Four New Works, With Three From a Different Species

<First published online in the New York Times on April 24, 2008>

In Program B of San Francisco Ballet’s New Works Festival, the first three works were different species of ghastly, so it wasn’t too hard for the fourth, Mark Morris’s “Joyride,” to prove the evening’s best piece. Yet it’s not difficult to find fault with “Joyride.” Its choreography has awkward transitions, the more exposed because the music it accompanies , John Adams’s “Son of Chamber Symphony,” seems to have no transitions whatsoever. And the dances have tepid, static or dead patches that suggest briefly that Mr. Morris lost his nerve.

Wednesday evening’s first three works - “Naked” by Stanton Welch, “A rose by any other name” by Julia Adam and “The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful” by James Kudelka - were, by contrast, all efficiently ghastly, showing no hint of diffidence, and all three seemed to have their vociferous admirers. Nevertheless “Joyride” had no sooner begun than it showed how Mr. Morris is a dance maker in a wholly different league.

The heart leapt just to observe the contrast between its first two recurring movements: a plucked, deliberate walking step, then a boldly vaulting jump. The diversity of this opening alone makes us feel that Mr. Morris is saying, “Look, people can be closed and open, allegro and penseroso, controlled and audacious.” And this precision and contrast were already the best dance news of the evening. Mr. Adams was conducting his own score, which was commissioned for this festival but had its premiere in concert last year, and many of Mr. Morris’s movements and structures seemed attuned to the music’s sound world (often percussive), its recyclings and its irregularity.

The whole New Works Festival to date has been a marvelous display of the range of lighting possibilities for dance, thanks to one man, James F. Ingalls. A longtime collaborator with Mr. Morris, Mr. Ingalls exceeds himself in “Joyride.” The brightness of that dance is caught to perfection, opening with glorious lemon-gold light on the backdrop, and the dancers, costumed in various metallic textures (gold, silver, stainless-steel) by Isaac Mizrahi, become a race of gods, or heroes from another planet. Mr. Adams’s music has three movements; both Mr. Morris and Mr. Ingalls help to reveal its structure. The central movement is more intimate, deploying the cast of eight in a series of four different dance duets. The finale is driven, including several brilliant male and female solos amid the ensemble.

I love the dance unpredictability of those solos. It may not be surprising that a man, rather than a woman, does fouetté turns, or that the whipping leg propels him sometimes into multiple spins, but how refreshing to see him do them while focusing on a diagonal spot, rather than out front, and how much more so to see that there’s no steadily pounding beat to his turns but a kind of arrhythmia. Another male solo does have a regular beat in one spectacular phrase, but it’s the movements that are surprising: He sits (looking up), rolls over, sits again (looking up) and so on. You feel the rhythm in your own body as you watch, as you do when another man does single turns to both right and left.

“Naked” is far more trite than anything in its score, Poulenc’s “Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos.” When the music is fast, Mr. Welch uses Kristin Long and Pascal Molat to move fast; when it’s slow, he uses Yuan Yuan Tan to be slow. There seems no chance for a dancer to be fast and slow here; they’re pigeonholed as types from the start. Holly Hynes has costumed the women in tutus and the men in pink flesh-color trousers with multiple creases around the groin and knees. The dancers are technically excellent, especially Mr. Molat and other men who do beaten jumps with exceptional speed, and yet Mr. Welch doesn’t make them interesting.

“A rose by any other name” tries to tell most of the story of “The Sleeping Beauty” to several of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations (orchestrated by Matthew Naughtin and Martin West so as to soften the edges), but why? The manner is cute/oddball/wacky (with male fairies, each full of human flaws). The dance phrasing is musically superficial. The lightweight storytelling - Prince and Princess end the ballet by rolling together across the floor, a sexual image that was already a notorious cliché in 1950 - is entirely irksome.

“The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful” (to music by César Franck soupily arranged for orchestra by Rodney Sharman) lasts no more than 30 minutes, but only by clock time. While you watch, you begin to feel that Bill Clinton probably eloped with Michelle Obama long ago, that the problems of Palestine and Iraq and Afghanistan must have all been sorted by now, that whole generations of human life have passed and aliens have surely taken over the planet and then departed, all while you are stuck there in the theater trying to find the least interest in watching the same tepid floozies doing the same limp steps. With its women so evidently “fallen” and its frock-coated men so pallid and ghoulish, I can see why a friend called it “The Best Little Whorehouse in Transylvania.” Even in Transylvania, though, aren’t most whorehouses livelier and more frolicsome than this dirge?

Here dancers must look as if the slightest step is too much effort to be worth completing cleanly; nothing is ever resolved. Ms. Tan and Pierre-François Vilanoba lead.

The New Works Festival is demonstrating what exemplary stylists the San Francisco dancers are: different from one work to another in temperament, line, dynamics, personas. But Mr. Kudelka’s style in “The Ruins” is a fate I would not wish upon dancers this fine.

@New York Times, 2008