Ballet gets audience into closed museum
For choreographer Thatcher, pandemic adds relevance to dance as an escape
Imagine people dancing ecstatically through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s galleries, next to Ellsworth Kelly paintings and Alexander Calder sculptures. In choreographer Myles Thatcher’s newest work, “Colorforms,” part of Program 2 in the San Francisco Ballet’s digital 2021 season, you get that vision as dancers spin and leap through the museum, tracing the paths of paper airplanes they throw gleefully.
The film extends into Yerba Buena Gardens and the groves of Golden Gate Park and includes dreamlike passages filmed onstage at the Opera House. The dancers are giddy, but there’s also a pining for connection and togetherness in the staging that will probably resonate with many after the past pandemic year.
“The most interesting thing about this time is the way the dance world was going, there was no real push to commit resources to something this big” on video, Thatcher says. “This was such an incentive to go larger. It has to be a real journey — you don’t want to create something that feels like an appetizer. You want this to be a meal for people buying a ticket.”
“Colorforms” was already commissioned for 2021 when the coronavirus shut down the San Francisco Ballet season in March. Although Thatcher had chosen the Steve Reich music he would set the commission to, he hadn’t yet conceived the piece itself. When the pandemic presented the opportunity for Thatcher to film part
of the work in the museum while it was closed, he jumped.
“Having these different environments and spaces created an interesting contrast for the movement,” Thatcher says. “We really pushed how much we could showcase SFMOMA.”
“It really gives you a feeling for the hidden nooks of the museum,” says Tomoko Kanamitsu, SFMOMA’s director of public engagement. “The architecture of the building is a character itself.” While Kanamitsu says filming in the museum during the pandemic was a tremendous effort for both the ballet and SFMOMA, “every time we talked to someone at the museum about the project, they were so excited to work on it.”
This is Thatcher’s fourth San Francisco Ballet commission following 2015’s “Manifesto,” 2017’s “Ghost in the Machine” and 2018’s “Otherness.” It’s coming at a time when many dance companies are still trying to determine how to safely come together again, and dance audiences are hungry for new work.
“My inspiration for the piece was the circumstance we’re all in,” Thatcher says. “There’s a very strong outsider narrative that I think a lot of people will relate to right now.”
San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson says the move to a digital season posed new challenges for the company, including needing to translate new works to the video medium. Tomasson calls Thatcher a talented choreographer and says his movement style has an “American feeling” about freedom to it that is evident in “Colorforms.” It’s choreography that also feels young, optimistic and unmistakably 21st century, all qualities “Colorforms” exploits memorably in director Ezra Hurwitz’s fullbody cinematography, which showcases Thatcher’s frequent use of ensemble groupings.
“It’s a hybrid of human movement wrapped up in steps that are very natural and comfortable,” says Ballet soloist Isabella DeVivo, who danced in “Colorforms” as well as three previous works by Thatcher. “It’s a feelgood movement in a grounded and wholesome way, a mix of athleticism with very downtoearth movements.”
At 30 years old, Thatcher already has an impressive resume as a choreographer. He has created works for
companies including the Joffrey Ballet and Charlotte Ballet and has been nominated for two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. Thatcher started dancing when he was a preteen and dealing with the difficulties of growing up queer in a small town.
“Art and creation have saved me from many a dark place,” Thatcher says. “I chose to dance partly to escape public school in Pennsylvania.”
Thatcher began as a student in the Ballet’s trainee program in 2009 and has been a dancer with the company since 2010. He was promoted to soloist in 2020. His ability as a choreographer has repeatedly been recognized by Tomasson with commissions for both the company and the ballet school.
“There’s some swagger, some kind of innate confidence that’s absolutely necessary when you’re dancing his works,” DeVivo says. “When you put it next to a classical ballet, there’s a grunginess to Myles’ work in the best possible way: You don’t have to put on your ballerina crown for the work.”
Thatcher wants his work to address big societal themes, like ideas about gender in movement, exploring notions of queerness in dance and elevating the idea of ensemble work in ballet as a statement about equity. These are ideas that Thatcher says the ballet world needs to consider as it moves forward.
“I think what’s beautiful about this art is that there’s so many different ways to approach it,” says Thatcher. “The digital season gave us an opportunity to start thinking past the physical spaces and to ask, how do we make our art more accessible, more equitable?”