Our big-time dance season kicked off with San Francisco Ballet's Gala Opening Night just in time for it to seem like San Francisco's salute to Obama's Inauguration. What a show – deep down, ballet is akin to a big display of fireworks, one starry shape appearing in a flash, only to fade and vanish as another bursts into view, on and on. SFB showed every mood and style from classical to romantic, dreamy to raucous to low-down, and revealed the huge range of these dancers.
Ballet is a vanishing act, and even the most serious ones depend for their effects on creating continuous wonder. It forces you to ask if this can be real. A ballerina like Tina LeBlanc, who is one of the greatest dancers in the world, gets you in her grip by moving with incredible lightness and rapidity from one starry shape to another, often spinning, with no fear or disorientation, going with dazzling confidence where she wants to, and at her own pace. When she hits the end of a phrase and holds still for a moment, you pinch yourself and ask if you really did just see what you know you just saw. Similarly, Yuan Yuan Tan, as the ghost of Giselle, hovered on tip-toe with no effort, as if she were floating, for an unbelievably long moment, like a ghost. Most wonderful of all was the new Cuban star, boy wonder Taras Domitro, who infected us with the illusion that we're doing what he was doing, and only when his whole dance was over did the spell lift. I felt it, but it was not just me – he made us scream.
Great dancers don't need great choreography, but it helps. Jorma Elo's Double Evil is actually shapeless overall, but it offers tons of fun steps, and James Sofranko, Pascal Molat and Garen Scribner tore up the stage in an excerpt. Exponentially more fun, however, was the brilliance that Molat et al. showed in Balanchine's Stars and Stripes, which is structurally as beautiful as the solar system (wheels within wheels) and closed the evening. These hilarious dances to John Philip Sousa's marches – same guy who wrote the song the SF Gay Freedom Marching Band was playing as they strutted past the Obamas' viewing stand – made me laugh out loud and feel free at last to enjoy this riotous music again.
Under Helgi Tomasson, San Francisco Ballet has gone from being America's best regional company to world-class. The roster is so strong that even with half the first string on the bench, they could still field bravura dancers and put on a dazzling show. Outstanding performers who put it over the top were Frances Chung, Lorena Feijoo, Pauli Magierek, Katita Waldo, Sofiane Sylve, and Ms. LeBlanc's charming, fresh-faced partner who replaced three others who fell to injuries, the brilliant corps dancer Isaac Hernandez. www.sfballet.org.
Suite dreams
Dances that tell a story come in many forms, but those that speak to our community have a special value. And there is no-one more poignant, honest, refreshing, and imaginative telling the stories of LGBT lives and loves than the transgendered choreographer Sean Dorsey, whose new show goes up this weekend at Dance Mission (24th and Mission). It's a must-see for all of us. Choreographically, Dorsey is a miniaturist; his best dance-theater pieces are sketches, small duets that embody the longings and insecurities of first love. He gets the moves uncannily right.
Dorsey's premiering Uncovered, a suite of dances based on the struggles of Lou Sullivan (1951-91), a trailblazing transsexual gay activist who lived here and left his diaries to the GLBT Historical Society. Dorsey has immersed himself in the Sullivan documents; odds are strong that he's brought Lou's story to life.
Don't be surprised to see the rest of the dance world there. As with Joe Goode, Dorsey has a big talent that resonates with audiences who don't think of themselves as gay. He has the full faith of the dance community, having won two Isadora Duncan Awards in his short career. Stageworthy!
Briefly noted: Queers know better than to dismiss the Theater of the Ridiculous, and it must go on record that the recent Fire Ballet at the Crucible in Oakland was stageworthy to the max. Vampire lesbians, three of them; towers of flames, rotating wheels of fire, leather, chains, a working dungeon, a 20-foot plated-steel dragon with a working mouth that breathed fire and wings that flapped, the sexiest Dracula (Brett Womack) I've ever seen, and at peak mayhem a red-hot sword being hammered for real on a huge anvil near a red-hot crucible that poured glowing metal in a 10-foot stream while 25 zombies vamped a number from Rocky Horror. But all that would not have amounted to much without the near-genius choreography of Viktor Kabaniev, who staged 20 "putting on the bite" duets, and as many "o my God, I'm turning into a vampire" solos with mounting convulsive energy (the last one in mid-air) and without repeating himself, so each one cranked it up another notch. Phineas T. Barnum was not a greater showman than this.
Lastly, the brief glimpse of the New York-based Lar Lubovitch Dance Company we got Jan. 15 at the (sold-out) SF Jewish Community Center should make us long for more. Not only can his dancers move like gods, but the out-gay choreographer's meditation on M/M attraction and repulsion, envy, hero-worship, betrayal, lust, longing, fury, and regret – all this embodied in his Men's Stories – is one that needs to be seen again and again, before it yields up all its secrets.