Not fearful of the new
A parade of premieres, unrivaled in U.S., continues in S.F. Ballet’s 84th season
Sheer numbers have a way of sobering you up. For many patrons, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s 32-year tenure at the San Francisco Ballet may have rushed by in a giddy blur of splendid dancing. That sensation has probably afflicted most of us at one time or another. But for a dose of dazzling reality, one should consult the company’s hastily assembled performance annals. There they are — 153 commissions stretching from 1985 through this coming 84th season.
True, a substantial number of those dances were created by Tomasson himself. But most represent a cross-section of American and international choreographers that no other stateside ballet company can rival. So the panoply continues in 2017. The fare includes seven additions to the San Francisco Ballet repertoire; six of them are world premieres. Three choreographers are making their debuts with the troupe. New here also will be Liam Scarlett’s full-evening “Frankenstein,” co-pro-
duced with the Royal Ballet. Choreographic contributions are nicely balanced between in-house offerings and guest creations.
Even those sophisticates who profess indifference to the opening night gala hullabaloo will want to catch this year’s premieres from much-coveted choreographer Trey McIntyre and former New York City Ballet principal and Paris Opéra Ballet director Benjamin Millepied, who has prepared a work set to John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances.”
McIntyre and Millepied may be familiar names in dance circles, but the third debutant, the Anglo-Portuguese choreographer Arthur Pita, will strike few chords in American dance-goers, although he is well known in England. Pita has prepared a contemporary ritual version of “Salome” that would appear to transgress a few boundaries. Don’t expect a dance of the seven veils. Do expect a head of John the Baptist. Pita styles himself a practitioner of dance theater, much influenced by his life partner, the celebrated choreographer Matthew Bourne.
The subject may be a bit risky, but in a phone conversation, Pita reports of the complete confidence demonstrated in his project by Tomasson and his staff. It has been Tomasson’s respect for different approaches to movement, from postmodern forays (like Margaret Jenkins’ “Thread”) to modernism (Mark Morris, Paul Taylor) to any number of tutu-clad effusions, that has encouraged the flow of talent to the West Coast.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in the 1980s, the Ballet Board of Trustees thought they were hiring in Tomasson a Balanchine apostle from New York City Ballet. But as Tomasson has reminded us several times, his aesthetic values were also formed by his sojourns at the Joffrey Ballet and Harkness Ballet, which fed on eclectic repertoire. Tomasson is one of those rare artists who see all of dance in a continuum. To patrons who complained lustily about William Forsythe’s galvanizing “Artifact Suite,” he insisted that it all derived from Balanchine, an influence the choreographer does not deny.
Timing has been on Tomasson’s side. He engaged Forsythe to make his astonishing “New Sleep” in 1987 shortly after the American choreographer joined the Frankfurt Ballet and before he became an international icon. Tomasson hired David Bintley before he started running the Birmingham Royal Ballet. The incomparable Alexei Ratmansky made his first American ballet for San Francisco. The New Works Festival in 2008 produced 10 ballets over three days; the fare included Christopher Wheeldon’s “Within the Golden Hour,” one of the choreographer’s most elegant abstractions, set for revival this April. Wheeldon’s 2002 “Continuum,” absent for several seasons, was revived two years ago and proved a revelation for many.
Tomasson favors continuing relationships with choreographers who often go on to more exposed assignments; we haven’t had a new Wheeldon since his Broadway “American in Paris.” The most productive of these liaisons has been with resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov. The former princi-
Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson is one of those rare artists who see all of dance in a continuum.
pal dancer created a stir with his “Magrittomania” in 2000, started making dances here and in Europe even before he retired from performing, and was named to his new post in 2006.
Possokhov’s ballets vary thematically, but they all seem fragments torn from an autobiography of a Russian absorbing his native and adopted cultures (as in “Swimmer” the other year), all of it leavened with a sardonic wit. This season, Possokhov will adapt “Optimistic Tragedy,” a Soviet play and movie about a ship’s crew and a new, female commissar. A glimpse at a rehearsal suggests the influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film classic “Potemkin.”
The other star within the ranks is Myles Thatcher, whose untitled premiere arrives in April. He started as a
member of the corps de ballet, created works for the Joffrey and New York City Ballet, and was an artist in the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiatives. He finds it advantageous to choreograph for his close colleagues.
“I know their personalities, strengths and weaknesses as they do mine,” said Thatcher in an email interview. “The mutual trust we have created allows me to take more risks with them.”
However, for visiting choreographers allotted three to four weeks of rehearsal, facing 70 dancers they’ve never met could be daunting and unproductive. Fortunately, the San Francisco Ballet roster has lured dance makers from halfway round the world.
Take Jirí Bubenícek, a former principal dancer at the Dresden Semperoper Ballet and John Neumeier’s Hamburg Ballet, who bowed here as choreographer with a witty quartet at the 2016 gala. He describes the preparation for his upcoming “Fragile Vessels” as “a pleasure. I admire diversity in a dancer. I admire the ability not only to be an excellent classical dancer or a well-coordinated mover, but an artist as well, an artist who dances with soul, heart and mind. I admire their ability to focus and work hard. The working conditions are fantastic, and the company staff is there to help, advise or find a solution.”
Pita, who has worked recently with Los Angeles’ Bodytraffic, echoes his colleagues: “San Francisco Ballet dancers are incredibly diverse, not just ethnically, but in their individual personalities. They are extremely innovative. They are open to all styles. They all have different methods of working. They are what a modern ballet company should look like.”
That company is in the midst of a significant personnel turnover. Three strong principal males retired last season. They have been succeeded by new principal Aaron Robison, who trained at the Royal Ballet School; and soloist Angelo Greco, who comes from Milan’s La Scala. In addition, both Carlo Di Lanno and Sasha De Sola have recently been promoted to principals.
So, matters are on the move at the San Francisco Ballet. Only one aspect of Tomasson’s commissioning program is troubling. In perusing the annals, I counted fewer than a dozen female choreographers hired over three decades. We know they are out there, and more of the most gifted of them should be creating dances at the leading ballet company in the West.
Identity politics has nothing to do with it; expanding artistic horizons does. I can only imagine how masters like Karole Armitage, Twyla Tharp, Lucinda Childs or Deborah Hay might propel the San Francisco Ballet’s sterling dancers to even greater heights. Never discount the potential for artistic alchemy.