves. Scarlett has used this persona – the male bombshell – before: Emble in “The Age of Anxiety.” He has catalytic power in Scarlett’s cosmogony, but he hasn’t yet come out and told us why.
Adams’ score has several obvious divisions in it. Martins and Scarlett did almost nothing alike in their versions, Scarlett seemed to be working to Adams’ melodic line rather than the pulsing beat. Still, they changed what they did at about the same time. Walsh and Sylve began a dance together by jerking to half-toe on each beep of the horns. Scarlett's interpretation of the music was emotional: a group lay on the ground and tossed in disturbed sleep while the woodwinds twittered.
At the same point Martins had Heather Watts thrown around violently at the end of a duet, Lorena Feijoo, in a Louise Brooks bob, pushed Luke Ingham to the ground on all fours. But then she rode on his back as he slowly crawled forward. Scarlett’s violence wasn’t violence, it was foreplay. Appropriately enough, the mid-market chic costumes by Jon Morrell were in about fifty shades of gray.
The ballet’s ending made sense musically but not dramatically. After a massive crescendo, the men pounded the floor as the women danced. The music cut out and so did the lights. Adams began a slow, dreamy section and Scarlett had a new couple appear in pale gray. Vanessa Zahorian – the only woman on pointe – drifted through the air carried by Jon-Paul Simoens in what Scarlett seemed to be offering as an apotheosis. Yet Adams was really only giving a cooldown from the aerobics. Maybe Scarlett was too: at the end, as Simoens limped off into the darkness, Zahorian got deposited to the floor and crawled towards us, just as Sylve did in the opening. Curtain.
In his past few ballets, Scarlett’s talked about sex – a lot – ranging from the problematic “With a Chance of Rain” to the humane and perceptive “The Age of Anxiety.” Still, the way he’s talked about it has been rife with stereotypes and hasn’t varied much: sex as a garden of thorns. The obsession is in danger of becoming adolescent, even prurient.
In “Fearful Symmetries” he created a viscerally thrilling dance and continued to find a language for sex. But will it be a dance language? Will it be a ballet language? The battle lying ahead for him will be the same one that MacMillan fought (and to many of us – lost): To reconcile his vocabulary and tradition with his subject matter.
In Program 2, Christopher Wheeldon’s “Continuum” was postponed and Mark Morris’ “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” went on in its stead. Its pastoral innocence was a good choice, as it was sandwiched by two more knowing works.
SFB’s edge in Balanchine has dulled over the years, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in “Rubies.” Over time at New York City Ballet the ballet has gone from a work with undertones of power and sexuality to a dance about sexual politics. SFB pulls it back to being primarily about dancing. When Lauren Strongin and Joan Boada or Zahorian and Taras Domitro wound and unwound from a pirouette with the woman’s arms across her breast, there was no hint of being caught or trapped. The couple smiled; it was a move, not a metaphor. The orientalist final pose, with the man’s arms reaching behind the woman to create a Hindu dancing god, was still more of a design rather than the Kama Sutra.
Sylve was ice cold and red hot as the solo ballerina, throwing her leg skyward behind her head in response to Stravinsky’s jazzy score but never missing a turn. Boada had an easy hoofer quality as he shuffled down a diagonal. Domitro also was amiable in his solos but had trouble partnering throughout.
Both Zahorian and Strongin had the right gamine look and the light, sweet and American qualities for the McBride role. From Houston Ballet, Strongin and her husband Walsh are the company’s most important new members. They were all over the repertory this weekend. Strongin looked as if she were holding back slightly in “Rubies,” until you realized she was dancing leads in all three ballets. Walsh only had to do two out of three. In “Drink,” he danced the Baryshnikov role, doing triple turns bang on the piano chords: one, two, three, developpé. In “Fearful Symmetries” he was called on to do his pivotal role with both casts.
Program 1 began with two in-house works. Helgi Tomasson’s “7 for Eight” is one of his less musical ballets. You could put money on which Glenn Gould album Tomasson had in his player when he was planning the piece (this one) but it sounded as if he were listening on shuffle play: he made opening movements into finales, ignoring Bach’s structure.
Still, Tomasson never makes an unwatchable work, and he’s always deft at casting. This time, Mathilde Froustey expanded grandly in two duets with Tiit Helimets. Tomasson passed down his brand of male technique – elegant and complex but modest – to Domitro in a filigree male solo.
Yuri Possokhov takes more risks. “Magrittomania,” now 16 years old, was his first ballet for SFB and the first of many risks that paid off: he managed to bring Magritte’s surrealism to life aided by a score arranged by Yuri Krasavin of doctored Beethoven.
Wearing a lipstick red dress, Dores André (the company’s newest principal) performed a solo with one hand behind her back, and later a duet with Walsh, both wearing gauze veils tied over their heads like insect’s membranes.
It’s only academic to call William Forsythe’s “Pas/Parts 2016” a revival. Originally set for Paris Opera Ballet in 1999, in resetting it Forsythe remained in residence with SFB for six weeks and re-choreographed about three quarters of the ballet. He was quoted in the program, “It should have been more classical in some sections; it was unnecessarily modern in some respects. It felt a little forced to me.”
Even so, some things about it did not change. With its neat, academic language and stripped down décor it felt – as it did in 1999 – more like a movement experiment than a ballet. It moved between short solos and duets into large group sections. Some sections seemed as if they were built off a kernel of vocabulary – a prancing walk, one with arms winging down from overhead, or some other improvisation – that got elaborated or explored.
The stage was enclosed by fabric on three sides (in Paris, it was translucent and some moments happened behind the back scrim). The costumes were the same; designed by Stephen Galloway, the women were in unitards that were bi-colored as if to split the body into front and back portions.
Thom Willems’ score began with an electronic whine that sounded vaguely like the first notes of “Bolero” on endless loop. At another point it seemed like a tape played backwards.
Forsythe is a specialty for San Francisco’s dancers – his contemporary version of classical ballet technique is right in their wheelhouse. Sylve started off with a solo showcasing her formidable ability. Later on, she tucked her leg on Carlo di Lanno’s shoulder, and he rose to drop her into a 180° penchée.
Feijoo’s performance was a monument to age and treachery. She came out, posed with an elegantly pumped foot and revolved through perfectly placed pirouettes as if she were Cher, daring the young whelps to try and keep up.
The meat of the ballet was elegant phrases that – befitting its Parisian origins – showed off the legs and feet like high fashion modeling. True to Forsythe’s quote, the ballet was indeed very classical, from Frances Chung’s variation of piqué emboîté turns to fouetté turns for the women close to the end that seemed lifted from “Symphony in C.” In the part done originally by Nicolas Le Riche, Walsh danced the most modern solo to chopping drumming sounds, but even that concluded with a manège.
The final section – as in many of Cunningham’s dances, which the ballet resembled structurally – was a slowly accreting phrase that added people one by one as well as layering counterpoint. Forsythe put on a light show at the very end; and the dancers lowered their arms in a tableau as the curtain descended. The whole thing was so cool it was hot.
copyright © Leigh Witchel, 2016
All photos © Erik Tomasson
Middle: Sofiane Sylve and the company in “Rubies.”
Bottom: Sofiane Sylve in “Pas/Parts 2016.”