S.F. Ballet festival’s inspiring start
‘Madcap’ clown most memorable of 3 premieres in first program
San Francisco Ballet’s next@90 festival promises “the future of ballet.” How can a world premiere live up to that?
Well, one hopes to encounter a piece that’s surprising, visually and sonically fresh, immersive and risk-taking. One also hopes for a work that isn’t just calculated novelty, but truly the result of the choreographer’s personal impulse.
Danielle Rowe’s “Madcap” hit a lot of items on that wish list Friday at the War Memorial Opera House, and crowned the opening of the festival, which runs through Feb. 11, with a hit.
The triumph is especially sweet for those who have followed the trajectory of Rowe, who spent much of her stage career as a jewelry-box-ideal ballerina at the Australian Ballet, then finished dancing at the avant-garde Nederlands Dans Theater. She had a clear choreographic breakthrough in 2017 with the searing duet “For Pixie,” created for SF Danceworks and later taken into the Ballet’s repertory. But her dances since, including “Wooden Dimes” for the Ballet’s 2021 pandemic digital season, have been uneven. Three cheers then for her persistence and for her vulnerability in pursuing an idiosyncratic vision in this high-stakes commission. “Madcap” may draw on a lot of established dance-theater tricks in the way it breaks the fourth wall and plays with dancer vocalizing, but the work is pure Rowe.
The setting is a decrepit circus. The pitiful antihero is a sad clown, danced by soon-toretire principal Tiit Helimets, in a role only he could have created. As the cruelly indifferent crowd laughs, he’s thrown into the spotlight — and as the curtain falls, rather than finally being alone, he’s stuck facing all of us.
In stalks Jennifer Stahl, an under-used principal in a breakout role, to guide us through this sad sack’s nightmare. She cackles, she hisses, she stares with the zombie eyes of a Tim Burton character as she tours us through the panoply of clown-torturers. There’s a clown apprentice (the virtuosic Parker Garrison) who pops Helimets’ balloon animal the second he completes it, and two goons in Beetlejuice stripes who dance with a red clown nose on a string between their mouths. There are three bounding guys in rugby shorts, a quartet of fiendishly waltzing women, and Sasha De Sola as the personification of a glittery mirror who taunts the clown with dashed hopes of splendor.
Emma Kingsbury’s costumes and Jim French’s lighting designs make for ingeniously macabre eye candy. The music by Swedish theater composer and indie rocker Par Hägström, meanwhile, is both a strength and a weakness — effectively cinematic, especially when the orchestra surges alongside the accordion refrain, but a bit made-to-order. Its serviceability contributes to “Madcap’s” one fault: Each episode goes on just a touch too long. But simultaneously, each episode draws on our sympathies. “Madcap” has a clear point of concern with what we might grandly call the human condition. Any of us could be, or has been, the clown with no choice but to keep performing to the world’s selfish indifference.
That clear core conflict is what elevated “Madcap” to greater memorability than Friday’s center premiere, “Resurrection.” Jamar Roberts, until recently resident choreographer at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, chose to work with Mahler’s monumental “Totenfeier” (the original version of the first movement of Mahler’s ominous Second Symphony, also known as the “Resurrection” Symphony) — and Roberts almost rose to meet it.
“Resurrection” has a hip stage design of three arched scrims by Roberts himself (he also trained in visual art), glam sci-fi costumes (Jermaine Terry), and an intriguingly bizarre story. Dores André is the witchy community leader who, after kicking over some other poor corpse, electrifies Isaac Hernández back to life and traps him in a red vest that lets her puppeteer his movements. Reversals ensue, with WanTing Zhao and Aaron Robison sweeping through in a far sweeter vision of partnership.
The movement is flat out fabulous. Roberts got the whole ensemble to dance so strongly from their pelvic floors that you half-fear ruptured hernias. And the star role is a meal for André, whose death stare could kill the devil himself.
But what the dance lacks is a core question of human experience for the audience to relate to. Why do we care? Roberts seems to have hoped for viewers to concoct a theme from the whims of his imagination. Someone page a dramaturge.
The program opened in well-trod neo-classical mode with “Haffner Serenade” by incoming Dance Theatre of Harlem Artistic Director Robert Garland. Pepto-Bismol pink and seafoam green costumes do not do this mostly academic treatment of Mozart any favors.
Esteban Hernández’s petit allegro footwork was sparkling. Julia Rowe, taking over the lead from an injured Katherine Barkman, is a delight and a musical marvel, but she needs to dance more with her eyes.
Throughout the program, the Ballet’s biggest asset at the moment seemed to be its orchestra, which shifted from Mozart to Mahler to movie soundtrack-like music, and made each measure thrilling. George Balanchine famously said that if you don’t like the dancing, you can always close your eyes and listen to the music. True enough under the wizardry of music director Martin West’s baton, though with “Madcap’s” antics to enjoy, you’ll want to keep them wide open.