What Audiences Haven’t Seen Before
<First published online in the New York Times on April 24, 2008>
SAN FRANCISCO. Novelty as cause for celebration! In ballet, an art so often stuffed with the same old chestnuts, it takes real courage to promote creativity rather than conservation. Diaghilev remains the exemplar here, but in this regard the United States has led the world for several decades. The concept of presenting a multiple-program bonanza of new choreography goes back to the 1972 Stravinsky Festival of New York City Ballet. That event included old works too, but its wealth of innovation became the stuff of legend. At least four of the new works choreographed then have gone into international ballet repertory.
One of that festival’s dancers was Peter Martins, who now runs City Ballet. In 1988 he staged its American Music Festival along the same lines, and then, starting in 1992, he began a series of occasional, somewhat festival-like spring Diamond Projects, each of which has produced multiple new works within weeks. Another of those 1972 dancers was Helgi Tomasson. Since 1985 he has run San Francisco Ballet, which is now reaching the climax of its 75th-anniversary season by presenting a New Works Festival that bids to rival City Ballet in the new-choreography stakes.
Ten world premieres by 10 choreographers are occurring over three nights; some of the scores are commissioned, and these programs will continue for just over two weeks. Since the choreographers include Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, Christopher Wheeldon, James Kudelka, Jorma Elo, Stanton Welch and Yuri Possokhov, the season is automatically of national and international significance.
The festival began on Tuesday with a gala-type account of Program A (most of the audience was in evening dress): a triple bill of Mr. Possokhov’s “Fusion,” Mr. Wheeldon’s “Within the Golden Hour” and Mr. Taylor’s “Changes.” “Fusion” and “Within the Golden Hour” feature handsome décors and costumes and are set to attractively interesting music; both show their creators extending their ranges and adding to their craft.
“Fusion” is an East-meets-West ballet. Set mainly to jazz-related music by the British composer Graham Fitkin, but opening with Middle Eastern-sounding music composed by Rahul Dev Burman, as arranged by the Kronos Quartet, it includes four men dressed approximately as (sometimes whirling) dervishes; four women who might be modern odalisques; and four other men whose bare-armed look is more Western. Above, a row of small screens hang like flags; James L. Ingall’s lighting changes them from orange to blue and back again. (At one point dervish movement is projected onto some of them.)
Though separate style ingredients are shown - the dervishes bend their thoraxes in and out like bellows; the women (on point) have jumps and positions with winged arms - this is, as the title indicates, a melting pot ballet. Both women and men even get to do, daffily, the same little pelvic wiggles. There are male-female pas de deux and single-sex group dances, but the emphasis is on flow, on overlap, on coexistence. It’s not without structural intelligence, and all of it is mildly agreeable.
“Within the Golden Hour” shows from first to last that Mr. Wheeldon’s gifts of construction are more complex and skilled: it’s generally beautiful. The music, by the Italian composer Ezio Bosso, is an appealing series of strings-only numbers, sometimes featuring solo violin and viola, and in parts drawing on Baroque material (in the manner of Tippett’s delectable “Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli”); the costumes are in sensuous shades of green, amber and blue (with women wearing dresses over tights of the same color).
Magpielike, Mr. Wheeldon includes - as he often has before - choreographic devices better known from a wide range of other dancemakers, including Mr. Taylor (perhaps for the first time) and, certainly, Frederick Ashton (a favorite Wheeldon source, especially in his American commissions). There are 14 dancers, used in various groups, arranged to frame and separate four distinct pas de deux. Of these, the second is for two men, bright, brisk and winning; sharing the same material; moving together but without physical contact.
In each of the three other duets, however, man partners woman. The focus, here as in other Wheeldon male-female pairings, is almost always on the lines and shapes shown by the woman, so that we may hardly realize that the guiding impulse comes as a rule from the man, who pushes or pulls, lifts and lowers, turns and steers her. Each duet successfully establishes and sustains its own different mood.
Though all the women (Katita Waldo, Sarah van Patten and Maria Kochetkova) are responsive and handsome, I couldn’t help wishing, here as in previous pieces, that Mr. Wheeldon would allow even one of them some serious signs of independence. There are memorable lifts, but these tend to be ends in themselves, without real expressive integrity, dynamically shaped as if they should be applauded. The larger group dances are entirely well shaped, and the ending - everyone joining into a machinelike group that pulsates from side to side - the work’s masterstroke.
Because Mr. Possokhov and Mr. Wheeldon have evidently enriched their own lexicons and capabilities, I ought to applaud them here more than I do. For the same reason, perhaps I should applaud Mr. Taylor less than I do them, for there’s hardly a jump or lift or pose in his new “Changes” that he hasn’t often shown before. Unlike “Within the Golden Hour,” “Changes” doesn’t end on a wow note but instead recapitulates its opening scene, as the curtain falls.
Yet “Changes” reminds me how, in 1988, Mr. Taylor’s contribution to City Ballet’s American Music Festival (“Danbury Mix”) was, brilliantly, set to the most imaginatively original of all American composers, Charles Ives, and so went to the heart of that festival’s idea. Likewise, “Changes” addresses a core era of San Francisco history: the 1960s. Danced to songs by the Mamas and the Papas, it recreates, in affectionate but near-cartoon terms, the nonconformist liberalism of Haight-Ashbury and the Berkeley campus.
We see the haircuts, the fashions, the dances (the hitchhike, the mashed potato, the Watusi) of that era; we see the characters, the actions (dope-sharing is mimed), the vitality and the surprising innocence. Mr. Taylor, as is his wont in these circumstances, rehearsed it with his own company; his former star Patrick Corbin then taught it to 11 San Francisco dancers. And seldom if ever have any performers who were not Taylor specialists ever caught the features of the Taylor style so well, always using their weight and three-dimensional physicality to make the movement strong, always filling a phrase sharply against its music.
In “California Earthquake” Courtney Elizabeth is a wild and liberated star who keeps, literally, knocking a crowd dead. In “I Call Your Name” Pauli Magierek dances radiantly with four men who lift her, upend her but always show that she is queen bee. Aaron Orza and Benjamin Stewart make “Dancing Bear” a work of childish dreams and adult protectiveness. And in “California Dreams” the ensemble surges, rotates and throbs in a joyously mixed paean. Forty years on Mr. Taylor’s “Changes” has given San Francisco images of itself in the 1960s, the very time when it seemed to change world culture.
@New York Times, 2008