As programming strategies go, it's hard to beat the variety show. It's like a three-course meal. The middle section tends to be the big deal, the starter revs you up for it, and the finale takes all that energy, whips it up to a new level and sends you home having had enough. At San Francisco Ballet right now, both Programs 4 and 5 follow this scheme and deliver a lot of satisfactions.
I can't say I like Chi-Lin, the middle piece on Program 4: it's like mixed grill, heavy on the protein. It's a Bolshoi-style ballet ("Midnight in the temple, and the statues come to life,") which at the Bolshoi and elsewhere is always a ploy to show the dancers nearly naked doing their showiest tricks. This temple is Chinese, and the ballet is a vehicle for the stunningly beautiful ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan (she's supposed to be a unicorn, and the three nearly naked guys are a phoenix, a turtle, and a dragon). The ballet has a Chinese-flavored, violently percussive score by Bright Sheng, gorgeous Chinese-temple decor by Sandra Woodall, and if the ballet had an overall rhythmic development I could really enjoy it. As it is, the tricks are very showy, and there were excellent performances by everybody, especially the amazing Davit Karapetyan, who's hotter than Brad Pitt and more stylish than Prada. The piccolo soloist, Julie Mackenzie, did a great job.
But the first and third pieces in this show were fantastic. The dancers got deep into the sweet mood of Paul Taylor's Spring Rounds, and sustained it at a glorious level all the way to the end. It's an essentially simple piece, modest, delightful, soft, gentle, and on a bad night it could "break," like a soufflé that didn't make it. The music is the inspiration. The score is a setting by Richard Strauss of many small dances by the 18th-century master Couperin, a miracle of orchestration and a turning point in the career of Strauss, who from then on abandoned the heavy Wagnerian style he'd been using, and set sail for the style of Der Rosenkavalier.
These dancers can make you feel all these nuances. All the way down to the corps level, the dancing was first-rate and often inspired. The stars, Vanessa Zahorian and Garrett Anderson, were radiant, but the best thing in it was the way they all danced together, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, moving together. Though indeed, there were many break-away moments, and I have to mention the fabulous dancing of Brooke Taylor Moore, whose name should be written in the stars, given the immediacy and joy she gave to arabesque a lyre, a step from the 18th century invented by Carlo Blasis and not seen often since.
Eden/Eden, which closed the show, is a ballet about cloning. Stick with me. It works. It's brilliant. The choreographer Wayne McGregor added a layer of hyper-ballet to an already existing minimalist opera-film by Steve Reich. Reich had set a fragmented spoken-word text about cloning to his typical pulsating, pixilated, glass-bead-curtain of sound. The dancers echo the hypnotic score with steps that exaggerate the mechanism of ballet, so they look scarily androidal and robotic, thrashing like club dancers at two in the morning zoned into endorphin-mania. As the text becomes increasingly disturbing, one of the dancers (Muriel Maffre) is given moves that make her look more human, motherly even; and the curtain comes down on a kind of movement-lamentation. All the dancers were superb, especially Hayley Farr, another corps dancer who took the stage and swept it all before her. Her light shone brighter than anything.
Taking the Fifth
Program 5 was equally interesting; I must give it short shrift, since there wasn't much new, and what was (Christopher Wheeldon's Carousel ) was very slight. Davit Karapetyan was once again world-class stellar in Helgi Tomasson's beautifully spare ballet, The Fifth Season, set to a perfect-for-dance score by Karl Jenkins. The cast was very fine, especially Yuan Yuan Tan, who has never been lovelier, Lorena Feijoo, and Sarah van Patten.
Mark Morris' excellent, austere ballet Pacific (created for the United We Dance festival in 1995, to mark the anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter in SF) deserved its handsome revival. And Jerome Robbins' first great ballet, Fancy Free (which was later expanded into the Broadway musical On the Town) rocked the house with its jazzy Leonard Bernstein score, its three sailor buddies, and their doomed efforts to get each one a girl on this hot night of shore leave. Garrett Anderson was the sweet-faced, na�ve guy who almost gets a girl, Gonzalo Garcia was the sailor who did the rhumba, and Pascal Molat the sailor who jumped up in the air, spun around twice, and landed on the floor in splits. You have to see it to believe it. Erin McNulty, another hot corps dancer, tore up the stage in her role as the first girl on the scene, and Vanessa Zahorian was charming, sweet, and gorgeous as the girl the sweet guy almost got.
Both shows run through this weekend. sfballet.org