San Francisco Ballet: Programme C

San Francisco Ballet: Programme C, Sadler’s Wells, September 19

If this was the one performance of San Francisco Ballet you were able to see, you would have missed some of the better works in the repertoire, but you would have felt the surge of approval for the quality of dancing, especially for the female principals. Of course there weren’t any in Beaux by Mark Morris because it was a cast of men only, but Maria Kochetkova in Yuri Possokhov’s Classical Symphony, Yuan Yuan Tan in Possokhov’s Raku and the trio of Vanessa Zahorian, Sarah Van Patten and Kochetkova again in Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour all received rapturous applause for their performances. Kochetkova’s partner in Classical Symphony, Hansuke Yamamoto, was also singled out. It was applause for the dancing rather than applause for the dance. This was perhaps the weakest programme the company presented and not even Wheeldon could raise its choreographic temperature. I wonder if this was not one programme too many.

Economics may have something to do with this. San Francisco Ballet is a large company, and the cost of bringing over the dancers (seventy-seven dancers’ portraits grace the printed program) plus crew and administrative staff must be considerable. For it to come to London at all has to make economic sense for Sadler’s Wells and for the company, and a third programme may have been deemed necessary to whet the audience appetite sufficiently for the run. But performing ten works in nine performances over a stretch of ten days with two days preparation and one day off is a tough challenge, the brunt of which is taken by the dancers. It is wonderful they receive their due recognition, but there was one injury last night (Pierre-François Vilanoba), an unfortunate symptom of such a full-on schedule. Hopefully there will be no other incidents.

By weak programme, I mean the works did not add, individually or collectively, to the image of the company that the other two programmes had already provided. Mark Morris’s Beaux was the only all-male work in the tour repertoire, and it is Mark Morris, but his celebrated musicality has always seemed to bob on the surface of the music rather than swim with it in the manner of Jiri Kylian, James Kudelka or Christopher Wheeldon, for example. Apart from showing off the male dancers to full advantage in Isaac Mizrahi costumes, cross-gender dancing and showing the obverse of what men normally do (especially in this company), Beaux does not have, to my mind, a lot to recommend it. What men normally do, however, goes to the other extreme in Possokhov’s Classical Symphony, to the score of the same name by Sergei Prokofiev. Possokhov, who is the company’s current choreographer-in-residence, brings his Bolshoi bravura to the men (Hansuke Yamamoto opens with a double tour to a deep plié), but showers so much technique on his dancers that the choreography has a prickly relationship with the music, though it gives his principal couples a chance to shine. In Raku, to a score by Shinji Eshima, Possokhov’s Russian proclivity for melodrama overpowers the Japanese sensibility for restraint. The story is loosely based on the burning of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto in 1950 by a deranged acolyte, to which has been added a parallel story of love and loss, jealousy and betrayal. Both strands of the story are set in an earlier, samurai period, replete with inexcusably wooden swords. Yuan Yuan Tan is the exquisite Japanese noblewoman, and her samurai husband who dies in an offstage battle and whose ashes are ceremonially returned and scattered over the stage by his distraught wife is the unfortunate Damian Smith. Pascal Molat is suitably nefarious with his shaven head and black costume as the evil acolyte, who is cast as both philanderer and arsonist. It’s all a bit exaggerated, and Possokhov’s treatment robs the plot of any real drama. The exquisite Tan is thus left to fulfill a dramatic role that really has little credibility or traction and for which her exquisite line and dramatic hair pulling cannot compensate. Eshima’s music, Mark Zappone’s costumes and Alexander V. Nichols’ lighting and set design were right on the mark, so it is a shame the whole idea doesn’t gel.

I was expecting the evening’s last offering, Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, to raise my spirits, but I fear Wheeldon, in choosing the minimalist music of Ezio Bosso, found himself with insufficient height and depth to carve out his characteristically deep creative line. As always, Wheeldon makes the music visible through rhythms and patterns, but very quickly Bosso’s music proves less and less appealing (as did some of the solo violin playing), resulting in a rather low-key, minimal work. Wheeldon’s cast is exemplary, with Luke Ingham replacing the injured Pierre-François Vilanoba, but this was not Wheeldon’s, nor the company’s golden hour.

San Francisco Ballet: Programme B

San Francisco Ballet, Programme B, Sadler’s Wells, September 15

By the second evening, the company is already more at ease. The programme starts with Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s Trio, to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, a wonderfully evocative minor key sextet that is reminiscent of the same composer’s Serenade for Strings, the score Balanchine used for his milestone 1934 work, Serenade. This circular relationship is completed by Tomasson’s fifteen years as a principal dancer with Balanchine’s company, and he is clearly drawn, consciously or unconsciously, into the powerful orbit of Serenade, especially in the appearance of the figure of Death in Trio’s second movement.

Christopher Dennis lights the stage and Alexander V. Nichols provides a backdrop of a silk-screened, close-up image of ancient buildings (Florence, perhaps) that picks up on the sentimental tone of the music and places the emotions somewhere in the past.

Against this backdrop, five couples waltz on to the stage in spirited form, like the music: straight out of the blocks. Tomasson brings us very much into the present moment, celebrating dance and the individual dancers, focusing especially on Vanessa Zahorian and Joan Boada, who work beautifully together in their duet and in their respective solos. Zahorian has the ability to wind up space and leave it swirling and Boada is like the torso to her limbs.

In the second, lyrical movement, we see a couple wound up in each other’s arms and a tall, slender male figure three steps behind, carving out an ominous, foreboding space: it is clear what is going to happen. Sarah Van Patten and Tiit Helimets are the two lovers caught up in an increasingly hopeless struggle to avoid the inevitable separation. Tomasson celebrates their love in a duet that is more complex than the first, but more flesh-and-blood, with a purity that suggests the couple’s bond. Vito Mazzeo as the dark figure of Death intervenes with calculated persistence, waiting his turn patiently, mercilessly, until he steals Van Patten away, his hand shading her eyes from her beloved, who is left alone with his loss.

The third and fourth movements leave Florence and its memories behind. Maria Kochetkova and Gennadi Nedvigin evidently relish every moment of the lively, earthy Russian folk rhythms and all the classical technique that Tomasson throws at them. The ensemble also gets a well-grounded workout and as the spirited fourth movement spins its shapes and rhythms, the entire cast is caught up until its fast, final, turning patterns come to a sudden end. The dancers appear to be still reeling in their bows.

The opening bars of C.F. Kip Winger’s score for Christopher Wheeldon’s Ghosts are quietly ethereal, and the sense from the figures in their Pierrot-like costumes is one of a gathering of celestial clowns at play. Wheeldon’s caterpillar forms and subtle groupings takes us unawares at first, but as in Number Nine, he finds a path through the music for his particular movement images that by the end makes you feel the path was always there. Despite the title (which is the title of Winger’s score), this is not a poltergeist ballet, but a mixing of dream and circus, fantasy and mime that envelops what Wheeldon conceived as ‘a mass gathering of souls’. Wheeldon is a master of classical form, not only in his development of classical ballet language, but in his use of space. It is more Parthenon than Seagram Building, counterbalancing groups and shapes in a natural, asymmetrical way, aided and abetted here by Mark Zappone on costumes and Mary Louise Geiger (again) on lighting. It is a creative team that forms a total harmony. Let’s not forget the contribution of the dancers, who enter into the spirit of the work beautifully. What I like about the San Francisco Ballet is that the dancers are all distinct, yet form a unity in each work without compromising that individuality. In the middle of Ghosts, on a stage lit with leaves, Wheeldon creates a beautifully expressive duet for Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith that adds a sense of reverence to the gathering of souls and the finale adds a joyous sense of fun. Makes you want to be there.

Ashley Page’s Guide to Strange Places takes its name from John Adams’ score. John Morrel’s opening image of a double yellow line down the middle of a road makes me want to overtake the head in front of me that is obscuring the view, but more importantly the road is more in character with the fast-moving opening music than with the choreography which moves fast but on foot. Paige has certainly picked up on the energy of Adams’ score, in which a broad range of percussion pounds and drives like a freight car going over a level crossing, but this leaves the dancers looking quite small in their body-tight costumes (also by Morrel), moving in different patterns that don’t quite satisfy the eye as the different instrumentation satisfies the ear. Not only that, but as the ballet goes on, I feel Paige takes a slight left turn in the road while Adams powers straight on, which is perhaps just as well, for there is a point where the percussion sounds like the theatre roof is being struck by a blunt instrument, but the classical duets continue as if nothing is amiss. According to the program notes (by Cheryl A. Ossola), Paige conceived the work as ‘an ensemble piece peppered with duets. For each one, he matched the movements, textures and tones to the dancers’ personalities and physiques.’ This translates into some great individual dancing from the four leading, colour-coded couples but it tends to keep the scale of the work intimate and inward-looking as it continues its detour to a strange place. The music has already arrived.

San Francisco Ballet: Programme A

San Francisco Ballet, Programme A, Sadler’s Wells, September 14

A Buddhist tale relates that a king once had a group of blind men brought to the palace, where an elephant was brought in and they were asked to describe it. When the blind men had each felt a part of the elephant, the king went to each of them and asked: ‘Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?” Of course their answers differed according to which part of the elephant they had touched and they could not arrive at a consensus. The elephant in this case is analogous to Helgi Tomasson’s San Francisco Ballet, and the blind men to those who are only able to see one or two of the three quite different programmes the company is presenting at Sadler’s Wells. To see the full range of this versatile company means investing in all three programmes, however satisfying each one may be.

It is worth noting that the opening night of Programme A is only two days after the dancers arrive in London, and they find themselves on a stage that is much smaller than their home theatre.

San Francisco Ballet performs with a live orchestra but the liveness was in some doubt on the opening bars of its first outing with Mozart’s Divertimento No. 15 in B Flat major, K 287. The pit sounded as if it had been dug a little too deep and the brilliance of Mozart’s sound was decidedly muffled, especially in the horn section. Balanchine’s Divertimento is a sparkling, airy work, full of intricate steps and patterns, a celebration of classical shapes in space and of the beauty of the dancers. The beauty of the dancers is not in question here, but I am not sure if it was the jetlag, or the orchestra’s playing, or the first-night nerves, but the cast struggled to maintain the unity of Balanchine’s choreography with Mozart’s music. Davit Karapetyan showed it was possible, ending his variation with a delightful flourish, but then Vanessa Zahorian danced beautifully but ran out of space and had to change trajectory to finish hers. The orchestra’s tempi seemed to spread panic through the ensemble patterns, giving them an air of constantly trying to catch up, with arabesques and arms arriving to their fullness in the same way different drivers might approach a speed limit: before, as you pass or after. In a program honouring Balanchine by a company steeped in his tradition, I can understand opening with Divertimento: you honour the great man and his work first. But the preparations were just too rushed to do full justice either to Balanchine or to the company, placing time and space at odds with one another. I am sure other iterations of the program will fare better.

The orchestra, under conductor Martin West, was more comfortable in the Rachmaninov, producing a full, warm sound in his Symphonic Dances which choreographer Edwaard Liang borrowed as the title to his work. Liang was a soloist in New York City Ballet, which comes as no surprise. There are elements of Balanchine in Liang’s choreography, but rather too much of a ticklish disconnect between the music and the choreography. Rachmaninov’s lush romanticism proves too powerful for the choreographic forces Liang can marshal, and he gets lost in a plethora of complex lifts that further divide attention from the music in direct proportion to the lifts losing form in space. Simpler ideas have greater traction, as when a group of women lift the hems of their skirts and let them fall in unison to accent the end of a musical phrase, but these are like snippets of conversation rather than part of a consistent choreographic language. It is towards the end that Liang manages to gather his forces closer together, infusing his choreography with a natural, sinuous energy that is warm without being emotional. Daniel Deivison responds to this beautifully, coaxing every last bit of juice out of the movement, and Sofiane Sylve enters almost deliriously into the swirling emotions of the score, taking full advantage of the movement Liang has given her, but it is all too little too late. Neither Jack Mehler’s rich seasonal lighting, nor Rachmaninov’s sumptuous score nor the dancers themselves can rescue this work, though it finishes bravely.

Number Nine (perhaps Christopher Wheeldon’s ninth creation for San Francisco Ballet), takes us by surprise at first by its vibrant, phosphorescent colour contrasts by Holly Hines (costumes) and Mary Louise Geiger (lighting). But very soon I realise I am watching what I have been looking for all evening, a match of equals between music (by American composer, Michael Torke), choreography, costumes and lighting that is consummated in the dancing. Wheeldon plays with his steps and in so doing finds musical space within the score that sets the dancers free. And a wonderful octet of principals and solists it is: Frances Chung, Maria Kochetkova, Sofianne Sylve, Sarah Van Patten, Daniel Deivison, Gennadi Nedvegin, Vito Mazzeo and Carlos Quenedit. Like Balanchine, Wheeldon, who was New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer for seven years, celebrates the body, makes effortless patterns – in one instance from four groups of women to two lines into a square and then into a rectangle – creates lifts that have clarity and sculpts movement that fills the space, however many dancers there are on stage. The entire work is suffused with humour, from the colours to the score to the two dancers conducting the orchestra; only the technical demands on the dancers are not to be laughed at. Towards the end, as the dancers appear to be wriggling in space, there is a trumpet fanfare. How appropriate: Wheeldon’s works have flown home, and in great company.