San Francisco Ballet has announced a Diamond Jubilee season for next year. The country's oldest ballet company, founded by Adolph Bolm in 1933, with a roster of 70+ dancers and 350 students, SFB is announcing an ambitious season. The good news is that a) they're reviving Giselle, which is to ballet as Hamlet is to acting — the greatest of the classics; b) three international ballet companies will send embassies, who'll dance gems from their repertories for us on Program 6; c) there'll be a mini-Jerome Robbins Festival, including West Side Story Suite (which means one of the dancers will get to sing �America"); and d) it ends with a grand festival of new works by 10 choreographers, which sounds bright and promising. The bad news is that the season starts off thin.
The season past had some pretty dull entries in the new-works category, the dreariest of them by SFB artistic director Helgi Tomasson himself. So it's no fun to say that Program 1 starts off with a Tomasson TBA [to be announced], with pride of place in the middle of the program. It might be just fine — especially if Tina LeBlanc recovers from her serious knee injury in time for him to create a ballerina role on her, since her quicksilver musicality brings out the very best in him. She is one of the greatest dancers in the whole world in that vein. But when she hit the floor on the last night of Don Quixote and could not get up, the prospects did not look good.
The best we can hope is that modern dance medicine will get her back on her feet for Giselle, in which she is simply fantastic. Also, Tomasson makes quirky and fascinating things on Kristin Long as well. Let's hope for something like that.
Tomasson's big gift is as head of the company — he can pick them. He's recruited and nurtured fabulously talented dancers from all over the world. They have disparate training, but they have uniformly extraordinary abilities, which makes new works the best chance for them to shine. First of all, they are so quick and eager, they inspire visiting choreographers. Also, within the creative process they get movement ideas so fast they help shape the style of the new piece, which creates the "world" of the new dance.
Program 6 gives us a rare chance to see dancers from other companies pay tribute to ours. From New York City Ballet comes a pair who'll dance Balanchine's poignant "Duo Concertante." The National Ballet of Canada will perform Mrozewski's breakthrough ballet, "A Delicate Battle" (never seen here before); and the Ballets de Monte-Carlo will dance the American premiere of their signature work, "Altro Canto," to music of Monteverdi.
Famous names
The big deal is the New Works Festival, which will end the season. Probably most eagerly awaited will be Mark Morris' setting of John Adams' Son of Chamber Symphony, a new piece of music co-commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts, SFB and Carnegie Hall. (Adams' score will be given its world premiere — as pure music — on Nov. 30 at Stanford University, performed by the contemporary music group Alarm Will Sound.) This will be Morris' seventh commission for the company. The other "famous-name piece" will be by Paul Taylor, whose "Company B" is one of the best new works SFB has danced in Tomasson's tenure.
A new work by our city's doyenne of modern dance, Margaret Jenkins, should be exciting; she'll work, as usual, with music by Paul Dresher. Other festival works include new choreography by company alumni Julia Adam, Val Caniparoli and Yuri Possokhov; Finland's Jorma Elo; the Canadian James Kudelka; Stanton Welch of Houston Ballet; and the New York City Ballet's resident choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon.