San Francisco Ballet
San Francisco Ballet commissioned guest choreographers to create new works that made their debuts on a Paris tour last summer. The company showed these ballets to the folks at home during its 2006 season in February, along with ballets by in-house choreographers and repertoire stalwarts. Famous guests always get the buzz, but in-house choreographers shine, because they know the company.
Paul Taylor makes his dances on his own company and then sends a trusted stager (Patrick Corbin here) to set them. But his dances seem to become themselves only when his company performs them. The new Spring Rounds is no exception. It’s a modest, lyrical dance to Richard Strauss’ transcriptions of Le Tic-Toc Choc by François Couperin. The music’s winsome imitation of a speedy clock purls along as the dancers enter to greet one another in spring green and then burst into a circle. Like the music, it’s lovely, but without much depth. Taylor is fascinated by the pastoral, but he’s done this before and better in works such as Arden Court.
Quaternary is also a U.S. première, and Christopher Wheeldon’s fourth ballet at SFB. Choreographed in his slickly inventive, contemporary mode, Quaternary is as calculated as a fashion ad. Wheeldon cobbled together chamber works of four disparate composers (J.S. Bach, John Cage, Steven Mackey and, for the umpteenth time, Arvo Pärt) and gave each a season of the year to represent. The décor, as in many Wheeldon ballets, is simple and ingenious: Designs by Jean-Marc Puissant and lighting by Jennifer Tipton feature a rectangle of fluorescent tubes. The dance concentrates on pas de deux. In the central summer section to Pärt, Muriel Maffre’s magnificently strange and impossibly proportioned limbs make drama out of any step she does. At the end, the rectangle of light floats apart, drifting into entropy, and the dancers move slowly back into the darkness. Wheeldon’s an impressive craftsman, but he looks more and more like an assemblage of choreographers, this time recalling Jirí Kylián. He borrows from himself as well; some of the most striking moments in Quaternary come from a ballet made shortly before, the more heartfelt After the Rain. Maybe it’s time to do fewer works and say more with each.
Blue Rose, a première by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson, isn’t deathless, but it’s a deft, unpretentious series of rags and tangos that takes great dancers and shows them off in a way that’s impossible without knowing them as well as he does. Magrittomania, a 2000 creation by company principal Yuri Possokhov, may have a concept that’s hard to swallow (Surrealist painter René Magritte’s depictions of banalities in motion), but Possokhov’s imagination, striking visual sense and solid choreography carry it off. Along with a stellar performance of Apollo by Gonzalo Garcia (the next best thing to seeing Jacques d’Amboise in the title role) and the poignant, comic depth Kristin Long found as the Cowgirl in Rodeo, Possokhov and Tomasson’s ballets suggested that SFB’s strengths begin at home.
Leigh Witchel is an independent choreographer who also writes for Danceview Times online and Ballet Review.
