The five members of Zhukov Dance Theater gave a supremely elegant evening of dances midweek last week at the SFJazz Center, a new 750-seat theater on Franklin Street with fabulous acoustics and comfortable seating looking down onto an arena stage that puts the show, so to speak, right in your hands. Live music must sound fabulous there �" there'd be nothing to distract from the sound, and you'd hear absolutely everything that happened. But the very elements that make the sound so live (board-and-batten walls like grey foam core corduroy, black boxing-ring stage, bleacher seating) bleakened Zhukov's dance spectacle, which was anxious to begin with, and made it seem like an episode of Ender's Game, like exercises in preparation for futurist gladiatorial combat. The happy ending, which the program promised, seemed to me like yet another contest in which all our humanist values have already been hazarded and lost.
Zhukov is Russian; he's lived amongst us as one of the great exponents of St. Petersburg classicism since the early 90s, when he joined San Francisco Ballet. Before he left Russia, he had impressed Balanchine's muse, Suzanne Farrell, who'd come to Russia to set Scotch Symphony on the Kirov Ballet, as one of the most eager dancers to learn the Balanchine style (she cast him in the lead). Zhukov was one of the first to follow Nureyev and Baryshnikov in coming to the West in hopes of finding freedom to express himself.
He came here. And though he was schooled in the rigorous correctness of the Vaganova method, he was longing to find a way of living as a dancer in the present world, rather than the "Age of Delirium," as the Russian scholar David Satter has described the Soviet system of hypocrisy. For the Russian ballet was, inside the Kremlin, understood to be an instrument of propaganda, a way of selling a kind of ideal that the commissars understood to be a great lie.
I've been watching his dances since 1991, when he was already creating cryptic modernist ballets. I see in his work the fear of the KGB, the fear of giving yourself away �" and also the fear of living in fear and never finding your heart's desire. It echoes the fears I had as a queer growing up in Mississippi �" actually the experience of declaring myself to someone I adored, who was shocked and denounced me. Perhaps I simply project my feelings onto his work because they do not refuse the projection. The same classic reserve that made him a glorious prince makes his dances resistant to interpretation.
His five dancers had mostly solos, most of which began with the sound of distant thunder and then switched to baroque cello music, each of which oozed a sensuous longing laced with moments frozen with fear. A prominent motif was a limb that would catch, freeze, and then begin to tremble violently. Most beautiful was a moment when the dancer was caught facing away from us in a deep lunge, and the long leg began to quiver and go crazy.
"Contemporary ballet" belongs to the countries that were overrun by the Nazis and the Soviets. Blood has soaked into their ground, and they have reason to fear a recurrence. Depending on who you are, Americans have never lost a war (until Vietnam). But Native Americans would not agree with that, nor would African Americans. American air is now tainted with anxiety, and if it's played right, it's popular.
About a year ago, Beyonce was accused of stealing moves from a choreographer she claimed "nobody ever heard of," Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The evidence, posted all over YouTube, was staggeringly clear �" the coolest moves in "Countdown," affectless, cool, deadpan �" came from Belgium, from a film of the contemporary dance company Rosas, headed by that lady nobody's ever heard of. My point is, contemporary ballet is sexy, elegant, gorgeous, dripping with cool, but also as empty-seeming as an A&F ad. It's high art, but all its elements are happening �" and it does not need to be changed much to make it commercial.
Also on Zhukov's show was a longer piece, equally desolating, by the Israeli choreographer Idan Sharabi. The five heroic dancers were Christopher Bordenave, Jeremy Bannon-Neches, Doug Baum, Nick Korkos, and Rachel Petrice Fallon. Interestingly, three of them have studied extensively with Alonzo King, whose Lines Contemporary Ballet just celebrated their 30th anniversary here with a show I was very sorry not to be able to see, but which all my dance friends said was extraordinary.
The two ballets during Zhukov's evening were obsessively watchable, and the dancers were gorgeous at every moment. But, as I say, I've had nightmares every night since.