On the West Coast, a Distinguished Company Avoids Showing Any Gray

<First published online in the New York Times on February 5, 2008>

SAN FRANCISCO. For most ballet companies that survive past their first 50 years, some degree of artistic recession proves inevitable. With San Francisco Ballet alone, the third quarter-century has brought a higher artistic eminence than before.

The company, celebrating its 75th anniversary this season, was founded in 1933. Helgi Tomasson became its artistic director in 1985; especially in the last 15 years, the troupe has become recognized as one of the world’s leading exponents of Balanchine style and repertory while presenting a series of commissioned new ballets by world-class choreographers and making successful visits to prestigious European opera houses and festivals.

Though the ballets Mr. Tomasson choreographs himself tend to be prettily forgettable, they usually have the virtue of making his dancers looks like focused, multidimensional classical stylists. And though he takes dancers from all around the world, he has given them a shared understanding of style fully as subtle as that of some European companies that employ only dancers from their own nations.

The nine repertory programs now being presented will reach a climax in the company’s New Works Festival in April and May, when an astonishing 10 world premieres - by choreographers no less than Paul Taylor, Mark Morris and Christopher Wheeldon, among others - will open on three consecutive nights (April 22 to 24), a quantity that has been matched or surpassed only by New York City Ballet and effectively bids to rival that company’s Diamond Projects of new choreography. (Most ballet companies are doing well if they can present four new ballets a year.)

San Francisco’s first two 2008 programs last week placed the company centrally as an inheritor of the traditions of 75 years of American ballet, including works created for Ballet Caravan, City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. The scores were by Bach (Mr. Tomasson’s “7 for Eight”), Mozart (Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15”), Tchaikovsky (the same choreographer’s “Diamonds”), Stravinsky (Yuri Possokhov’s “Firebird”) and Virgil Thomson (Lew Christensen’s “Filling Station” and Mr. Morris’s “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes”). When did anyone last see two Thomson ballets on consecutive nights?

Natal’ya Feygina’s playing of the piano pieces in “Drink to Me” was occasionally tentative, but Martin West’s conducting of the five orchestral scores was always good, with a balance between strings and horns in the Mozart that beautifully demonstrated this score’s ravishing sonorities (soured only by ill-tuned violin playing in its cadenzas).

Some factors are now holding back San Francisco Ballet from greatness. Female style here has not reached the peaks of refinement that male style has; to compare and contrast the company’s various leading and rising male dancers was a richer experience than the same exercise proved with its women. And at least three of these six ballets were poorly lighted, with too little illumination reaching the dancers from the front, and too much from above and, especially, the sides.

If Mr. Tomasson thinks a certain Stygian gloom is proper to “7 for Eight,” that is his privilege as its choreographer. But “Divertimento No. 15” is not helped by leaving the women’s faces occasionally in near shadow (even in the opening tableau). We should not be seeing shadows between the women’s shoulder blades in the opening waltz in “Diamonds” (which suffered more), and both dances relied excessively on spotlights. Great lighting (which need not be slavishly faithful to some bygone scheme) matters more to choreography than designs.

Even so, “Divertimento,” which has no fewer than five ballerina roles and a corps of eight women, was the richest event of these two programs, followed by “Drink to Me.” Each was double-cast; I was happy to see three performances of each. Several dancers - Elana Altman, Vanessa Zahorian, Frances Chung, Sarah Van Patten, Elizabeth Miner, Katita Waldo, Nicolas Blanc and Gennadi Nedvigin (who looks as if he may be the company’s finest stylist of all, especially in the “Drink” role created in 1988 for Mikhail Baryshnikov) - appeared in both, all to real advantage. Tina LeBlanc (especially) and Kristin Long both shone in the lead role of “Divertimento.”

In my experience “Divertimento No. 15” reached a peak at City Ballet from 1980 to 1985; these San Francisco performances, despite a few smudges here and there, were the brightest and best I have seen since then. This was dancing that sang with irresistible rhythmic brio. A transfer of weight from two feet to one became delicious; a change of body angle became juicy. Similar qualities shone in “Drink to Me,” especially in the male roles. (Mr. Morris makes entrancing contrasts by giving his men fiddly little footwork and then big but arrestingly precise jumps.)

“Filling Station,” a 1938 piece of Americana seldom seen today, proves to be the masterpiece of the artist Paul Cadmus, whose choices of costume color and imaginative décor surpass anything in his paintings. The choreographer Lew Christensen, following Lincoln Kirstein’s scenario, made a nice little comedy that leaves traces of fantasy in the mind. He originally gave himself the Puckish/heroic leading role of Mac, the filling station attendant; today Rory Hohenstein plays the role with touching strength and sweetness.

In Mr. Tomasson’s “7 for Eight” (2004), so named because it fields eight dancers in seven separate pieces of Bach music, Joan Boada created as much texture as the lighting would permit, as did Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun, Ms. LeBlanc, Mr. Nedvigin and others. Another home-commissioned ballet was Mr. Possokhov’s “Firebird” (2007), a sentimental pop reduction of the traditional scenario, with major cuts even to Stravinsky’s 1945 suite version of the score and a ballerina role that is considerably simpler in both steps and characterization than either Michel Fokine’s 1910 original or Balanchine’s 1949 version. A harmless and easily entertaining piece, this does nothing to reward a second viewing.

I have reservations about “Diamonds” that might have been done away with by better lighting and a different ballerina. (And why does Susan Tuohy’s décor consist of pearl pendants?) Though Yuan Yuan Tan, regarded by many as the company’s prima and its first-cast Firebird, brings fine articulation to certain details of this great role, which was created for Suzanne Farrell, the ballet might have been renamed “Sugar.” Ms. Tan, on the music but never in it, gave a mild, dainty, sweet account of a role that surely needs spaciousness, grandeur, glamour, cool. The rest of the company’s dancing, though likable, lacked ebullience.

Though “Diamonds” is often regarded as the thinnest of the three pieces in Balanchine’s 1967 “Jewels,” it has more choreography than most choreographers’ masterpieces do and can often win an ovation greater than it elicited on Friday. Other casts will follow, though. By missing them, I feel I am missing a story of consequence that extends far beyond California.

@New York Times, 2008