San Francisco Ballet has ended their season sailing full steam ahead, despite coming into the home season off an exhausting tour that injured many first-rank dancers, some of whom were on the bench until the end. But corps dancers stepped up and made the fans proud. Standees – the people who come back to see the show repeatedly, to check out how Liz or Martyn or Masha would do a classic role, so many times they can't afford seats – seemed thicker in their ranks than ever midseason, and thronging the rail for Tina LeBlanc's farewell.
Fans of Tina LeBlanc, of whom I am one, have followed her in the spirit of John Muir seeking Nature at the clearest, cleanest, most sublime. The house was full of emotion that last night, but we all felt very different things. Me, I am still in denial. She danced better than ever, showing you whole phrases where others only show single steps – e.g., in Balanchine's Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, she'd show not only how the leg went up but also the arc it cuts coming back down, and emphasize the transfer of weight onto that foot, before cutting under with the other and executing the frothiest little jump, both legs aquiver, and then standing there glowing as if to say, "Did you see that?"
Examples like this were legion. She did nothing wrong all night. How do you spell "flawless?" The only reason I could see for her to retire was that she has two boys whose upbringing she wants to give her heart to. They came out at the bows to present her a flower, and the way she knelt down to hug them told us plenty.
With LeBlanc, what you see is what you get. She can move faster, more accurately, with the least misjudgment of the amount of force required, so that at dazzling speeds, she could shift an emphasis, soften the attack, and win your heart with her delicacy. Her dancing is good medicine. Not only does it lift your spirits, it improves your co-ordination, balance, reflexes, and somehow expands your own sense of possibility.
So it's fitting that she ended her career in San Francisco, which has always been about "can do." The new dancers in the company all look up to her, as do the students at the San Francisco Ballet School, who turned out in full force for her farewell. They're very fine dancers themselves and have their end-of-year performances this week at Yerba Buena, May 20-22, for which only a few tickets remain.
We won't get to see SFB again until Aug 16, when they'll do their annual free show at Stern Grove. But there's big-time dancing coming up as Cal Performances ends their season in Berkeley, with the Mark Morris Dance Group presenting his most wonderful work at the end of the month, and the Bolshoi Ballet from Moscow, which is probably the greatest performing ensemble in the world at the moment, dancing the haunting classic La Bayadere .
Both these companies have the two things SFB lacks at the moment: a consistent company style, and thorough-going coaching of all the dancers in the finest degrees of shading the phrases. SFB's dancers are quick studies, like studio musicians, and can "sight-read" anything. In new works, they can grasp and hold your attention and make it through anything. But the very eclecticism of the repertory, and the huge range of training the international stars bring with them, mean that only in the ballets that they perfected in their tour last summer did they dance with a deep understanding of the phrasing. Within the Golden Hour was mesmerizing, in a way that the classics Swan Lake, Diamonds, Lilac Garden were not. No dance company can be great without large reserves of rehearsal time.
Robert Cole ends his long run at Cal Performances, which he has built into the foremost presenter on the West Coast, with a very big bang indeed. Morris's L'Allegro, il penseroso, ed il Moderato is a huge work requiring the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the University Chorus, and superb solo singers, and a stage like Zellerbach Hall's, which will allow the fantastic imagery his dancers create to float before our eyes as conjured up by Handel's music. Morris' dancers have a profound understanding of the way the dance fits the music, and the kind of energy the differing textures require. Of all his work, this is probably the most satisfying.
The Bolshoi Ballet rose under the Soviets to become Russia's premiere export, and has thrived under good leaders over the last 20 years so that their technique has remained heroic and their dancing is even freer and more inspired. They present the Petipa classic La Bayadere with a consistency of style, which means that the illusions should be absorbing, though the Zellerbach stage is not really big enough for all their effects. Expensive, but not to be missed.