In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

258 | New Works Festival: San Francisco Ballet War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco April 22–27, 2008 Festival review, Dance Magazine, July 2008 This festival of ten world premieres, celebrating sFB’s seventy-fifth anniversary , put its faith in contemporary ballet. Almost all the works had live music (hallelujah!) and elegant sets. I would wager that six of them will have long lives. The three pieces that were about sheer movement and music also happened to be the three that I would travel great distances to see again: Jorma Elo’s Double Evil, Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, and Stanton Welch’s Naked. The combination of tutus and drums thrust Double Evil into a mode that could be called tribal/classical. The snaking heads; undulating bodies; and big wheeling, slicing lifts that have become Elo’s signature moves were put to propulsive use here. Inventiveness flowed, momentum mounted, and the dancers reveled in the music by Philip Glass and Vladimir Martynov. In the oeuvre of Elo’s dances here in the United States, Double Evil (someone please help this man with his titles) is among his exhilarating best. Wheeldon’s Golden Hour was calmer and more intense. Five couples in shimmery blues, ochers, and greens (costumes by Martin Pakledinaz) performed Wheeldon’s typical bent-knee lifts and legs-like-scissors lifts to Glass-influenced music by Ezio Bosso. But I’ve never seen Wheeldon slow down as radically as he did in the central duet for the mesmerizing Sarah Van Patten and her partner Pierre-François Vilanoba. In this exquisite pas de deux, she makes a developpé seem like an alchemical reaction. For piquant use of music, Stanton Welch’s Naked was a winner. The accents in the choreography beautifully intersected with those of the Poulenc score. A single girl in salmon-colored (naked?) tutu seemed to collapse part of her body just at the moment one hears a kind of raindrop in the music. The synergy between the partners and the single dancer helped crystallize certain moments, like when four women were in arabesque in the four corners , one woman held aloft also suddenly struck an arabesque. Clarity of shape, musicality, and choreographic surprise came together in this sparkling ballet. Standout pieces for their vividness of mood were James Kudelka’s The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful, Yuri Possokhov’s Fusion, and Val From 2007 to 2012 | 259 Caniparoli’s Ibsen’s House. Kudelka’s Ruins was nostalgic, sad, noir. A small group of women in feathered, tutu-y skirts drifted in from downstage right. Their tutus were dripping with torn shreds of something—perhaps the women were swans from somebody’s attic. Their dreamy bourrées allowed them to shift and glide among themselves, changing places against a velvet darkness (lighting by James F. Ingalls). This impressionistic dream turned dangerous when three Victorian-suited men started to partner these creatures . Toward the end Yuan Yuan Tan entered in a sequined red and black dress. Vilanoba, the count with the longest waistcoat, danced with her in a way that felt like he was trapping her—just a shade Dracula-esque. But it was that first image of swans in an attic that lingered through the whole ballet. To the sounds of tabla music by Graham Fitkin and Rahul Dev Burman, Possokhov’s Fusion finds four men in white dervish-like outfits sitting on the floor doing chest and shoulder isolations like you would do in a jazz class. Four women, and then additionally four men, emerged from the upstage darkness wearing sleek blues and grays. A shape of elbows up and palms down lent an Eastern flavor. There was a breathtaking scene where Yuan Yuan Tan seemed to get sucked toward Damian Smith past a flank of the four dervishes, and the two got caught up in a beautiful pas de deux. In the end, the four men in blue performed the same chest isolations the dervishes had opened with, signaling a complete transfer of style—with many stories along the way. Caniparoli’s gloss on Ibsen’s female characters (based loosely on five of his plays) was a bit Tudor-like in its portrayal of angst-ridden women, but less spare, more lush in the body. Each of the five women was assigned her own signature gesture. The five men seemed to suffer as much as the women, but with less individuality. They were all given the same gestures: fingertips meeting and swiveling around...

Share