The San Francisco Ballet's final subscription program of the 2006 season is energetic and ecumenical, a real crowd-pleaser, and entirely made in the 21st century. Don't let that dismay you, however, for there is nothing scarier on the bill than acid-tinged piano pieces by Gyorgy Ligeti, an 83-year-old Hungarian with musical roots in the strictly serial Darmstadt school, where he lectured from 1959-72. Played by Michael McGraw and Nina Pinzarrone, this thorny music sounded positively dulcet.
Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon talks a complicated talk in the program, but his movement is properly about the music and the dancers. Unfortunately, I got to my seat late due to a mix-up with the program and was unable to secure either my opera glasses or a pen before the lights went out, rendering this description somewhat sketchy.
Four couples in "Continuum" engage in ensemble before breaking off into duets. The first (I believe it was Vanessa Zahorian and Moises Martin) is almost ritualistic, like a Southeast Asian temple dance. Every time the boy lifts the girl, she flexes her feet. Or, because the dim lighting tended to render the dancers stockier than usual as well as obscuring their faces, she could have been some giant bug wrapped around his waist. If you get the idea there was little eroticism, you're right. Wheeldon is working out spacing and leverage issues, which are going to need several more viewings for me to figure out.
After the intermission came the American premiere of Lar Lubovitch's "Elemental Brubeck," made for SFB's appearance in Paris last summer. It's a thoroughly agreeable jazz number. Rory Hohenstein was the boy in red (a role made for Gonzalo Garcia). He flipped and flirted, and the audience went mad. Hohenstein may be a cross between Gower Champion and Gene Kelly, but he's no Fred Astaire. In other words: Dance 10, Personality 3.
Hohenstein was joined by an intense pas de deux for Elizabeth Miner and Damian Smith and three jazzy couples, of which Frances Chung — she of the ebullient stage presence and blinding smile — was the single standout. To me, the disappointment in this piece, besides noting again that Lubovitch is a derivative choreographer, was the music — a 1950s big-band recording by Dave Brubeck that sounded like Benny Goodman on steroids. So what do I know? At the end, "Elemental Brubeck" got the biggest ovation of the season. You can't go wrong by underestimating the public's taste, or whatever it was that P.T. Barnum said.
Further reflections
All was made well at the end, with a revival of Yuri Possokhov's "Reflections." I don't think his "Magrittomania" wore very well; its surface amusements, once seen, lost their potency. "Reflections," on the other hand, which seemed fanciful and not very substantive last season, this time took on almost heroic stature. Maybe it was the juxtaposition to the rest of the program. In the company of Balanchine or Mark Morris, "Reflections" might have a "boutique" look, but coupled with Wheeldon's self-importance and Lubovitch's artificial froth, Possokhov's work looks exactly like something the Bolshoi Ballet should do — if they had an adventurous choreographic bone in their body.
You get the idea immediately from the music, Mendelssohn's first symphony, in C minor, written when he was 15. Martin West and the orchestra played it with big, brawny enthusiasm. A girls' corps in white, led by Kristin Long, opens the piece, and immediately you know something is "off" as Long crosses the stage and momentarily "falls." Or does she? Yes, she does, because I remember it from last year.
Nothing untoward happens after that, but you are now in an agitated state, anticipating disaster. There is no disaster, not even when the ballerina in red (Lorena Feijoo) and her troupe arrive. It looks for a while as if there might be a pileup a la Ballets Trocadero, but the two divas manage to miss each other, though not without close calls. This Possokhov is a very sly fellow. He's also very Russian, which means drenched in romantic melancholy. In the slow movement, Pierre-Francois Vilanoba falls for the "reflection" of Katita Waldo and dances an impassioned pas de deux with her as if she were a mannequin. They are reflected in mirrors — he adoring, yearning, and looking silly-sexy in a short, black wrestling singlet; she either cruel or clueless or not real at all. As a portrait of unrequited love, it is painfully illuminating.
The final two movements produced jumping, spinning and beating by Guennadi Nedviguine (back from protracted injuries) and Pascal Molat. As a display of aerial competition, it brought down the house — with far more justification (i.e., it is much harder to do) than the Bob Fosse-cloned jazz dancing.