Balanchine at the SF Ballet

An all-Balanchine program being performed this week at the San Francisco Ballet is all about big ballets with lots of dancers in each of the trio of works. It started with the 1967 Diamonds which is usually performed as the finale to Jewels, right after the dreamy Emeralds and the jazzy Rubies. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

The ballet evokes the dazzling luxury of Imperial Russia to the music of Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony, minus the first movement. What stood out was the joy of simply watching Balanchine's use of bodies as architecture, and also how peerlessly he married music and movement. The dancing by everyone was first-rate and so was the orchestra under conductor Martin West.

Balanchine's first ballet created in the United States, the 1934 Serenade, is a calmer beauty for many women and a couple of men. Set to one of Tchaikovsky's loveliest set of tunes, the Serenade in C Major for Strings, the ballet started off with a large group of motionless women with their right arms outstretched to the horizon before moving into more abstract physical architecture and a yearning story that is not explicit.

The one male-female duet was danced by Wei Wang and Jasmine Jamison. Wang has become one of my favorite dancers in the company, and in this performance I realized he may be the best partner in the whole company, lifting women effortlessly in the air as if they were a delicate feather rather than visibly gearing up for a heft.

The final ballet was the 1958 Stars and Stripes, orchestrated by Hershey Kay to music by John Philip Sousa. Kay was an indespensable figure in New York City, orchestrating ballets and musicals, including Bernstein's On The Town and Candide.

The ballet is meant to be comic and lightly ironic, with one amusingly uniformed regiment after another taking the stage. However, with fascist politics presently dominating the country, presenting a United States flag-waving romp does feel a bit tone deaf, as does the company's continuing plans to perform at the Kennedy Center in May. Check out Rachel Howard's well-written review and discussion of the topic at the SF Chronicle.

When a black curtain was raised near the end of the piece, revealing a huge United States flag, for some in the audience it felt a bit like watching Springtime for Hitler. (The above photo is by Austin Newsom.)