San Francisco Ballet is riding a triumphal wave through their 75th anniversary year. Extra festivities marked the two-week run of their near-sold-out Jerome Robbins program. Big crowds turned out for two Words on Dance Symposia, to hear dancers who'd starred in West Side Story and other Robbins hits. They talked about the torments and satisfactions of creating Robbins roles. And a couple hundred former SFB dancers gathered last Saturday in the Museum of Performance & Design, next door to the Opera House, for an emotional alumni reunion, surrounded by an exhibition of costumes they'd danced in and photographs of themselves in their moments of glory.
Dancers live a long time — their performing careers are brief, but the art lives in them and keeps them younger than most for decades. Studies show dancing is good for the brain. The star of the reunion was unquestionably the ballerina Jocelyn Vollmar, whose career flourished in the 1940s, and who was America's first Snow Queen in SFB's complete version of The Nutcracker. Vollmar still commands the stage with a microphone in her hand, speaking with ease and grace of the struggles they met and overcame, addressing a crowd who'd faced their own difficulties and beat them back somehow.
Though dancers make it look easy, it's not been easy; 20 years ago, SFB was just emerging from bankruptcy and a Save Our Ballet campaign that saw dancers in costumes in the street begging the city to come to the rescue. After Ford Foundation help and a professional management turn-around that included the spectacular firing of artistic director Michael Smuin — a searing episode, with front-page headlines for weeks, and proxy-fights waged on the front steps of the Opera House — management was put in the hands of the impeccable classicist Helgi Tomasson, who has shepherded the company through two decades of balanced budgets and steadily improving reviews, to the point where the company is now considered one of the very good ballet companies in the world.
The party was a double event: a reunion for the dancers, but also the rebirth of the Library for the Performing Arts under its new name. Just inside the door, former SFB Director Lew Christensen looked down from the wall in the famous George Platt Lynes photograph: nearly naked, nipples showing, inside the cellophane grease-monkey costume designed for his ballet Filling Station by Paul Cadmus. Next to him, posterized to larger than life-size, a ballerina in a space-age costume lunged into the scene: it's Elise Reimann as the Principal Dynamo from the famous Ballet Mecanique, choreographed by the company's founder Adolph Bolm, and the hit of the ballet's first season in 1933. The links between SFB and the Museum go back to its beginning, since the core of its holdings remains the collection of watercolors, sketches, designs, and costumes of Russell Hartley, designer/costumer for SFB's early years. It's said that Hartley made half of the costumes for the first production of The Nutcracker out of the curtains for the old Cort Theater, which he bought when it went out of business.
The exhibition (which runs until August) is itself a wonder. You can stand nose–to-velvet with the deep-blue doublet Romeo wore when he met Juliet, and there's the gown she wore to the ball. There's a vermilion costume from the Ballets Russes Coq d'Or, constructed by Karinska's studio in London. Across the way there are maquettes, including a scale model for the buffalo that emerged from the fog in Smuin's protest ballet, A Song for Dead Warriors, inspired by Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.
Starstruck corps
Reunions bring up a lot of emotions. Rachelle Reyes, who said she danced in the corps behind Ms. Vollmar, looked starstruck and decades younger than she must actually be as she told me how excited she was to be here. Jamie Zimmerman, who once had the most beautiful feet in the company, still radiates energy like a star, says she's a mom now and has a school up north, and admits when pressed that the kids still think she has a beautiful foot. Jennifer Blake, who took the stage by storm in Ballo della Regina, still vibrates like a rapier and was electric with excitement to see dancers she'd shared the stage with — like Eric Hoisington, whose heroic muscularity made a matinee idol out of him a decade ago, when he danced like a Rodin statue come to life. He's living in New York now and teaching. For those of us who survived the AIDS era, it's not hard to remember falling asleep dreaming of David McNaughton, the great star of the era when all possibilities seemed still open; he was at the party looking like the Dude's modest younger brother. McNaughton once seemed to live in the air. It was a way of life he learned from his teacher, arguably the school's greatest teacher, Anatole Vilzak, whom McNaughton took into his home in his dying years. He's writing a poem about Mr. Vilzak.
There's a clutch of alums who direct ballet companies, in Cincinnati, Boston, Portland. And SFB alums Val Caniparoli and Julia Adam are in demand as choreographers. But teaching is the alum's mainstay. Lucky for us: as a result, the area is studded with ballet schools, and it follows that the audience is rich with members who can dance. It's impossible to overstate the importance of SFB School; in 75 years, they've not only trained the dancers, they've trained those who've trained the audience.