Ballet should always be this exciting: San Francisco Ballet at New York City Center

I saw San Franciso Ballet several Saturdays ago (Oct 18), at the end of the company's tour to New York City, and the performance had me positively giddy afterwards. The work on the program was all work that I had seen the company dance before, but seeing the works with fresh eyes and getting absolutely wonderful performances from the company left me very excited in general.

In particular, I was thrilled with Christopher Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour. It was new in May at San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival, and I remember liking it but not being particularly enthusastic about it; at the time, I saw it at the tail end of the festival marathon, and much of the work from the festival had been pretty lackluster, so my brain by then was mostly numb to everything. This time around, I saw loads of invention, a surprise around every corner of the music, and overall a ballet put together with a wonderful sensitivity to music and structure. Much of the inventiveness came in the three pas de deux sections: the first was a playful duetset to a pizacatto musical piece, danced by Katita Waldo and Damian Smith. The pas de deux starts out like a tango that then unfurls into a quiet, but quick-moving romp through the space and the partnering. The second pas de deux was a mesmerizing, slow duet danced by Sarah van Patten and Pierre Francois Villanoba; it deliciously stretched out and lazed around the cello line of the music. The third pas de deux, danced by Tina LeBlanc and Joan Boada, mixed elements of the first two, as a kind of finishing statement of the movement presented. What I found most remarkable here was that the movement and steps seemed to unfold with the music surprisingly, yet perfectly: you don't expect to see what's next, but once you see it, you think it just works so satisfyingly well where it is.

Yuri Possokhov's Fusion, at the end of the New York program, was fun when I saw it at the New Works Festival in May and it fun here as well, but with the spectacular added dimension of Yuan Yuan Tan, who gave a mesmerizing performance (I had seen the other cast in San Francisco). The ballet is vaguely ethnic, with whirling dirvish dancers placed next to contemporary ballet dancers in pants and pointe shoes, and with music played by a band of non-classical instruments with drums and eastern instruments. My favorite moment remains the moody second movement, where the central ballerina - Yuan Yuan Tan here - throws herself into a "wall" of four dervish men, then is pushed back out in a ripple like motion. The pas de deux that Tan performs afterwards with Damien Smith is a marvel of precision and control. Smith, by the way, was the man of the evening, doing wonderful partnering duties in Golden Hour and Fusion, but dancing just as well on his own as well.

Divertmento No. 15 opened the evening and looked like the most traditional ballet on the program, with its tutus, tiaras and men in frilly tunics. However, the speed and devilish footwork of George Balanchine's choreography places Divert in the 20th century, and in a way showed the connection between "traditional" classicism and the contemporary aesthetics of Wheeldon and Possokhov. The performances of the principals here were a bit shaky - not everyone was able to wrap themselves around the quickness of the choreography, and many of them looked self concious and scared of the speed (except Frances Chung, who stood out from the pack in the third variation and pas de deux). I was most excited watching the corps de ballet, which moved with a surprising sense of musicality and urgency. The Minuetto in the middle of the ballet is usually treated as a minor distraction in between the principals' variations and their adagio, but here it was great: the corps work really embodied the kind of musical excitement inherent in the choreography.

I can't remember the last time that I was so energized by watching a ballet performance. There was the right mix of something traditional-looking plus a really engaging case for new choreography, and I really felt great about the state of ballet if can be danced and presented so engagingly (sadly, I wasn't so thrilled by ABT's mixed bill at City Center just a week afterwards - it wasn't bad, just kind of boring - but more on that soon). The elements all came together at this performance: great dancing, good choreography, good programming. And I've written this here before, but I think it's okay to say it again: I love San Francisco Ballet.

Photos: Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour, courtesy sfballet.org; Possokhov's Fusion with Damien Smith and Yuan Yuan Tan, photo by Erik Tomasson; Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15 with San Francisco Ballet's corps de ballet, photo by Erik Tomasson.