Dance always does well in hard times – back during the Great Depression, when ballet was just getting its start in this country, the audience came out of nowhere and mobbed the theaters. Everybody commented then on its sudden popularity, and it only grew more popular during the war years. And here now, San Francisco Ballet (though plagued with injuries and rumors of cutbacks) is dancing with flamboyant brilliance to packed houses, and has just enjoyed a completely sold-out run of Swan Lake.
They're looking brilliant still in the two mixed bills, Programs 4 & 5, which opened last week. It's partly us, because seeing them look so confident makes us feel better. And it's partly them, for they feed off our energy – 3,000 of us (the Opera House holds a crowd the size of the town I grew up in). That makes for a lot of joy.
We're not deluded. The things they're doing are astoundingly clear. Half the ballets on these two programs are virtuosic pieces, with trajectories as intricate as circuits on a motherboard. They require absolute precision of execution (Helgi Tomasson's pure-dance ballet, On a Theme of Paganini, Prog. 4; and two ballets from the all-Mark Morris Prog. 5, A Garden and Joyride). Again and again the dancers meet the challenges, stop on a dime, change directions at lightning speed, and continue to fill out the designs and make them make sense. Much of the pleasure comes from seeing it work out so perfectly.
Morris' A Garden is a fantasia of order amid mazes, built on Baroque dance steps and figures suggested by the music of Couperin on which it's set. It's like looking down at the Bay: traffic moving across the bridge, boats spanking along under it, birds flying by, and the Marine layer coming in through the Golden Gate, advancing on the East Bay like an army - so many groups, each with its own agenda and consistency, dancing in the same space, but in very different ways and without interfering with each other. It's very difficult, perhaps even more difficult than Joyride, which is set to brand new music by John Adams. It was the best of last year's New Works Festival, and has continually shifting rhythms, which this year looked for the first time like a language the dancers really "speak." And they keep it beautiful.
No matter what, these dancers are beautiful: Martyn Garside, Taras Domitrio, Maria Kochetkova, Diego Cruz, Vanessa Zahorian, Brett Bauer, Matthew Stewart, Jeremy Rucker, Lorena Feijoo, Alexandra Lorey, from top to bottom of the ranks, everyone is beautiful to the point where it makes your heart ache.
Prog. 4 also contains two ballets with recognizable people in them. Lilac Garden is a tragedy of manners from the 30s, choreographed by Anthony Tudor, which is one of the founding documents of American Ballet Theater's repertory. Tudor specialized in creating tense characters whose smallest gestures revealed how constrained they were. This ballet was once searingly dramatic, and may be again, but it requires absolute consistency of style to make it really telling, which was not there opening night. My spies tell me that Saturday night's cast came closer to the mark.
The best thing of the whole run, however, is the comedy of manners by Jerome Robbins that closed Prog. 4. The Concert, which he made shortly before West Side Story, is a mysteriously profound and hilarious look at what audiences do when they go to hear Chopin played at a concert. The company pianist, Michael McGraw, who's on the stage playing the Steinway grand, has some hilarious Victor Borge-esque moments of his own, and ends the ballet chasing the dancers all over the stage and must be regarded as one of the stars of this piece, which ranges from slapstick to wistful bemusedness in its effects, which I won't spoil by trying to describe them. I'll just say that even the smallest role in this ballet offers a dancer a chance to shine. Pascal Molat, Sarah van Patten, Erin McNulty, Bruce Willis, Martyn Garside, and Danielle Santos danced at the very highest level, and afforded a kind of pleasure you can only get in live theater, amidst a crowd of thousands who are out of their minds with delight.