San Francisco Ballet opened their regular season with two mixed bills, like a prelude to the new production of Swan Lake coming at the end of the month. Both shows continue this week. and constitute great nights on the town – there's much to enjoy, smooth moves, lots of skill, good-looking people, great live music. Both programs showed why SFB is now considered world-class, and also why it is still not one of the great companies. Namely, though the stage was bursting with talent – with life-saving performances from Pascal Molat, Sarah van Patten, Vanessa Zahorian, Tina LeBlanc, Luke Willis, and the most versatile cadre of corps dancers anywhere – superb dancing is not everything you could want from a ballet.
Nor did we always get stellar dancing from the stars. What happened to Taras Domitro? He simply blazed at the gala. He was, if possible, even more exciting than that as the Mercurial figure in the finale of Helgi Tomasson's Prism. In those ballets, he cut his figures so sharply, we were smarting under the attack. But he did not look confident at all in the Melancholic section of Balanchine's Four Temperaments; he came onstage with his ribs stuck out, and moved like a kid who did not want to go to school.
It is not his metier. Domitro is a vertical dancer; his awesome pirouettes and tremendous jumps can't help him here, for the Melancholic look is Picasso-esque, bent and angular; the hero falls over backwards a lot, and meets himself coming and going. Many of the steps in 4Ts are in fact African (Balanchine's neo-classicism incorporated new folk material from all over, especially jazz) and likely not taught in the Cuban ballet syllabus. So why did they put him in it? Surely they don't want another big star to go down to injuries and be out for the season.
The 4Ts was the only great choreography on either program, but it did not look great, neither Wednesday nor Friday nights, though Pascal Molat was heroic in Melancholic Wednesday, and Sofiane Sylve peeled the bark off Choleric. Balanchine's neo-classicism is sharp and fast, but it's yielded to a silver-age, more galant style that's fluid, melting, rounded. Both evenings began with neo-classical settings of piano concertos (Prism by Tomasson, to Beethoven; and Naked by Stanton Welch, to Poulenc) that owe more to Jerome Robbins' aesthetic than Balanchine's. Arms flow like grass in water, pirouettes melt into a caress, the back of the head leads around the corner oftener than the eyes.
Naked is truer to the 1930s Poulenc, who's playing at being Haydn, than Prism is to Beethoven, who's sincerely a Haydnist; indeed, Poulenc is like Haydn alternating uppers and downers. The first movement goes manic, and Zahorian takes a phrase of turns like a Mercedes on a test-track. Suddenly, the mood changes completely, and Frances Chung opens like an orchid into unbelievable tropical sensualities; there's a tiny cadenza that anticipates the glass-bead-curtain music of Steve Reich for Chung to swim offstage to. The adagio proper is like Haydn on Quaaludes, with Yuan Yuan Tan drifting, floating, soaring. Gorgeous, druggy.
Both Welch's and Tomasson's ballets put me in mind of Christian Dior: they were sumptuously elegant, beautifully cut and fitted, stunningly executed, though a little heartless. No problem with Poulenc, who is heartless, but not so with Beethoven. Prism succeeds in fitting neat moves to Beethoven's rhythms, but can't match the feelings the harmonies call up, though Sarah van Patten was phenomenally beautiful in the adagio. She divided her body in half, and created a poem of classical precision with her feet, while her upper body moved like a cat's that's being stroked. She was in that deep zone, as if she were dreaming.
Yuri Possokhov's very melty new ballet Into the Lilacs is sincere, beautiful, crowded with images, with lots of couples. It's got a push-pull action, surging that keeps the images from separating enough so you can see them, everybody's tangled like young lovers. It's set to lush neo-Romantic music by Boris Tchaikovsky that builds to a very fast finale.
Neither Val Caniparoli's Ibsen's House nor William Forsythe's in the middle, somewhat elevated stood up to a repeat viewing. Forsythe's piece has to be danced as if it were hip-hop, like slamming a mallet into a very thick steak. Only Pascal Molat brought enough muscle to it for me. Caniparoli's characters are all hysterical, for which I have limited tolerance. But the dancers are thoroughly committed to presenting these Victorian characters, and Luke Willis' unexpected poetry as Torvald from A Doll's House actually makes me consider going back and re-reading that play, his portrayal is so moving.