A dedication to the dance
Do not think of the San Francisco Ballet School’s annual Student Showcase as the coda to the company’s season. Imagine, instead, that the Showcase, which opened its run Wednesday, May 31, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, is an overture to a single career or to several brilliant careers in dance.
This is serious business. Bouquets were plentiful Wednesday, cheers were lusty, but the aura was professional, all the way down to the Level 2 girls and boys. Dedication and passion, on the part of students and parents, dominates. From the age of 7, Jacob Seltzer wanted to be a dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. The problem was that he lived in Washington, D.C. But in 2015, his mother, Susanna Seltzer, moved to the Bay Area and 17-year-old Jacob is now at Level 7 of the school and danced winningly Wednesday in Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s folksy “Meistens Mozart,” partnering the charming Jasmine Jimison.
Then, there are the Feinstein twins, Daisy and Calder, both in Level 3. At 11, they think only of ballet (they even dance together in the party scene of “Nutcracker”). They reside in Sonoma, but mother Erika Stuart happily drives them into town four days a week. The pair will attend the Bolshoi Academy in New York over the summer.
That caliber of commitment may explain why Wednesday’s main event, a heart-stopping performance of George Balanchine’s “Serenade,” came over so potently. The choreographer prepared this, his first American ballet, for a class in 1934, and it was restaged authoritatively for the school by Elyse Borne.
From the unison extended palms, the signature moments abounded in this “Serenade.” A few technical mishaps intruded, but what mattered most was the musicality: These women seemed to ingest the Tchaikovsky score into their musculature. The performance was fierce and thrilling in a way that a lot of professional performances are not; these dancers are too young to have acquired mannerisms. In the waltz duet, Joseph Warton partnered Wona Park with great care. Only the lighting required modification; “Serenade” is a ballet of shadows.
In other respects, the program seemed overlong and depended on recorded music. Corps dancer and choreographer Myles Thatcher introduced the public to his recent “Panorama,” a lively sextet for extremely supple bodies dancing in semi-darkness. The captivating Douwe Eisenga score is a find, Blake Johnston’s “Filamentous” is another sextet, a mass of generic modernism that barely explores Bryce Dessner’s music.
Extremely heady tempi sabotaged Park’s Kitri in the “Don Quixote” pas de deux, though partner David Preciado did his best. I thought the opening school-wide demonstration by Karen Gabay (late of Ballet Silicon Valley) was lumpy and unmusical. The score was the opening movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. I realize that Richard Wagner called this work “the apotheosis of the dance,” but Gabay’s hectic lifts and floor positions seemed frivolous. The entire school excelled: They will confront far worse choreography in their careers.