"It takes ten years to make a dancer." Martha Graham said that, and most everyone in the business agrees.
The graduating performances of the great dance academies have always drawn excited audiences. In the Tsar's day in St. Petersburg, the school performances were a very big deal - Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina were all spotted early, the balletomanes rated and ranked them as eagerly as the current stars. Similar interest gathers in New York around the Spring Showcase of the great School of American Ballet (SAB), which was founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in New York in 1934 and which gives New York City Ballet nearly 80 percent of its dancers.
The San Francisco Ballet School is almost exactly the same age as SAB; it was founded in 1933 to provide dancers for the San Francisco Opera, and has been one of the most important academies in the country ever since. The great Russian dancers Anatole Vilzak and Ludmilla Schollar taught here for decades, and under the administration of the Christensen brothers the SFB School became the most important school west of the Mississippi.
I saw no Nijinskys at the San Francisco Ballet School's Spring showcase last Thursday night, which was a wonderful evening of dancing but left me with some questions about the school. The program was arranged to make the dancers look like they were having a great time on stage - even the youngest kids looked happy and proud of themselves, ready to be seen, comfortable onstage, and glad to show off their mastery of the basic technique. The routines were musical and dance-y, and since they were mostly set to the fabulously danceable music of Leo Delibes, they were a joy to watch (The Czardas was especially dashing; set by Jorge Esquivel, it showed the care with which the upper-level boys have been taught character-dancing by Leonid Shagalov.).
But it doesn't look like the school is able to recruit the really biggest talents. I saw nobody who has "got it all"; among the men, if the big jumps are good, the feet are so-so, and a man with short legs must have excellent feet to make it.
The dances for the advanced students did not expose their classical technique to great scrutiny. Not even the star of the evening - the dazzling and adorable Hideko Karasawa, who danced exquisitely, and very correctly, in the classical "Bluebird" pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty (partnered by the gallant Max Levy), and made the evening worth walking a mile to see. Even she turned out not to have a complete armament of technique when clean fast entrechat-sixes were called for in George Balanchine's Serenade. She did not let on, though, and along with everybody else she danced the ballet with wonderful spirit and art and gave us a performance to lift up our hearts.
Unlike SAB, the SF Ballet School provides only 40 percent of the SF Ballet's dancers, and that figure masks the number of dancers who've been mostly trained elsewhere and have merely done their last year or two here. Ms Karasawa has not been invited to SFB; she's signed with Memphis Ballet, who I must say (if she dances regularly at the level she showed last week) are lucky to have her. Her gifts of style and spirit and charm are outstanding, her pirouettes in Serenade were so brilliant and so fast they peeled your eyes, her proportions are near-perfect, and her figure lends itself to every important style – Romantic, classical, and modern.
What the programming did show was the advanced dancers' strength in "contemporary" work. They phrase beautifully, they move in large patterns with sweep and musicality, and they can stay soft and subtle in difficult transitions. These are very important gifts. The school's Trainee program fielded its seven dancers in a mysteriously beautiful ballet by SFB star Nicolas Blanc, set to quasi-mystical music by Arvo Pärt. The stage was rather dark, the colors felt like dark red, and a sort of priestess guided three couples through phrases which were often danced in canon, so an image would appear and then reappear rapid-fire, one-two-three, as each of the boys leaped into the same place one after another.
Secret Places, by former SFB star Parrish Maynard (a man with excellent feet who now teaches at the school, he may have some impact on the boy's footwork in years to come) was a poignant and gorgeous dark idyll for two couples (Samantha Lynch and Sean Orza, and Kaia Tack with Owen Thorne). This ballet called for a seamless romantic flow of movement. They'd emerge from clean pirouettes already falling into the new phrase and gliding with unchecked momentum through silky transitions deep into the new movement. Such intimate partnering is a joy to see.
SF Ballet School scholarships announced
The San Francisco Ballet School announced the recipients of the Bob Ross Scholarship, the Keith White Memorial Scholarship, and the Eric Hellman Memorial Scholarship for the 2006-07 school year.
The Bob Ross Scholarship: Hideko Karasawa Originally from Nagano, Japan, Karasawa, 19, a student in the School's Level 8 class, performed Clara in Nutcracker in 2005.
The Keith White Memorial Scholarship: Graham Maverick Originally from Mill Valley, Maverick, 18, training in the Level 8 Men's class, has performed the Nephew/Prince, a Mouse and a Page in Nutcracker.
The Eric Hellman Memorial Scholarship: Rebecca Rhodes Originally from Libertyville, IL, Rhodes, in Level 8, has danced as a Snowflake and a Flower in Nutcracker, and performed Company roles in The Sleeping Beauty.