S.F. Ballet fills the screen with Art Deco showpiece
If a choreographer wants to make the most of this pandemic era, Sarah Van Patten is the woman to put on the screen. Van Patten, who joined the San Francisco Ballet in 2002, is the finest actressdancer in the company, so it is good to have a beautifully directed record of her theatrical genius in Danielle Rowe’s new dance film, “Wooden Dimes,” the clever Art Deco centerpiece of the Ballet’s digital Program 3, which began streaming Thursday, March 4.
Rowe, increasingly in demand to choreograph for regional companies and here making her first ensemble work for the Ballet, has carried out
“Wooden Dimes” with a shrewd eye for spectacle and a mature choreographer’s skill. There are shiny propdriven delights throughout the production, particularly a Ziegfeld Follieslike sequence with fluffy feather fans shot from above and a clever group rendezvous with a massive table. But the real beauty of the film comes in two long pas de deux, simultaneously swirling and nuanced, for Van Patten and Luke Ingham. Between these little love poems our story, spare as it is, unfolds.
Betty Fine (Van Patten) is a vaudeville chorus girl plucked for stardom; Robert Fine (Ingham) is her adoring 9to5 workhorse of a husband, and he’s
heartbroken when he sees Betty tolerating the compromising attentions of her director, played with supreme smarm by Tiit Helimets. A dramaturgically inclined viewer might note that the arc of the story feels a bit miscalculated in including such a long, ecstatic duet between the couple so early (one wishes some seeds of tragedy could have been subtly sown there), but the ending duet is engrossing, a current of powerfully mixed emotions thanks to Ingham’s peculiar and touching innocence.
In the middle of the film, Rowe gives audiences a brilliantly detailed sequence for Ingham and the demons of his jealousy, embodied by Dores André and Max Cauthorn, ensnaring their prey with the most aggressive slithering possible from creatures with four limbs.
Heath Orchard’s cinematography reinforces the central image of a shining light that lures and blinds. Emma Kingsbury’s costumes provide jazzage flash, graphically simplified. But perhaps the greatest collaboratorheroes here are the members of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, who recorded James M. Stephenson’s commissioned score individually due to COVID precautions, and yet sound like an exuberant whole as mixed and edited by Ballet Music Director Martin West.
Exuberant, too, is the audience ovation, recorded in 2016, for the ballet that closes this program, Yuri Possokhov’s “Swimmer.” Given that popular reception, probably few readers want to hear me say that I have always found this ballet glaringly problematic. Suffice to remark that this ballet combining a John Cheever short story with Tom Waits songs and riffs on Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” makes up in silly costuming and ingenious theatrical projections what it lacks in restraint. Joseph Walsh gives an epic performance as the titular man in Lycra trunks, but worth looking for, too, are two retired dancers much missed: Lauren Strongin, with her bright energy, and James Sofranko, a wonder of liquid control.
The words “contemporary masterpiece” and “21st century classic” should not be overused, but they apply to Alexei Ratmansky’s “Symphony #9.” The opening panel of his “Shostakovich Trilogy,” and chillingly attuned to the dark ironies in the persecuted Soviet composer’s work, this is a ballet of psychological depth and structural brilliance. Jennifer Stahl and Aaron Robison are particularly transfixing as the more anguished of the two couples in this 2019 recording. Wei Wang, bounding through as the mysterious superhuman force, is a paragon of refined athleticism and will make you very glad you watched.