Creativity in ballet, unbound
Many dance fans slake their choreographic curiosity with YouTube videos. But when you’re the head of one of the world’s most prestigious ballet companies, you create San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound: A Festival of New Works, a 17-day event combining symposia, dance films, webcasts and new works commissioned from a dozen marquee dance makers.
“We don’t have the big-pillar choreographers with us anymore, like Balanchine and Robbins and Ashton,” says Helgi Tomasson, the Ballet’s artistic director and principal choreographer. “I wanted to try to discover what the thinking was with another generation.”
Tomasson invited artists who are both locally familiar (Alonzo King, Christopher Wheeldon, Justin Peck, Myles Thatcher, Trey McIntyre, Arthur Pita, Stanton Welch) and wider-ranging (Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Edwaard Liang, Dwight Rhoden, Cathy Marston and David Dawson in his first American commission). “It’s a mixing up of choreographers that I want to see,” Tomasson said by phone.
The dance makers got three-week residencies from July through mid-October, when they worked with assigned groups of dancers and enjoyed near-total creative freedom to create 30-minute ballets for the festival.
“So many of them commented on how wonderful it was to meet other choreographers like this,” Tomasson says. In addition, “it gave the dancers the opportunity to be seen by 12 different sets of eyes … and be discovered in a way that maybe hadn’t occurred to me.”
The excitement spread well beyond the studio, according to Artistic Administrator Abby Masters. “It’s hard not to feel that energy when every rehearsal the dancers are going to is for a new work,” she said by phone. “And then they’re peeking in the windows of a different rehearsal and seeing something entirely new.”
Dancing is only the tip of the massive “Unbound” iceberg. There’s been music from Björk to Bach for the orchestra to learn, plus costumes to design and scenic elements to build with the Opera House’s dimensions in mind.
“How will these ballets work with one another? How do we engineer a change of scenery?” says production director Christopher Dennis. The Ballet typically does two or three new pieces in a season, which his team is able to integrate smoothly with the staging of existing works; with 12 brandnew ballets, that efficiency disappears.
The hundreds of costumes were sewn by shops in the Bay Area, New York City and the United Kingdom. Fittings became another puzzle, with boardrooms doubling as makeshift ateliers and dancers sometimes getting pulled out of rehearsals for fittings.
And then there’s the travel planning. Like an air traffic controller, Masters managed the comings and goings of rotating creative teams last summer. She then secured a block of hotel rooms to house the entire contingent of choreographers, composers and designers for three weeks prior to opening night, while they finesse the choreography, costumes and staging.
And during “Boundless,” the festival’s second-weekend symposium, guest speakers like Dance Theatre of Harlem Artistic Director Virginia Johnson and choreographer and tech innovator Sydney Skybetter will also be in town.
“It’s a total full house — beyond full,” Masters says. And it’s been worth all the overtime hours. “We might be tearing our hair out, but I think it will be really exciting.”
During last summer’s artistic residencies, we went behind the scenes and into the rehearsal studio with all of the choreographers. In these exclusive profiles, they shared insights into their work, their perspectives on the art of dance, and their sometimes quirky inspirations.