Review: Diverse program offers stirring preview of 2020 season
Everyone takes away something different from a performance gala.
That’s not only inevitable, it’s the intended effect when a program of multiple short works is constructed to demonstrate, highlight and contrast the various aspects of a company. Audience members make comparisons, play favorites, make new discoveries and find connections or congruencies, even where none are there by design. That’s the onenightonly fun and fizz of such events — not to mention the fancy dinners, eyegrabbing gowns, kilts and feathers people wear, and all the Champagne and other potables they put away.
During “Spellbound,” San Francisco Ballet’s 2020 seasonopening gala, there were plenty of dance stimulants to choose from on Thursday, Jan. 16, at the War Memorial Opera House. The bill of 12 works included two world premieres (a planned third was replaced by Danielle Rowe’s intimate and captivating “For Pixie”), the San Francisco premiere of a David Dawsonchoreographed “Swan Lake” pas de deux and assorted other classic and contemporary pieces.
One thing that stood out right away, in the spry and saucy “Men’s Regiment” from George Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes” at the start of the evening, was the heights the wonderful male dancers of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s company achieved — jumps, spins, spacespanning leaps and airborne turns kept coming all night.
Max Cauthorn and Esteban Hernandez cantered springily and competitively through
August Bournonville’s “Jockey Dance,” wittily staged by Ulrik Birkkjaer. Angelo Greco looked positively springloaded in his “Le Corsaire” pas de deux (with Misa Kuranaga). That’s not to say there was anything mechanical about his whirling pirouettes and other athletic marvels in this famous Marius Petipa set piece. As the potent, barechested slave Ali, he defied both gravity and his status.
The high points in “Spellbound” weren’t all pyrotechnical or by any means exclusively male. A notable peak came in the aforementioned “For Pixie,” set to a recording of Nina Simone’s hypnotically seductive voice. Dores André and Joseph Walsh went deep here, as they pulled apart and clung together in a aching meditation on how lovers suffer alone because they suffer together. It was about the impossibility of staying together and the anguish of separating.
Wonderful in a somewhat cooler vein was a duet from Justin Peck’s “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.” A simple but effective lighting design of alternate, distant footlights (by James F. Ingalls) made it seem as if Sarah Van Patten and Henry Sidford were working out their own stretchy interpersonal geometry in a kind of enchanted mirrored space. They danced with responsive sensitivity to each other’s limbs and torsos but maintained an easy independence from each other as well, roaming away and reuniting in a fluid yet urgent manner.
Of the two world premieres, Val Caniparoli’s “Foreshadow” stood out. In taking on the love triangle in Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” the piece both tapped the classic novel’s romantic tension and took off on its own terms. A feverish Ludovico Einaudi score ramped up the effect. Elizabeth Powell was especially intense and convincing as Kitty, but both Jennifer Stahl’s Anna and Tiit Helimets’ Count Vronsky came off as fully dimensional characters realized in a sequence of arresting confrontations. A shuttling light design by Jim French suggested the passing trains that figure so importantly and tragically in Tolstoy’s narrative.
Myles’ Thatcher’s “05:49” came off as a gimmick in search of a purpose. As projections of a digital clock counted down the time and a voiceover idly riffed on the 1960s erotic film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and the words “jaundice” and “jaded,” Sasha De Sola and Benjamin Freemantle were trapped in a hermetic exercise with little at stake.
Impressions, some bright and some not so, kept coming.
Sofiane Sylve brought a visceral, pained grace to the “Swan Lake” pas de deux, well partnered by Carlo Di Lanno. Wona Park and Wei Wang were charming and demurely muscular, if somewhat static, in Victor Gsovsky’s “Grand Pas Classique,” to a D.F.E. Auber score. The balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” felt routine, without the sweet fire of young love sparking to life. Even the orchestra, which played well under Martin West’s baton the rest of the night, sounded lackluster in the Prokofiev extract.
The gala closed fittingly, with pieces that looked backward and forward for San Francisco Ballet.
In a pas de deux from Yuri Possokhov’s “Bells,” to Rachmaninoff piano music, esteemed company veterans Yuan Yuan Tan (celebrating her 25th year) and Vitor Luiz (who is retiring) gave a nervy, bittersweet performance. It began with the vivid image of Luiz hoisting Tan over his head on outstretched arms. She seemed both weightless and a burden, a tribute to these dancers’ mastery of visual and emotional complexity.
Then, with the full company resplendent in white and chandeliers glowing softly overhead, the stage filled with the interlocking, fugal pattern work of Balanchine’s “Diamonds.” Never mind that it wasn’t all in gleaming shape. It was splendid to see all the transverse movement and evolving unities. The full threeact “Jewels” is coming in April.
For this one night, it was lovely to contemplate what Tomasson, with his own deep connections to Balanchine and commitment to new works, has achieved in his 35year run as artistic director. A gala, for all its glamour and allure, is finally an enticing tease of what lies ahead.
The full San Francisco Ballet season of eight programs gets under way next week and runs into May.
Of the two world premieres, Val Caniparoli’s “Foreshadow” stood out.