S.F. dancers show ‘Unbound’ range
On Tuesday, April 24, at the War Memorial Opera House during Program C of the San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound: A Festival of New Works, only one choreographer was making a company debut. That was the phenomenally prolific, Belgian-born Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Her “Guernica” closed the bill in a surge of passion and visual pizzazz, suggesting the troupe has not seen the last of this dance maker.
As far as contrast goes, this third Unbound bill ranged widest over the dance terrain. Stanton Welch contributed a neoclassical abstraction, and Trey McIntyre offered the mostly indescribable and altogether wonderful “Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem.” The one constant of the evening lay in the dancers’ surprising consistency in a variety of material.
In “Guernica,” Ochoa attempts to convey the rage and grief felt by the world after the destruction of that town during the Spanish Civil War. She also attempts an homage to Pablo Picasso, whose massive canvas immortalized that horror. Ochoa almost replicates the painting (which now resides in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum), and she distills the mood of a world coming to grips with an international nightmare. An ominous recorded soundtrack suggests an artillery barrage.
Alexander V. Nichols’ decor (four strips of light) emits smoke, the sky turns blood red, and two couples (Dores André/ Vitor Luiz and Julia Rowe/Myles Thatcher), all wearing Picasso’s signature bull horns, launch earthy duets tinged with elements of traditional Spanish dance. Soon, the corps lies twisted on the floor as if they were broken Cubist sculptures. Mark Zappone’s clever costumes are imprinted with fragments of Picasso’s art. Although the final duet for André and Luiz (to piano music of Charles-Valentin Alkan) is pleasing, it seems a sentimental response to the issues Ochoa has raised.
In “Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem” (from Walt Whitman), McIntyre offers an autobiographical essay, mingling memoirs of the choreographer’s eccentric grandfather with a meditation on the recent solar eclipse. In this intimate gem, Benjamin Freemantle seems to summon events of his past as they drift in and slip away. Nostalgia is a boon and a curse. The vocabulary shuns traditional ballet and favors an arm-rolling, floor-hugging style, yet McIntyre’s musical sensitivity is a compelling force.
In his dances, this choreographer works mostly with pop music, and he seems to inject it into his dancers’ bloodstreams. Here he transmutes Chris Garneau’s wistful and bouncy songs into a second skin, and the result is a bittersweet triumph. It helps that Freemantle (recently promoted) may be giving the performance of his young career. Jennifer Stahl and Sasha De Sola were two of the women drifting through the protagonist’s life story.
If Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson staged Unbound so that he might answer the question, “Where is ballet going?” then Welch’s reply might be, “Nowhere it hasn’t been before.”
This setting of most of the two Bach violin concertos for 12 dancers boasts neat compositional gambits, a winning courtliness and opportunities for superior dancing (like the opening solo for Angelo Greco), but Welch, artistic director of Houston Ballet, never comes to grips with the composer’s contrapuntal universe and it’s all simply pretty and not much more. Cordula Merks was the violin soloist.