San Francisco Ballet began their 75th anniversary season last Wednesday night with a gala performance that started off like a shareholder's meeting at Grudge, Grindem, and Weep. It was an evening that strove to impress and certainly did that — the dancers are amazingly skilled, and they gave us their all — but for a while it was very short on fantasy, wit, and graciousness, and despite all the beautiful legs, it seemed it would never get beautiful.
The plans must have looked good on paper: it's the diamond jubilee, right, it needs to be monumental? SFB is America's first, the oldest continuously operating ballet company in the US. So something to show off the SFB School, key to the ballet's success, should start the evening's dancing. Well, first the speeches and parade of trustees. Oh, let's include all the Christensen Medal Winners. And present this year's, too, don't you think? And pretend to surprise him? And he claimed to be surprised (though he was the emcee, and it was listed in the program). Then parade all the recently retired ballerinas.
Well, the young folk were valiant, and showed talent and skill, but they were out there for half an hour in a grueling ballet about kids dying young; then the retired ballerinas entered onto a stage so dark you could only make out Muriel Maffre, who had the savvy to wear a gown with a white bodice so she caught some light. They all sat and watched a duet that calls for dead-pan chutzpah danced by a little-me ballerina, who forced her gaiety and pushed herself to no avail. Which meant that the audience had sat there an hour and so far had no fun at all.
It is a credit to all the performers that the show regained any impetus at all. The Russian virtuoso Guennadi Nedviguin put the show back on keel with the single most dazzling pirouette I've seen in a 12-month, ending it in a soft, brilliantly placed pose that could not have been perfected. His partner, Katita Waldo, had been no slouch in her half of the hot number ("Two Bits," a perfect little display piece by Helgi Tomasson). Sofiane Sylve, a Dutch-trained virtuoso guesting with the company, did not perform any of those pirouettes which make her one of the wonders of the world, but showed blazing moxie in a "modern relationship" duet by Hans van Manen. At first, she's really not impressed, but when she finally falls for the guy, she opens up and goes all the way.
There was a splendid example of the Russian chestnut pas de deux ("Esmeralda," in which our darling new ballerina Maria Kuchetkova kicked a tambourine held at shoulder height, then bopped it against a hip balancing on tip-toe). She was ably supported by the Cuban virtuoso Joan Boada. There were two jazz dances: old-fashioned Rogers & Hammerstein schmaltz, "If I Loved You," given a deeply dramatic reading by Sarah van Patten; and a hot new thing by choreographer Wade Robson, which didn't really give Rory Hohenstein and Matthew Stewart a chance to show how tuned in they are to American popular dancing. (That moment will come in March, when they do West Side Story Suite on Program 4.)
Tina LeBlanc has recovered and looked wonderfully romantic dancing to Rachmaninoff, and the two French ballerinos Pascal Molat and Nicolas Blanc paraded their stunts with such verve we were finally back in gala-land, where fantasy, wit and the frankly unbelievable ought to be the order of the day. They know better than to take these dazzling tricks seriously, and offered them up as a form of droll courtesy "after you, Alphonse; no, after you, Gaston," while chasing each other about the stage at terrifying speeds.
There was more French wit in a classical pas de deux that turned the conventions inside out. Vanessa Zahorian and Davit Karapetyan (in real life an item) finished off the show as the stars in the polonaise finale of Balanchine's Diamonds. It's a big, full-company number that sends squads of people stretching their long silky legs in unexpected directions all over the stage. The ballerina has to bring all this to a focus even as all these courtiers are jumping and turning. Zahorian was specially coached by Suzanne Farrell, Balanchine's muse, who originated the role. It will be fascinating to see how she grows in the role, an opportunity that comes this week since Diamonds forms the finale of the triple bill on Program 1 that opened the ballet's subscription season Tuesday night.
They've got an ambitious year ahead, culminating in a festival of new works by many of the finest choreographers working today. Bring them on!