San Francisco Ballet opened their final shows with a free "company class," open to the public, in honor of National Dance Week. We got to see SFB dancers onstage at the Opera House under work-lights and in practice clothes, doing the dancers' daily work-out, where they maintain the basic technique they use in performance.
Much is revealed. You see why they are so thrilling in new works, and hit-and-miss in the classics. SFB has no company style. On the other hand, they have a magnificent uniformity of talent and quickness to try new things. From the very first knee-bends, the diversity of their backgrounds is obvious, and the levels of motor skills register as off-the-chart.
So of their last two programs, if you can only see one, the mixed-bill of contemporary works is the one to catch. It has not opened as of this writing, but the full-evening Balanchine Jewels has, and it swam into and out of focus.
Caveat # 1: The press always sees the ballet from orchestra seats, but Jewels looks best from above, where the kaleidoscopic patterns that the corps dancers make get their full effect. #2: Jewels will doubtless gain polish during the run. Opening night, of the three sections – Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds – only the jazzy Rubies really worked, though it must be said: it was fantastic. Vanessa Zahorian outdanced anything your reviewer has ever seen from her, and her partner Pascal Molat ran away with the whole evening, delivering a performance of such wit, energy, intelligence, I'd have to compare him to Louis Armstrong.
Jewels was a box-office smash when it was new, but it's very hard to cast new dancers in those roles – they must have the right personal qualities. Emeralds requires voluptuous softness in the upper body and exact, arrowy sharpness in the legs. When this ballet goes to the bad, it should be renamed "Creme de Menthe": druggy, sweet, smooth. It's actually a radical experiment in rhythm – can you dance on an imperceptible beat? A great performance is a mystical experience, as if they were dancing to your heartbeat, but Saturday, neither ballerina was up to it, though Dana Genshaft, Hansuke Yamamoto, and especially Frances Chung were amazing in the pas de trois. My spy said that the second cast was stunning.
By the end of Diamonds, Balanchine's built such an astonishing climax you'd swear there were 64 dancers onstage, though there are "only" 32. Imagine the most complex freeway interchange you can, and you'll fall short of the braided vectors that the corps dancers have to negotiate in the polonaise finale. Sophiane Sylve stood rock center amidst all this, spinning through every conceivable permutation of arms and legs. She was perfect in the adagio as well, but it was a deathly perfection.
They've reached the end of the season battered but undefeated. Many of their most important dancers are in the infirmary; Pierre-Francois Vilanoba, Sylve's heroic partner, is almost the only premier danseur left standing; it was wonderful to see him bring the house to a frenzy with a cyclonic solo of grand pirouettes.
Rory Hohenstein, whose snake-like spine made him the most fascinating male dancer we had, has returned as a guest artist for Program 8 to reprise his stunning role in Jorma Elo's Double Evil, a mesmerizing acid-trip of a ballet which morphs the usual classical moves so you're on the edge of your chair wondering if the dancers will make it. SFB's website has a clip of this that'll give you the idea. The highly-praised Russian Seasons, choreographed by former Bolshoi Ballet Director Alexei Ratmansky, enters the rep, and Yuri Possokhov's Sufi-influenced Fusion (new last year) rounds out the bill.
Arguably the best ballet company in the country. Through May 10.