recent SFB reviews more Renouf reviews SFB Website Renee's web site

The San Francisco Ballet's spring season now has begun to solidify. Helgi Tomasson continues to mixan astute combination of technical bravura and classical challenge; opportunities for the dancers to dance to the hilt and requirements for classical style, laced with small ensembles which permit individual dancers to emerge and shine. Program IV and V seem to epitomize his careful calculation.

Beads of Memory
Music: Tchaikovsky
Choreography: Helgi Tomasson
Costumes: Patricia Zipprodt
March 7: Katita Waldo; Roman Rykine; Leslie Young; Rachel Rufer; Chidozie Nzerem; Steven Norman; Vanessa Zahorian March 16: Yuan Yuan Tan

March 7: Proust:
Music:Saint- Saens
Choreography: Roland Petit
Costumes: Christine Laurent
Scenic Design: Rene Allio
Staged by Luigi Bonino
Lucia Lacarra, Yuri Possokhov

March 16: Two Bits
Choreography: Helgi Tomasson
Vanessa Zahorian and Gennadi Nedviguine

Bugaku:
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi
Choreography George Balanchine
Staged: Elyse Borne with coaching by Allegra Kent
Scenic Design: David Hays
Costume Design: Karinska
March 7: Muriel Maffre, Cyril Pierre
March 16: Lucia La Carra, David Palmer

Celts:
Traditional Music rendered on tape, including The Chieftans; Celtic Thunder
Choreography: Lila York
Costumes: Tunji Dada
March 7: Gennadi Nedviguine; Tina Le Blanc; David Palmer; Joanna Berman; Stephen Legate
March 16: Joan Boada;Tina Le Blanc; Muriel Maffre;Benjamin Pierce

To deal with the silliest first, the matter of Bugaku. Everything about the production and the execution is so totally handsome, the set, the lighting, the costuming and the dancers, for a total anthropological horror.

Dear Mr. Balanchine. He saw the lofty, remote all male dance form of Bugaku when the Imperial Household Musicians of Japan toured the United States, managed by David Garfias and his wife Yoko Tahara. This form, with roots in Buddhist practice from China, Korea and India, has red and green forms for dances of the Right and Left; please don't ask me which is which. Masks, helmets, bulky boots and costumes of heavy brocade and embroidery provide the surface for carefully symmetrical dances, usually done by two groups of four men on a raised platform within the Imperial Household Ground. The musicians are hereditary. I have been privileged to meet and converse with one of them, Suenobu Togi, who taught the gagaku ensemble for a number of years at the U.C.L.A. Department of Ethnomusicology. During an interview with me in 1968 Togi-san remarked casually, 'My family belonged to the Left and it moved over to the Right, about 900 years ago.' Hearing such a statement, it's obvious I might choke or sputter seeing what Mr. Balanchine made of this austere and ritualistic tradition: an elevated exercise in pseudo-Japanese kama sutra practice.

With the aid of Carolyn Carvajal March 16, who identified the ballet's vintage by its bikini style, I began to see the work as pretty silly, even though it was considered quite sexy when first performed. But the thought of the company's extraordinary skill and care going into such a pastiche simply speaks to Mr. Balanchine's conditioning as a Russian in exoticizing the East, never mind any bow to ethnic accuracy.

Deliberation ballet can muster, a lower center of gravity its exponents try to avoid. But the movement of the samurai does indeed require a lowered center to be convincingly macho, Japanese style. While elegant Cyril Pierre could not muster this physical rootedness; David Palmer could and did. In the matter of the women, both La Carra and Maffre were excellent. If La Carra looked more like the Western image of Cho Cho San, Maffre exuded a certain knowledge of protocol as well as the underlying drive to couple.

Now for Beads of Memory, Helgi Tomasson's first work, choreographed for Houston Ballet in 1985. To Variations on a Rococo Theme, Tomasson places an extraordinary demand on the principal feminine soloist. The violin continues weaving its intricate lacings of sound and the poor woman must make coherence out of the sound and her intricate vocabulary.

Celts was commissioned by Boston Ballet for a popular music program and first presented in August, 1995 in one of the biggest Irish strongholds in the United States. The final movement for Celts was created and received its world premiere March 21, 1996 one week after Riverdance premiered in the United States March 13 of the same year. York, a veteran of the Paul Taylor Company, has a definite feeling for ensemble and blending solo work in and out of the ebb and flow of group assignments. Celts was no exception, using the brisk, energy of Irish clogging as a take off, particularly with the hands-at-the-side, body erect, legs pumping characteristic of Irish jigs. This almost shooting quality was repeated in a pas de deux where Tina Le Blanc, held horizontal in the air shoots her legs as if she is slicing the air on the vertical. It made for a spectacular exit.

There was a section for lovers, first danced by Joanna Berman and Stephen Legate and the second viewing by Muriel Maffre and Benjamin Pierce. It possessed a touch of fierceness, not at each other, but about life and spirit. I remember a horizontal emphasis on forward and back motions between the lovers, which struck me as a legacy of York's years with Paul Taylor. The feeling established was not one of the sharp verticals which were prominent amongst the male ensemble or in the virtuosic pas de deux by The Couple In Red. The company loved dancing it, the energy, the sense of self within the rigors of Irish style. Celts has a vigor which sends you away invigorated, rather than the Sandpaper Opus which leaves you amused rather than stimulated. It will be interesting to see how that ballet works following Nureyev's Raymonda, Act III.

The insertion of Two Bits and Proust into the program to make a suitable length was refreshing. Helgi's pas de deux as pieces d'occasions still rank as some of his best choreographic achievements. Proust makes one want to the see the full work, created in 1992, mounted on the full company. Between Posokohov ‘s physical eloquence with emotion and La Carra's extraordinary suppleness, the eerie evocation of a dead love and the storms of the relationship was absorbing. They were particularly attuned to some of the physical demands Petit made in his choreography, such as Possokhov sliding under La Carra's body, raising it and then sitting almost vertically before repeating the movement, thrusting her across the floor as she remains relatively inert but compliant. The pas de deux is, unquestionably, in the same theatrical vein of Petit's accomplishment with Carmen.