Twice as nice onstage
In double bill, wondrous ‘British Icons’ cleanses heart and mind at San Francisco Ballet
You could cynically describe “British Icons” as a double bill designed to pacify traditionalist subscribers still reeling from the loud dystopian spectacle of San Francisco Ballet’s season opener, “Mere Mortals.” But that would definitely miss the real news of this second offering curated by Artistic Director Tamara Rojo as she takes the company into a new era.
So let’s put aside marketing considerations and be plain: “British Icons,” which opened Friday, Feb. 9, for seven performances at the War Memorial Opera House, is wondrous.
Consider the musical experience alone. First, we hear a Mahler song cycle that is really a symphony, with gorgeous vocal performances from two San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows. Next, we hear an exquisite rendition of Liszt’s piano sonata in B minor, arranged for orchestra, with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra’s string section at its lushest under music director Martin West.
As for what’s happening on stage? One of these ballets is a rare kind of masterpiece — a spiritual journey that leaves your brain and heart cleansed.
The masterpiece is 1965’s “Song of the Earth” by Kenneth MacMillan, and it was beautiful on Friday to see the ballet welcomed with somber yet warm applause. Its gently astringent qualities might surprise West Coast viewers. In the 1980s, certain U.S. critics enjoyed mocking MacMillan as the “libidoand-aggression school of modern ballet.” (Rest in peace and thank you for your pithiness, Joan Acocella, the late, great dance critic for the New Yorker.) That description would seem fair on the evidence of “The Invitation,” one of only two MacMillan works in the Ballet’s repertory prior to Friday — a ballet that culminates in a rape.
But MacMillan had range. At times he had subtlety. In “Song of the Earth,” he had oceanic philosophical depth.
“Song of the Earth” plays against the tremendous drama of Mahler’s music with pared-down clarity. No flashy costumes, just practice-style leotards in white, black and beige. The movement is equally exposed, its inventiveness entirely within the discipline of ballet logic. When the dancers push through an extension with a flexed foot, you might think of George Balanchine’s “Apollo.” But other motifs, like swaying deep crouches, or a bend into a sitting-on-air position with legs turned in, bring to mind Asian forms of theater and highlight “Song of the Earth’s” cultural mélange. After all, the text of these German-composed songs is six poems by the venerated eighth century Chinese poet Li Po.
You don’t have to know anything of what’s being sung to follow the ballet with total comprehension. MacMillan himself outlined it: “A man and a woman. Death takes the man. ... We find that in Death there is a promise of renewal.” This does not do justice to MacMillan’s treatment of death (the extraordinarily pure Wei Wang, in black and a simple half-face mask). He’s not a malicious stalker with a scythe, but an ambiguous reality among us in all our life seasons, the Eternal One.
Death cavorts alongside the man at his times of drunken revelry. He whispers to the woman, and sometimes shouts at her, but he also listens to her. The three characters become one, the woman looped around the men’s waists as they spin. Yet still, the woman screams “No!” — you can see it in her joined, splayed palms as she ends a pirouette in a deep, beseeching lunge.
The work demands a lead dancer who can stand in vulnerable dignity. That was Wona Park on opening night, with Isaac Hernández, who has danced the Man before at English National Ballet, and who impressed most here in the final duet. A small miracle of the ballet is that it is both pruned to essentials and expansive — there’s a large ensemble and several choice soloist roles. A lyrical Jasmine Jimison and crystalline Katherine Barkman each gave one of their greatest performances to date.
Is Frederick Ashton’s “Marguerite and Armand,” the second “British Icons” offering of the night, not a masterpiece too? A lot of critics at its premiere in 1963 thought so, but then again the whole ballet world was in thrall to stars Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, who had formed their electric partnership just one year before.
Today it has to be admitted that moments of the ballet are silly in that Verdi opera/ telenovela kind of way. What remains astonishing is the fit between Liszt’s music and Ashton’s simplification of Alexandre Dumas fils’ 19th century novel “The Lady of the Camellias.” (Piano soloist Britton Day summarized the plot humorously at a precurtain talk — “a man and a woman fall in love and she dies” — but other relevant details are that she’s a courtesan, she’s dying from consumption, and Armand’s father secretly tells her she has to stop seeing his son.)
Ashton didn’t want anyone else dancing it after Fonteyn and Nureyev gave it their last whirl in 1977, but finally the French ballet superstar Sylvie Guillem stepped into Marguerite’s ball gown in 2000, and Rojo debuted as Marguerite in 2011, one of the best contemporary Marguerites.
Misa Kuranaga in her first attempt Friday didn’t yet make those ranks; she seems to still be figuring out how to turn from teasing to lovestruck for Armand’s highdrama party entrance. Meanwhile, Joseph Walsh had the arabesque, the pained depth and, oh yes, the hair for Armand.
Is “Marguerite and Armand,” as the influential Clive Barnes once proclaimed, “more pungent in effect” than that ballet bedrock, “Giselle”? Surely not, but it’s awfully fun to indulge.