9 new works to mark Ballet’s 90th anniversary

2023-01-15 - By Rachel Howard

Last summer, choreographers from around the world began arriving at the San Francisco Ballet’s Franklin Street studios. Each was allotted three weeks to create a new ballet, and then two additional weeks earlier this month to refine it.

The result is the Ballet’s ambitious next@90 festival, marking the company’s 90th anniversary. Beginning Jan. 20, the event’s three programs offer world premieres by nine choreographers over 22 days. It’s not the San Francisco Ballet’s largest festival ever, but it is the company’s most diverse, programmed by former Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson as he prepared to hand the reins to new Artistic Director Tamara Rojo.

Here’s who’s who in the next@90 lineup:

Program One

Robert Garland

Robert Garland once said in an interview for World Ballet Day that “I am a believer in the idea of legacy.” He knows whereof he speaks: The former Dance Theatre of Harlem principal dancer was recently named that company’s next artistic director, carrying on the legendary Arthur Mitchell’s founding vision of a “haven for dancers of all colors.”

His next@90 creation honors legacy at San Francisco Ballet, too. Garland is choreographing to Mozart’s Haffner Serenade, inspired in part by former artistic director Helgi Tomasson‘s

treatment of the Haffner Symphony in 1991. But Garland’s reasons for choosing the piece may seem unexpected to those not used to seeing connections across cultures. Last fall, in an interview recorded for World Ballet Day, an annual event San Francisco Ballet participated in on Nov. 2 along with 58 other companies, Garland said that the classical canon contains “African-centered rhythms and syncopations that you do not get in contemporary classical music.”

Garland’s “Haffner Serenade,” set to three movements of the Serenade for Orchestra in D Major, plays off these rhythms, giving West Africaninfluenced steps alongside classical combinations to principal dance couple Esteban Hernandez

and Katherine Barkman.

“The future of ballet is diversity,” Garland said. “But I would lean more toward the American idea of pluralism. Because it’s not just about skin color, it’s also about idea.”

Jamar Roberts

Former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater star and resident choreographer Jamar Roberts has turned from his usual jazz inspirations and taken on a monumental score for his next@90 ballet: “Totenfeier,” the original version of the first movement of Mahler’s ominous Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection” Symphony.

“Thinking about this moment, I knew that I wanted to

make something disruptive,” Roberts said in a video interview released by the Ballet. “We give so much attention to the happily and the merrily, but I feel that the darkness is equally important.”

His “Resurrection” features a powerful community leader (Dores André), who in seeking a new partner magically revives a dead man (Isaac Hernandez). The movement is full of angst and urgency, with the women off pointe and grounded.

“Choreography is not just making steps in the studio,” he said. “To me it’s more like the job of a novelist.”

Danielle Rowe

San Francisco Ballet audiences are familiar with Danielle Rowe’s theatrical playfulness from her “Wooden Dimes,” a 1920s fantasia made for former Ballet star Sarah Van Patten as a dance film in 2021 during the pandemic. For next@90, Rowe — who began her choreographic career while dancing for the avant-garde-oriented Nederlands Dans Theater — has taken that theatrical bent in an eerie new direction.

Rowe’s “Madcap” features Tiit Helimets as a lost clown in a decaying circus world.

“I’m taking the idea of the clown — the armor that a clown wears — and really just looking at the anatomy of the clown, dissecting it and using these components as inspiration for movement,” she said in an interview for World Ballet Day.

The piece is set to music by Swedish indie musician Pär Hagström, and the slightly macabre costume design is by fellow Australia native Emma Kingsbury, who also designed costumes for “Wooden Dimes.”

As the clown encounters a range of carnival characters,

there are moments both lyrical and disquieting, extending the dancers beyond their usual gracious composure.

“They’re so brave, so willing to be uncomfortable and try something new, so I wanted to capitalize on that,” Rowe said.

Program Two

Val Caniparoli

Val Caniparoli is marking his 50th year with the Ballet, having joined as a dancer in 1973 and transitioned to a principal character dancer in 1985 (you can see him in roles like Uncle Drosselmeyer in “Nutcracker,” or the Prince’s tutor in “Swan Lake”). He’s perhaps best known for his ballet “Lambarena,” created in 1994 in consultation with West African dance experts Zakariya Sao Diouf and Naomi Gedo Johnson-Washington. Caniparoli’s ballets have been commissioned and danced by the Royal New Zealand Ballet, the Finnish National Ballet and more than a dozen U.S. companies.

For his next@90 ballet, “Emergence,” Caniparoli felt drawn to fully inhabit this uncomfortable, not-quite-postpandemic moment, asking the dancers to draw on their emotions about the world beyond the studio.

“There is so much tension and anxiety,” Caniparoli told The Chronicle, “and I’m using that as the base of the ballet.”

The costumes, by San Francisco-based Susan Roemer, evoke street clothes. The music is a Concerto for Cello and Strings from 2008 by Halle Orchestra composer in residence Dobrinka Tabakova.

“It has an edge, but it’s also gorgeous,” Caniparoli said of the score in three movements titled “Turbulent,” “Longing” and “Radiant.” It fits Caniparoli’s belief that “we’re in a whole new world. How do we work with each other?”

“I’m taking the idea of the clown — the armor that a clown wears — and … using these components as inspiration for movement.” Choreographer Danielle Rowe

Bridget Breiner

Bridget Breiner grew up in Columbus, Ohio, but made her stage career in Germany, joining the Stuttgart Ballet. After her early choreographic forays there, she became an artist in residence in 2008. In 2020, she became artistic director of Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe. “The Queen’s Daughter,” her next@90 creation, will be her first work for a U.S. company.

A retelling of the story of Salome, the biblical daughter who dances for the king and asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, the ballet is set to an exquisite and rarely performed piece of music, British composer Benjamin Britten’s fiendishly challenging violin

concerto.

“Our company manager here in Germany has a background as a violinist,” Breiner told The Chronicle via video from her home in Karlsruhe. “He introduced me to this piece of music, and he was even the one who said, ‘Oh, I think it’s a Salome.’ ”

But Breiner admitted she was not originally drawn to the story.

“So many artists over the centuries have wanted to give Salome either a femme fatale voice or a really innocent voice,” she said. Then she realized “there was something fascinating and more nuanced about this girl.”

Breiner’s Salome, caught between a lusting king and an ineffective mother, is portrayed by principal dancer Sasha De Sola.

“Sasha completely ran with it,” Breiner said. “We didn’t want a pantomime, so the movement has an archetypal quality, I’d say. It’s both emotional and symbolic, grand gestures that I hope will read to the back of the opera house.”

“I thought that rather than existing in the vastness of the universe, we ourselves are the universe itself. And I immediately knew that the music of ‘Bolero’ was the perfect expression of

its theme.” Choreographer Yuka Oishi

Yuka Oishi

In making her U.S. choreography debut, former Hamburg Ballet member Yuka Oishi is also making a fresh interpretation of a much-interpreted score, Ravel’s “Bolero.” Oishi told The Chronicle the piece is inspired by her recent pregnancy.

“My belly was a systematized universe,” she explained. “I thought that rather than existing in the vastness of the universe, we ourselves are the universe itself. And I immediately knew that the music of ‘Bolero’ was the perfect expression of its theme. … The melody repeats itself, and by the end of the music, ‘Live! Live! Live!’ the music cries out to me.”

This is not any previous era’s “Bolero.” The ballet begins with a deconstructed take on the music by contemporary composer Shinya Kiyokawa and quirky, off-kilter movement.

Though the ballet builds to big group statements of all-out dancing, Oishi’s inspiration remains intimate, and the emotional connection between her and the dancers was clear in smiles and tears during a studio run-through.

“What I want to create must be beyond my imagination,” she said. “To do this, I have to face each individual. I feel that when I, myself, face the dancers with my heart naked, and when our souls start dancing together, I will be able to see something for the first time.”

Program Three Nicolas Blanc

“Since the pandemic, something unlocked in me as a creator,” said former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Nicolas Blanc, speaking to The Chronicle by phone from Chicago, where he is now a rehearsal director for the Joffrey Ballet.

“So when Helgi (Tomasson) invited me to be part of the festival, I knew I wanted music that allows us to get in touch with our emotions, to be vulnerable.”

Blanc said he kept returning to New York-based English composer Anna Clyne’s achingly lyrical cello concerto from 2019, “Dance,” in which each of the five movements is inspired by a line from a poem by 13th century Sufi master Rumi. Researching Rumi’s life and wanting to suggest a story without overcrowding the music, Blanc settled on a central figure representing the poet, and an ensemble that represents the poet’s thoughts and emotions — including fleeting memories of Rumi’s spiritual mentor, Shams al-Din Mohammad.

For Blanc, a Paris Opera Ballet-trained former virtuoso whose sterling stage career in San Francisco ended in 2009 due to injury, next@90 is also a homecoming.

His promising early choreographic career has included works for the Joffrey, Barak Ballet and the New York Choreographic Initiative, resulting in a work that premiered in the 2016 New York City Ballet gala.

Claudia Schreier

Claudia Schreier has an unusual background for a choreographer in demand at such esteemed companies as Boston Ballet and Miami City Ballet. The youngest of the next@90 choreographers, she didn’t pursue a professional dancing career, but instead attended Harvard, where she made her first dances for the university ballet company. She then interned for former New York City Ballet star Damian Woetzel at the Vail Dance Festival, leading to a marketing job at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and a breakthrough work, “Passage,” for Dance Theatre of Harlem in 2019.

For her next@90 premiere, “Kin,” Schreier is working for a second time with music by composer Tanner Porter, expanding the depth of their collaboration with an ambitious

commissioned score.

“I knew it was atypical to commission music for a festival, because there are so many other

moving pieces already,” she told The Chronicle. “But it was important to me to work with an artist who breathes with me

into new ideas, who challenges me.”

“Challenging” is an apt word for Porter’s rhythmically intense, metrically complex work, which she and Schreier developed from an idea about a journey for two women from darkness into light.

“There’s not a defined narrative,” Schreier said, “but a difficult power dynamic.”

Yuri Possokhov

Yuri Possokhov joined San Francisco Ballet as one of its most acclaimed principals in 1994, and became choreographer in residence when he retired from the stage in 2006. Throughout his career, he has been nothing if not bold.

For his next@90 commission, he’s taken on one of the ballet world’s most venerated scores: the Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Composed in 1931, it was choreographed by 20th century ballet great George Balanchine in 1972, and is one of Balanchine’s most widely known masterpieces.

“There is no connection between his ballet and my ballet — I couldn’t do Balanchine; impossible,” Possokhov said in a video released by the Ballet.

His vision of this famous score draws on a cast of 15 dancers, including two principal couples and a central “muse,” soloist Sasha Mukhamedov. The choreography draws freely on folk movement from Possokhov’s (and Stravinsky’s) native Russia.

Ironically, given that he is using a score from 1931, Possokhov said that “the future of ballet is the future of new music. We have to ask musicians — symphony music, folk music, everything music — because we’re following them.”