© Erik Tomasson, SFB Ballet.co Festival Reviews: Prog A, Prog B, Prog C Programs A&B SFB New Works Festival Photographs Gallery of 30 images of all the pieces in the festival SFB 'Fusion' reviews SFB 'Within the Golden Hour' reviews SFB 'Changes' reviews recent SFB reviews more Renee Renouf reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

Working backwards, Changes is not a Taylor top drawer work, when one remembers the company performances in Company B, Spring Rounds, and Sunset, to Edward Elgar music, all during Helgi Tomasson’s artistic tenure. Barring the pas de deux between Benjamin Stewart in union suit pjs and Aaron Orza in fur-lined hooded full coat, where Orza danced and Stewart imitated, the tone is not tender. In size and quality the pair clearly realized a father-son relationship, bonding personified.

In Changes, Taylor’s dry, laconic side was given full exhibition to the sounds of The Mamas and The Papas, sporting corps members dancing with the abandon staggering technique affords, wearing Santo Loquasto’s costumes, seeming pick-up discards from the side streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, lighting on the murky side though the dancers were clearly illuminated. Courtney Elizabeth danced full out in a frenzied solo, suggesting heavy drug influence. The work bore kinship to Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe. Even the joint usage in Tharp’s work was lyric compared to the disheveled inhalations with indications of shooting interspersed, a frenzy, reckless, down-on-their luck young street flotsam, conceivably rebel offspring of affluent boomers. A world apart from me and most of the audience by choice, it is a Taylor essay of a world to be found in today’s San Francisco.

In the program’s middle Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour provided elegant expositions for six principal dancers, and a magical central circle mid-way through, glowing through skilful lighting. Evio Bossio’s music, with melodic and haunting qualities, seemed overlong. Katita Waldo and Damian Smith led the successive trio of principals, followed by Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba, and finally Maria Kochetkova and Joan Boada. My impression registered many lifts for the women, the straight leg, pointe perfect, stretched horizontally, at an angle, in supported grand jete. Wheeldon has lovely sensibilities requiring a second viewing. One interesting note was that Martin Pakledinaz’ costumes looked more like would-be houris than the prior visual impact of Woodall’s designs.

Possokhov’s Fusion was another matter. He is a more instantly readable choreographer, more willing to experiment with themes less classical; the supporting music, with its strong percussive reference to North Indian tabla rhythms, provided a perfect aural backdrop for the quasi Sufi-like figures seen as the curtain rose before Benjamin Pierce’s series of slightly angled, cloth squares changing colors as the dance progressed.

These seated male figures extended their torsos side to side, their arms at shoulder height in what might be considered fakir positions; east of Suez certainly, somewhere between Delhi and Isfahan. I grinned to myself, semi-convinced that soon Lorena Feijoo would emerge with short veil, headband and enormous pearl dividing her forehead. Designer Sandra Woodall would have none of that, instead clothing the women in form-fitting unitards ending in pants, softened by successive tones of one color torso-to-trouser hem: great solution, generic in suggestion, modern in realization. As the tunic and capped figures disappeared into the wings, from the rear, Feijoo emerged, dancing a short variation, before being followed successively by Kristin Long, Vanessa Zahorian, Yuan Yuan Tan; their partners Joan Boada, Gennadi Nedvigin, Jaime Garcia Castilla, Damian Smith soon followed. When the women arrived, they soon swivelled their hips, undulating their torsos all en pointe, effectively enforcing what a friend said to me “The Russians love exotisme,” a fascination reinforced in Russian ballet librettos.

Throughout the provocative sound of Graham Fitkin and Rahul Dev Burman’s music, the mid-East figures, the women and their partners interwove, sometimes both groups of men taking something from each other, sometimes the women with the mid-East figures; the Sufi-like figures imitated women’s movement while the women took up the straight angles of the Sufi gestures. There was a particularly effective pas de deux between Tan and Smith, testimony to the advantage of having partnered a dancer and knowing her abilities.

Possokhov has a remarkable talent to make a slight theme interesting, even absorbing, particularly for me who is dotty for almost anything east of the Indus. While the level of his fascination did not reach his Magrittomania achievement, Fusion made an enjoyable, intelligent essay in cross-cultural influences and surely imagination.