The B.A.R. dance critic Keith White prophesied 20 years ago that the future of choreography would lie in same-sex partnering, which would open up new ways of showing things we all need to know that can't be shown more clearly in any other medium.
Valentine's week brought two shows that proved him right. The most interesting things in the grand spectacle A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Opera House lay in incidental same-sex byplay, while nothing in that show was more interesting than the intimacies of the hole-in-the-wall show Dance Lovers, a suite of mostly same-sex duets for "couples, crushes and comrades" that took place in the Joe Goode Annex in the Potrero on Valentine's night itself. I hasten to add, though, that the audiences for both shows were ecstatic. The Opera House crowd jumped to their feet and screamed, such was the power and charm of the dancers in putting all this across.
Certainly I saw no choreography in the duets for the lovers in the Hamburg Ballet's Midsummer Night's Dream that I had not seen done better before elsewhere. The steals from Balanchine reminded me how much more visionary those moves were in their original setting, though the moves are in themselves interesting, and choreographer John Neumeier did give his dancers plenty of opportunities to sell the material. They rose to the occasion like Olympic skaters �" each flashy pirouette, leap, and lift got the heroic treatment from these superbly trained and completely committed dancers. Although their vehicle is a fussy, fidgety movement design that gets almost all of its meaning and mood from the music, the performers won the audience by dancing their hearts out.
The audience especially loved Puck (Alexandr Trusch), who flashed about the forest in split leaps and dazzling pirouettes executing the commands of the Fairy King (Thiago Bordin), trying to squeeze the nectar from the magic flower onto the eyes of the right lover, and mostly getting it wrong. Most beguiling was the broad comedy between him and the sleeping gardener Lysander (the super-hunky Edvin Revasov), who seems to fall asleep like a horse with his legs straight and his butt in the air; it's a very pretty butt, and Puck spends a lot of time coaxing it into position for squeezing the juice onto him.
Hamburg's artistic director is no fine craftsman, but he is a bold creator of spectacles. Jurgen Rose's sumptuous visual designs create grandly royal apartments and a truly magical forest, and the wedding clothes are being sewn on-stage as we watch, which creates a special theatrical anticipation and sets up the finale.
Most of all, he uses music shrewdly to create his social strata: classic Mendelssohn for the aristocracy, modernist walls of sound by Ligeti to evoke the awesome powers of the fairies, and best of all, disarmingly adorable hurdy-gurdy music for the shop-men who want to put on the play for the Duke's wedding.
The long ballet suddenly came to life as the rough-hewn men of Athens put on their campy classical tragedy at the wedding. To hear Verdi's hit tunes accompany Pyramus' fight with the lion and Thisbe's lament gave lift to a heavy evening. Neumeier's wit rose to Trockadero level at this point.
Hamburg Ballet brought their conductor, who led the SF Ballet orchestra with spirit. Helene Bouchet brought complex dignity to the leading roles of Hippolyta and the fairy queen. Carsten Jung flared bravely as Bottom (playing Pyramus), and Konstantin Tselikov was adorable in red pointe shoes as Flute (playing Thisbe).
Duo action
Meantime across town, of all the duets in Dance Lovers, the most poignant to me was that of James Graham, who has a crush on his straight friend Sebastian Grubb, who loves him back, just not that way. The sweet thing about this dance is how much room they give each other to express the affections that are there, and how large the emotions become as they animate the body of Graham: his moves burst from him in flashing pulses like light from a star. The chunky, heavily muscled Grubb dances in sweetly rounded, amazingly graceful small moves that circle back into himself, in ways that are clearly understandable versions of the ways people actually move when they are apologizing as kindly as possible for not being able to reciprocate.
The kissing duet of Charlie Slender and his fiance Buckley White looked at first dangerous, as if Slender were putting the make on an innocent who'd never felt this before, and seducing him. Buckley began to respond to the kisses, whereupon Slender began to back up, drawing White helplessly after him. But then there was a pause, and White initiated the kisses this time, and it was Slender who succumbed and followed him all around the room trying to keep lip-to-lip. More developed. Eventually, as the lights went down, the pelvises moved towards each other, and at the end you could not see daylight between them. The simplicity of it was classic.
Sheldon Smith and Lisa Wymore had the other wonderful dance �" they are married, and both teach in major dance departments (Mills and UC, respectively). Indeed, many of the performers this night came out of the UC dance program, and are used to creating dances with an idea in them. Smith and Wymore are adept at comedy, and their dance mimicked the rehearsal/creative process of making up a dance for this occasion. It was low burlesque �" the premise is Mr. and Mrs. Honeydew, i.e., She asks him, "Honey do this, honey do that," but in the lingo of performance theory. The script was very clever ["and maybe now some pelvic mobilizations"], and they ended up deciding to be natural, and just did some sweet slow dancing as the lights came down.
Each of the dances was charming in its way: the other performers were Chad Dawson and Braden Pells, Caroline Alexander and Andrew Ward, Jeremy Bannon-Neches and Demetria Schioldager. Jess Curtis and Rachel Dichter closed the show: him naked, her power-dressed, standing stock-still like the farmer and his wife in "American Gothic," exchanging lovers' sweet talk, him finally nibbling her ear and getting her to hold his hand "for a very long time."