Don Quixote at the SF Ballet

San Francisco Ballet's lavish production of Don Quixote, an 1869 Russian extravaganza that premiered at the Bolshoi, just finished up a successful two-week revival. Nathaniel Remez and Pascal Molat played Don Quixote and Sancho Panza respectively as they bumbled their way through Barcelona, a gypsy camp, a tavern, and a fairy dreamscape. (All production photos are by Lindsay Rallo.)

In truth, the Don and his servant are not the main characters of the narrative, which revolves around a young couple trying to marry while being thwarted by a father wanting a wealthier match for his daughter. The opening night cast featured Sasha de Sola and Francesco Gabriele Frola as Kitri and Basilio, who I did not see, but according to Steven Winn and Rachel Howard, they were fabulous.

Unfortunately, ballet is as strenuous and injury-prone as any professional sport, and the new Italian principal dancer Francesco Gabriele Frola injured himself in the last minutes of the long, three-act ballet, limping off the stage with no word on when or if he would return to action.

On the following Friday, we saw the young Australian dancer Joshua Jack Price in the role of Basilio, and he was pretty fabulous himself. Also worthy of praise is the entire production, particularly the exquisitely colorful costumes by Martin Pakledinaz.

The highlight for me was seeing the Swedish dancer Nikisha Fogo in the major role of Kitri.

Fogo tends to stand out in any performance, with her combination of musicality, speed and angular gestures that are sharper than everyone around her. It was a joy to witness her taking on such an extended, difficult role.

The Blake Works at the San Francisco Ballet

Everything was beautiful at the SF Ballet last Friday.

There were bon vivants sipping champagne on the outdoor balcony on the mezzanine level...

...along with couples of all sizes, shapes...

...and gender identities.

The San Francisco Ballet continued its season last Friday with The Blake Works, an evening-length set of ballets by the 76-year-old choreographer William Forsythe set to music by the 37-year-old English pop singer James Blake.

My favorite section was the 20-minute Prologue, where a Blake song was deconstructed into halting musical snippets sandwiched between silence, with principal dancers moving frenetically across the minimalist stage, led by the incomparable Joseph Walsh. (All production photos are by Chris Hardy.)

The second section, The Barre Project, was created during the COVID pandemic, and featured one great dancer after another, like Cavan Conley above, attached to the barre and eventually freeing themselves to encompass the whole stage.

After intermission, there was a reprise of Blake Works I, seen here in 2022, which Forsythe set for individuals such as the enthralling Nikisha Fogo along with complex dances for the entire ensemble.

The ballet was set to seven songs by Blake, whose recorded music eventually became irritatingly boring to me over the course of a whole evening. In her rave review of Blake Works in the SF Chronicle, Rachel Howard maintains: "I’d argue that whether you like the music itself is immaterial. To witness the depth with which Forsythe listens is the point." Half of the joy of going to the SF Ballet for me is hearing their excellent orchestra performing live music rather than prerecorded tracks, so I am not convinced, but as a showcase for exciting dancers, the evening does its job.

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 Jimison. 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.)

The Seasons of Eugene Onegin at SF Ballet

After a December of Nutcracker performances and an Opening Gala in January, the San Francisco Ballet opened up their regular season with the world premiere of an ambitious, full-length story ballet based on Alexander Pushkin's 1830s verse novel, Eugene Onegin. In Russia, the book is a standard, revered classic that everyone reads in school, but outside that country the story is mostly known from Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera, which has one of the greatest musical scores he ever composed. San Francisco Ballet's new version, co-commissioned by the Joffrey Ballet, is the work of former SF Ballet dancer and choreographer Yuri Possokhov to new music by Ilya Demutsky. The result was a triumphant addition to the many films, plays, operas, and ballets that have already tackled the story of a precociously jaded young antihero who breaks a young woman's heart and kills his best friend in a senseless duel. (All production photos are by Lindsey Rollo.)

The ballet's four acts are framed by abstract visions of the seasons, beginning with a long ensemble dance representing the Spirits of Spring, headed by the reliably fabulous Nikisha Fogo. Although these interludes seem to belong to another ballet altogether, they are entertaining in their own right, with gorgeous costumes by Tim Yip highlighted by casually sexy outfits for the Boys of Summer.

In the Tchaikovsky opera, the 17-year-old Tatiana is the main character, who falls hopelessly in love with the sophisticated city slicker Onegin. In this version, as in Pushkin's poem, the central emphasis is on the 18-year-old Onegin who casually spurns Tatiana after she confesses her deep infatuation in a letter. Katherine Barkman was fine as the bookish, lovelorn young woman but a bit too recessive, as she was often upstaged by the other characters, particularly Joseph Walsh as Onegin.

I recently read the original Pushkin poem-novel, and it was a surprisingly rich experience. (Click here for the free 1881 Henry Spalding translation at Gutenberg Press.) Midway, there is a scene detailing Tatiana's prescient nightmare of being abducted by surreal creatures before watching Onegin slay Lensky with a knife. The scene is omitted in the Tchaikovsky opera but is one of the the ballet's dark-hued highlights.

The two subsidiary characters of the young poet Lensky and his fiance Olga, Tatiana's younger sister, often steal the show in this tale, and they did so once again thanks to the energetic, entrancing dancing of Wei Wang and Wona Park.

At first the musical score by Ilya Demutsky sounded bizarrely old-fashioned to me, rather like film music from an earlier decade. However, it became more interesting as the ballet progressed, varying dramatically from scene to scene, and it struck me as a real accomplishment. By the time the tragic duel occurred, the synthesis of music and dance felt seamless.

The last act has Eugene returning to Russia after journeying in self-exile abroad for eight years and going to a fancy ball where the hostess is none other than country bumpkin Tatiana transformed into fashionable society woman after marriage to an old general. This finally allows for a full-on romantic duet for Tatiana and Onegin in Possokhov's choreography.

The finale featured the incomparable Joseph Walsh dancing in despair with the Winter Spirits, having screwed up his own life and that of others irreversibly. Congratulations to all involved at the SF Ballet for delivering a successful new story ballet.

Frankenstein at SF Ballet

Late to the party again, I finally saw the San Francisco Ballet production of the full-length, story ballet version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein last Saturday evening. Created in 2016-17 by British choreographer Liam Scarlett as a co-production of London's Royal Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, it's an ambitious, colorful, striking work. Scarlett was a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet before retiring in his mid-twenties to become a full-time choreographer. Frankenstein was his first full-length ballet which was an immediate, popular hit with audiences but left a lot of critics kvetching. (Click here for the late Alan Ulrich's review of the SF premiere.)

Scarlett proceeded to create ballets all over the world for the next four years until accusations of "sexual impropriety" involving male dancers surfaced in 2019. The British tabloids were at their worst and implied that he'd been molesting minors, which turned out to be bunkum. The succeeding, years-long investigation cleared him of all charges, but it was too late. Scarlett resigned his position with the Royal Ballet and companies around the world dropped his ballets from their repertories. With his career over, and after a year of hiding away during the COVID pandemic, Scarlett hung himself in his own flat, dying at the age of 35. Tamara Rojo, SF Ballet's Director who was in charge of the English National Ballet at the time, was quoted in Dance Australia: "The world is a much darker, uglier, nastier place without you [Liam] in it."

In the Ulrich review, he noted that "Scarlett has said how eager he was for San Francisco Ballet to have the piece because of dancers Joseph Walsh and Frances Chung." Eight years after the premiere, the two dancers reprised their roles as Victor Frankenstein and his doomed fiance Elizabeth Valenza, and it was an absolute treat seeing this dynamic duo from the original cast dancing on Saturday night. (All production photos are by Lindsey Rallo.)

Before his suicide, Scarlett left a bequest naming five "trustees" to oversee his legacy, including Joseph Walsh and his wife Lauren Strongin, a recently retired soloist at the SF Ballet who danced in a number of Scarlett ballets. So on top of performing Victor Frankenstein, Walsh along with Strongin have been staging the four different casts that have been performing Frankenstein earlier this year and in the final "encore" week to end the season. Walsh is one of my favorite dancers, with an ability to go from utter stillness to fluid motion without any visible transition, a skill that reminds me of Buster Keaton at times. (Click here for an interesting interview with Walsh and how crazy it has been trying to be both dancer and stager at the same time.)

The original production by John Macfarlane is both spectacular and stark, with the medical students anatomy theater looking like something out of the recent film Poor Things. The ensemble dance with students waving around body parts was a bit bizarre, but it effectively takes the audience from the opening scenes of genteel Swiss aristocracy into the realm of horror. The reanimation of The Creature at the end of Act One was a genuine coup de theatre and it packed a jolt.

This is the third time Wei Wang has been in this production as The Creature and he owns the role. Creepy, alluring, pathetic, and frightening all manage to come across in his performance, and the scene where he accidentally kills the 7-year-old William Frankenstein is the most powerful in the ballet. On Saturday night, William was danced by the extraordinarily precocious Bode Jay Nanola, who was amazing.

The huge musical score is by New York composer Lowell Liebermann, whose music I had never heard before. His template seemed to be the late ballets of Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella), and though Liebermann doesn't have the melodic and rhythmic genius of Prokofiev (few composers do), the score was colorful, attuned to the action, and eminently serviceable. My hope is that Ms. Rojo brings back more of Liam Scarlett's ballets, some of which he created for the San Francisco Ballet, especially since the company already has two official "stagers" in Lauren Strongin and Joseph Walsh.

Hans van Manen at the SF Ballet

Hans van Manen is a 92-year-old Dutch choreographer who I had never heard of before. After seeing four of his dances at the SF Ballet on Wednesday, I am now a total fan.

Hans van Manen began choreographing in the late 1950s for the Netherlands' one television station, then joined the Nederlands Dans Theater and the Dutch National Ballet where he has created over 150 dances in a very long career. Pictured above is from the first work on the program, the 1971 Grosse Fugue to string quartet music by Beethoven, which still looks startlingly modern. (Pictured above are Dores André and Fernando Carratalá Coloma. All production photos are by Chris Hardy.)

The choreography is arrestingly earthbound, with lots of squats, twirls, and angular extensions but not so much flying in the air as is usual for classical ballet. The movement is often similar for both men and women, anticipating and possibly influencing Mark Morris.

The newest work on the program was the 2012 Variations for Two Couples, a short 15-minute dollop of elegance danced to a conglomeration of modern string music. The finale had the two couples finally joining each other, rather like the ending of Gross Fugue where all the disparate groupings eventually join together in an abstract ballet version of a group hug. (Pictured are Aaron Robison, Frances Chung Joseph Walsh, and Sasha Mukhamedov.)

This was followed by the wildest and funniest piece of the evening, the 8-minute Solo from 1997, set to a recorded performance of an insanely fast J.S. Bach Partita for Violin. The title could have been Tag Team, since it actually consists of a trio of male dancers who form a relay onstage, performing one virtuoso feat after another. Rachel Veaujean, who was staging these works for the SF Ballet, stated, "Solo is very virtuoso, very grounded, and super fast. At the very first rehearsal, nobody can do it, it's a mad little marathon." On Wednesday evening, it was danced spectacularly by Lleyton Ho, Luca Ferro, and Archie Sullivan. (Pictured is Cavan Conley from opening night.)

The final ballet was the 1977 5 Tango's set to a score by Astor Piazzola that was also danced to a recording rather than a live orchestra, which robbed the piece of a lot of its impact. The five-movement ballet is mostly amusing for not actually having a tango onstage, but instead approximations and variations on the Argentine national dance.

The fourth movement starts as an erotic duet for two male dancers before two women arrive on the scene. As there was no real biographical information about Hans van Manen in the program, on returning home I asked Google, "Is Hans van Manen gay?" and found a link to an article in the Holland Gay News entitled Hans van Manen, Streetwise Gay Icon. A biography in Dutch of van Manen was recently published and the article summarizes the wild life of a starving, post-World War Two teenager who made his way in Amsterdam's dance world while being publicly open about his abundant gay sex life during the 1960s and 1970s, before it was safe to do so. (Pictured are Fernando Carratalá Coloma and Victor Prigent.)

Although Hans van Manen is a venerable Queer Icon who I should have known about earlier, the real discovery is his marvelous choreography. There are four more performances of the program at the SF Ballet, including tonight (Friday, April 11), and you can get tickets by clicking here. (Pictured is a young Hans van Manen.)

Raymonda at the SF Ballet

Your chances of seeing a live production of the full-length, 1898 Russian ballet Raymonda, with choreography by Marius Petipa and music by Alexander Glazunov, are exceedingly slim. The SF Ballet is currently presenting a lavish production that was originally conceived and choreographed by Tamara Rojo for the English National Ballet in 2022, just before she arrived in San Francisco to become the company's new Artistic Director. It's easy to see why the ballet is so rarely performed anymore as it requires a huge cast and orchestra, and for the three principal roles, a level of dancing difficulty that ranks with some of the most demanding in the classical repertory. Plus, the characters are one-dimensional and the original storyline is casually Islamophobic, with the Saracen guest wanting to kidnap and rape the virginal heroine before being thwarted and killed by her Christian Crusader fiance. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

Rojo changed the narrative for the better, though it sometimes doesn't make much sense. The time and setting was moved from medieval Hungary to 19th Century England and Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Instead of hanging out in a Hungarian castle for the first act, we watch Raymonda (Sasha De Sola) as she quickly leaves her upper-class British home and follows her soldier fiance John de Bryan to Crimea, where she joins a nursing unit a la Florence Nightingale.

The nurses and soldiers are given sensational dances, but the happy music did seem a bit odd in this context. As my companion Austin remarked, "Wow! I guess war is fun and there's lots of dancing."

The colorful musical score by Glazunov is considered one of his best works, and it's eminently danceable, but much of it sounded like second-rate Tchaikovsky to me. What was fabulous was the playing of the orchestra under conductor Martin West, not to mention the live cimbalom in the last act for Raymonda's final solo. (Pictured are horn players Logan Bryck and Brian McCarty in the orchestra pit.)

The hour-long first act tends to drag in any production (there are YouTube versions from the Bolshoi and La Scala), but things pick up considerably in Act Two when Abdur Rahman (an exuberant Fernando Carratalá Coloma), the exotic Ottoman officer, gives a party in a tent for the ailing soldiers and their attending nurses.

There are wonderful dances from various nations and quite a bit of seductive movement from Rahman and Raymonda. In other words, think of Rudolph Valentino as The Sheikh. As Rachel Howard points out in her SF Chronicle review, "like pretty much every full “Raymonda” production, it’s about sublimated sexual fantasies."

The final act, which is often performed as a separate chunk, is the wedding party with a lot of "character" dancing, which I am assuming means ballet versions of folk dancing. Cleverly, the revised libretto specifies "Hungarian Workers" at the English estate where Raymonda is to marry John de Bryan. However, in this version, Raymonda pulls a Nora in A Doll's House and abruptly exits at the end of the ballet, leaving her betrothed on the altar after dancing with him for 30 minutes. It doesn't really work but it doesn't matter.

Seemingly the entire company is dancing in this production, and they are looking great. Although the three principals on Saturday's opening were very good, there weren't any real superstar moments where the audience holds their breath and can hardly believe their own eyes. There are three other casts rotating into the roles and I am tempted to return to the opera house to check them out. (Click here for the SF Ballet casting site.)