San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival - some delayed thoughts

(San Francisco Ballet in the 21st century, advertised on sleek MUNI buses.)

I recently found these scribblings about San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival in my drafts folder - from all the way back in May! I brushed it up and decided to finally post it, for even though the New Works Festival has long gone, many of the ballets will be touring the country when SF Ballet visits Chicago, New York, Washington DC and Costa Mesa in the fall.

It's always interesting to see something new (well, at least before you actually see it, anyway), and particularly in the new-work starved ballet world, audiences and critics perk up to see if a new ballet will become something worth watching over and over again, like the Balanchine and Petipa classics - pretty high standards for sure. So there was considerable excitement and press surrounding San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival in spring 2008: the premise was ten new ballets by ten major choreographers, presented on three programs, performed over two weeks.

I trekked up on May 3 and 4 to see the final weekend of the festival. On the one hand, the company deserves praise for so enthusiastically embracing new choreography. The new ballets were danced with total commitment and passion from the top to the bottom of the company, and I just love watching the company in action. The dancers look invested in the work that they are doing on stage, exciting individuals poke their heads out, and the company is just a joy to watch almost no matter what they are dancing. It is interesting, too, that artistic director Helgi Tomasson and the company chose to celebrate its 75th Anniversary with the forward-looking festival of new ballets, when many ballet companies normally celebrate the passage of time by looking far backwards into the nineteenth century, staging yet another production of a warhorse classical ballet.

But there is another hand. I didn't find any of the festival's new ballets wholly satisfying or particularly memorable (and the ones that were memorable were memorable for the wrong reasons). Some were better than others, but even the better ones were less interesting as actual ballets than as a small window into an individual choreographers' artistic development. (In Sarah Kaufman's in-depth article for the Washington Post, where she does not take an altogether positive view of the festival's results, Kaufman notes that the New Works Festival choreographers were not given all too much time to think about and shape their ballets - three weeks of rehearsal squashed in between the company's other rehearsals - where Balanchine and Ashton, modern "masters" of the 20th century to whom these choreographers are inevitably compared, spent much more time with their own companies, letting their ideas stew and develop each they created a "masterpiece" ballet. An explanation, perhaps, for the lack of any particularly strong ballets in this Festival?)

Mostly, everything just looked the same: it appears as though every contemporary ballet is performed on harshly lit-from-above stages with black backdrops, or is somber in mood and/or esoteric in subject. Sure, it's okay if some of them are like that I guess, but with most of the ballets in the New Works Festival looking that way, and programmed as they were into a long weekend marathon with no brain refresher in between, my overall view of the ballets was certainly affected. I think I would have liked a few of the ballets much more if my mind hadn't already been numbed by a constant barrage of somber darkness. Context is important.

The pieces that worked best came from choreographers who appeared most comfortable with classical dancers and the classical vocabulary. They didn't all use pointe-shoes and tutus, but they were comfortable enough with ballet-trained dancers' abilities to use them freely and to their best and fullest capacities. It looked considerably more awkward when the choreographer tried to push into other dance forms, like when we saw dancers halfway try to movement improvise or awkwardly navigate in high heels. When the dancers looked comfortable, the choreographer was able to offer some sort of choreographic insight. Not that I don't appreciate their attempts to try something outside the norm, but the dancers are, after all, ballet dancers working for a big ballet company.

Here's what I remember about the festival.

First, the better works - Christopher Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour, while not the most interesting of his works that I have seen, showed that Wheeldon is exploring the limits of classically-based movements in inventive ways. It wasn't a wholly complete ballet, more a loose collection of thoughts seemingly bundled together only because the music was composed by the same person (here, Ezio Bosso). Nevertheless, I did enjoy watching the pas de deux, and there were a few fun movement themes running through the ballet, like a weird spider exclamation-type movement with girls held diagonally over their partners and traveling offstage. I also enjoyed Yuri Possokhov's Fusion; Possokhov chose an unusual score for the ballet that was performed by a separate band from the usual San Francisco Ballet orchestra, and visually there were influences of whirling dirvish dancers who spun into and out of the piece. But at its core were ballet dancers pointe shoes, and the dancers were literally woven into the piece's moody atmosphere. I loved the second movement, where a female dancer threw herself into a three-person wall of dervish dancers. The wall then rippled and whirled her back out again and again - it was very unusual to see and completely fascinating.

Then, at the other end of the spectrum were the pretty bad works: Julia Adams' A rose by any other name was simply boring. She states in the program notes that she set out to do a reinterpretation of The Sleeping Beauty set to Bach's Goldberg Variations, but just about the only revelation she provides is that the characters in the ballet had sex. It was overlong and dull, and when the fifth prologue fairy danced another faceless variation only five minutes into the ballet, it felt like 20 minutes had already passed - and there was still the rest of the Sleeping Beauty story to go. James Kudelka's The Ruins Proclaim the Building was Beautiful similarly seemed to extend time with its boredom factor. The notes say that the ballet's theme is the decline of civilization, but as the corps borreed around in orange blood-drenched tutus for thirty minutes, my attention and patience declined. Then Yuan Yuan Tan came out in a red cocktail dress and high heels to dance a violent, misogynistic pas de deux with a man in a tux - which was even more boring than the rest of the ballet.

Ballets that were pleasant enough included Val Caniparoli's Ibsen's House was one of the more traditional-looking ballets of the festival with costumes looking 19th century Victorian, and the pas de deux were loosely based on the central couples of five Henrik Ibsen plays. The dances were quietly emotional, perhaps more so with familiarity with the source material. Mark Morris' Joyride was full of frenetic energy, jokiness coming in digital displays in the center of the dancers' costumes that continually flashed numbers. I wasn't personally prepared for the music, but perhaps on future viewing that might change. This wasn't as inventive for me as a ballet like his own Mozart Dances. Stanton Welch's Naked was pleasant in that it was one of the only ballets costumed in a traditional classical tutu, and used dancers in a classical fashion. It was a conventional-looking ballet, set apart from the dark, angular ballets that surrounded it and allowed Kristin Long, Frances Chung and Yuan Yuan Tan to show some traditional ballet virtuosity.

I didn't feel anything particularly good or bad about Jorma Elo's Double Evil, which was set to percussive selections of music by Philip Glass and Vladimir Martinov. It allowed the men to show some very impressive tricks, but the transitions between movements were awkward and clunky, the dancers looked like they were racing to shift from pose to pose. It didn't congeal as a full ballet for me, but at least in the beginning it appeared to be going somewhere. Margaret Jenkins' Thread was uninteresting more in that the dancers looked tentative doing contact improvisation work; Jenkins runs her own company with dancers used to working in her very particular style, and SF Ballet's dancers just didn't appear organic enough in this ballet. Paul Taylor's Changes was a dance set to rock music for the company's youngest dancers, decked out loose-fitting clothing. It let the dancers really get into the dancing and enthusiastically thrash about, but it wasn't much more than that and felt oddly airless.

Of the works from the New Works Festival, Possokhov's Fusion, Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour, Elo's Double Evil, Morris' Joyride and Caniparoli's Ibsen's House will tour, though they will be placed with other pieces on separate programs, including a few Balanchine ballets and older one-act pieces from SF Ballet's repertoire. In different contexts, the ballets probably won't look so similar, to their benefit.

Did these ballets provided an interesting look into the future of ballet as a choreographic artform? I'd have to say not really. I found Edouard Locke's recent Amjad, which sped up and deconstructed classicism in intelligent and bizarre ways, to be a much more compelling statement of where ballet can go. Still, there is no faulting San Francisco Ballet for so boldly embracing an entire festival of new work. The company has hit gold with brand new ballets in the past, and if it continues to commission regularly, it will surely hit gold again.

Photo credits: (1) SF Muni bus, photo: me, (2) Christopher Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour, photo: sfballet.org flash animation screen capture, (3) Yuan Yuan Tan in James Kudekla's The Ruins Proclaim the Building was Beautiful, photo: sfballet.org, (4) Molly Smolen and Tiit Helimets in Val Caniparoli's Ibsen's House, photo: Erik Tomasson, (5) Sarah van Patten and Rory Hohenstein in Jorma Elo's Double Evil, photo: Erik Tomasson.

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I've been taking a bit of a break from show going this summer, but in two weeks, American Ballet Theatre will be in town at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with Rabbit & Rogue, a new piece by Twyla Tharp that was co-commissioned by ABT and OCPAC. The company will also be performing Harold Lander's Etudes. Word from New York has not been particularly strong about either of these ballets, but I might be itching for some ballet by then anyway.