Big-time dance kicked back in last week as the gala opening of San Francisco Ballet's season showed 10 brilliant dances in quick succession to festive effect, and then the real season began with the tragedy of Giselle. The company is now rightly regarded as one of the best in the world – not in the top rank with the great Russian, French, British, and New York companies, but right behind them.
So far this year is slightly underwhelming, as if the dancers have not quite got their stage-presence back. There's been much technique, strength, accuracy, brilliance on display, but the luster has been spotty. It won't be long til they're back in top form.
The gala last Wednesday was really a party that lasted til 3 a.m., with professional dance entertainment in the Opera House for a couple of hours – the audience as much on show as the dancers, the parade of costumes onstage almost out-flashed by the feathers and sequins in the house.
Galas are variety shows, descendants of imperial command performances, and suited to the royal attention span. SFB's galas are more serious than most. This one included three new duets that merit another look: a postmodern study in close-in partnering for Tiit Helimets and Sarah van Patten, a sexy duet for Lorena Feijoo and Vitor Luiz to a bolero from the score for Almodovar's Talk to Her, and a dreamy moon-child piece for Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith to the ravishing adagio from Ravel's famous piano concerto (choreographed by Val Caniparoli, Yuri Possokhov, and Edwaard Liang, respectively). The last piece resembles Ashton's Monotones enough to make you remember Ashton made his ballet for an occasion like this.
It was a chance to see new dancers for the first time. The stand-outs were Vito Mazzeo, for astounding aplomb in the heroic Black Swan pas de deux, and the new corps dancer Nicole Ciapponi, who's got speed, attack, moxie, and a hilarious wit; I can't wait to see her again, in anything.
It was also heartening to see the great dancing of the gorgeous students from the SFB School out on the disco floor at the bash in City Hall after the show. We'll be seeing plenty of them filling out the corps de ballet in the season ahead, starting with Giselle and in the huge cast of Symphony in C, the glorious ballet by Balanchine which is the finale of Program 2 (Feb. 3-13), to be reviewed next week.
Giselle got off to a slightly rocky start on opening night; both stars wobbled on the final turns of their first-act solos, and the ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan sometimes failed to point her feet when she jumped. But the big moments, especially in the second act, were extremely beautiful. The corps de ballet danced heroically throughout, and the supporting stars were superb: Pascal Molat as the boy she does not love, and Gennadi Nedviguin in the first act divertissement, and especially Elana Altman, who danced the Queen of the Wilis with majesty in the second; she was fantastically beautiful when she took the air. The production will doubtless polish itself during the two-week run.
Giselle is one of the great classic ballets, historically important as the culmination of the Romantic ballet. It's one of the first to use dancing on pointe, and the best to exploit the fantastic atmospheres that gaslight could create onstage. But it's bigger than that: as Balanchine said, Giselle is to ballet as Hamlet is to poetic drama. The material is so juicy, so suited to its own art form, that every great-hearted performer wants a chance to probe it, and audiences can't tire of seeing how the new generation makes it its own.
Like Hamlet, it is a ghost story, with a heroine who goes mad and a delicate prince who is not ready to take on the burden of being in charge of the state; and as with Hamlet, there are many questions as to what's real and what's illusion; what's the brave, noble thing to do; and finally, how easy it is to get it all wrong.
Giselle has two scenes: Giselle's farmyard, and the graveyard where she's buried. She is a peasant girl, and a nobleman disguised as a peasant wins her heart, which breaks when she discovers that he's already engaged to the noblewoman whom chance brings in a hunting party to her house. Giselle loves him because he, too, loves to dance. In the second act, her ghost saves his life.
Our production's haunted forest is one of the greatest stage-settings I've ever seen; it rivals something from The Lord of the Rings as the kind of place in which impossible things could happen – such as, in this case, that the ghosts of jilted maidens (the Wilis) may rise from the dead and make unwary men dance til they fall down dead.
The Wilis' power is laid out most explicitly in the implacable forward advance they make, like planes taking off from the decks of aircraft carriers in war movies, where the dancers lift one leg behind them, lay out flat, and chug forward in interlacing lines. This is interrupted by the flying advance of their queen, launched like a javelin.
There will be five ballerinas playing the role over the course of the run; Maria Kochetkova has an unparalleled lightness and elevation (she gets aloft like a kid on a skateboard); Sarah van Patten is likeliest to go mad in a way that breaks your heart; Vanessa Zahorian has greatness in her. Watch this space for reviews of more performances.