A Note on San Francisco Ballet

San Francisco Ballet
New York City Center
Thursday, October 16, 2008

It was a treat to see this company and its wonderful dancers.

Thursday’s program began with two works by director Helgi Tomasson. "The Fifth Season" is an ensemble ballet set to engaging, danceable pieces by Karl Jenkins; "Concerto Grosso" is a piece for five men set to Francesco Geminiani’s Concerto XII in D minor. Both of these works, easy on the eyes and ears, seemed to exist mainly to show off the dancers, and if that was the goal, it was successful.

The standout performer in "The Fifth Season" was Yuan Yuan Tan, whose musicality and intensity of focus was strong enough to reach all the way up to the rear mezzanine (The View from the Fourth Ring’s usual City Center seating area). The SFB’s excellent men had the stage to themselves for "Concerto Grosso." Tomasson’s choreography, while providing each dancer ample opportunity to show off, to its credit also allows for the individuality of each man, so that we saw people on the stage, not just technically proficient machines.

Before we could get to the real meat and potatoes at the end of the program, we saw Mark Morris’s "Joyride," which was not much of a ride and had unfortunately little joy. The eight dancers, costumed in shiny gold or silver tunics by Isaac Mizrahi, were for the most part poorly used. The last (and only other) time that I saw SFB it was in Morris’s "Sylvia," which I thought was promising and yes, enjoyable. In this work, however, what Morris perhaps construes as simplicity of movement, comes across as merely simplistic, suggesting that he has an unimaginative and limited balletic vocabulary. The commissioned John Adams score was perhaps less workable for dancing than Morris may have hoped. The score itself had a vigor and muscle and I would like to hear it again, but the choreography was a distraction, failing to enhance or illuminate its qualities.

The last piece was Balanchine’s "Four Temperaments," and the SFB dancers gave it a great reading.

Part of the fun of seeing SFB dance it was the chance to see this ballet performed in a more intimate space than what I normally see at the New York State Theater. Because the City Center stage is that much smaller, the spatial dynamics of the ballet are significantly changed. For example, in Melancholic, when the principal (Taras Domitro) and soloists are downstage left and the four women make their dramatic, aggressive entrance from upstage right, the shorter diagonal causes the two groups to encounter one another in a more intimate, emotionally engaging way, which the larger stage can swallow up. So the spatial arrangement also causes an adjustment in the emotional dynamics of the choreography (actually, not too unlike the space on the Dance in America recording of the piece for TV).

Domitro’s reading of Melancholic was one of the strongest I have seen. A technically beautiful dancer, his performance was effective and articulate without being melodramatic. Lorena Feijoo and Ruben Martin (who seemed somewhat swamped by her strong personality) performed Sanguinic. Feijoo, who comes on (too) strong in the opening movements, looks good in the rest of this variation, which does reveal an aggressive, darker, less sanguine side. Ian Popov was a good Phlegmatic, and Sofiane Sylve looked much more comfortable in Choleric than in the Sanguinic she used to dance at New York City Ballet. The company’s electric performances in the finale brought this great work to a close. I’ll hold the emotional intensity of those final lifts in my heart for a long time.