CriticalDance Forum

Despite the San Francisco Ballet's long absence, its visit to the Harris Theater this week will not be a compendium of the best hits of its history.

Instead, the engagement through Sunday is heavy with something more rare: new ballets. The troupe opened Tuesday with new ballets by two bright stars of the art and artistic director Helgi Tomasson's 2 1/2 -year old "The Fifth Season."

Both Christopher Wheeldon's "Within the Golden Hour" and Jorma Elo's "Double Evil" offer plenty of evidence of the innovation, excitement and daring of their creators. They also reveal weaknesses, inconsistencies and the occasional irritating quirk. Both overstay their welcome, but both boast spots that take your breath away.

"Double Evil" is aptly named, a bipolar affair shifting back and forth between contrasting scores from Philip Glass and Vladimir Martinov. The dancing shifts, too, eventually conjoining its classical form and a modernist, marionette-like counterfoil. "Evil" also shows off one of the troupe's celebrated attributes, the speed and agility of its male dancers, and it defies all sorts of structural rules and traditions in search of a new, cluttered, yet vaguely satisfying elegance. At times the men lift the tutu-clad women and wind them around their bodies with contorted, unpretty, almost gauche movements, while the entrances and exits, from the side and the rear, upend the usual dramatic expectation.

Helgi Tomasson's "On a Theme of Paganini" is an adroit, lively example of the neoclassical mode he inherited from George Balanchine, a stately, elegant, straightforward work frequently graced with his own unique stamp.

Framed at the start and the end with a motif riffing off classic ballet arm positioning, it is rich with contrapuntal structures—a pair of leads, for instance, enacting one set of rhythms and moves in complete opposition to different ones from a handful from the corps. At its heart is an utterly glorious pas de deux, telegraphing Tomasson's riveting sense of drama, danced exquisitely Wednesday at the Harris Theater by creamy, swarthy Davit Karapetyan and delicate Maria Kochetkova, one of the more artful ballerinas on view during this visit by the San Francisco Ballet, where Tomasson is artistic director. I prefer it to his "The Fifth Season" from Tuesday, though that work is probably more original, layered with earthy tones and buoyed by a sly, imaginative ballet tango.

Of the four ballets from the troupe's new works festival this year, my favorite by far is "Fusion," Yuri Possokhov's moody, mysterious, almost impish fantasia on the whirling dervishes. Not only does he know the dancers and their strengths (he is resident choreographer), but he clearly knew with "Fusion" precisely what he wanted to portray and how to achieve it. His is the least meandering and clearheaded of these new pieces, and Wednesday it proved a grand showcase for former Joffrey Ballet star Lorena Feijoo, as passionate and agile as ever, and tantalizing Yuan Yuan Tan, a ballerina with serpentine limbs and scintillating power. Four men were clad in dervish-like costuming, but Possokhov provides an ingenious, plotless work that suggests more than it tells and moves from start to finish with its own compelling logic.

Dance review: San Francisco Ballet in New York

Ben Finane, Special to The Chronicle

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
(10-14) 04:00 PDT New York -- To celebrate its recently completed 75th season, the San Francisco Ballet is taking its show on the road. On Friday and Saturday, New York City Center audiences got their first look at works by Mark Morris, Yuri Possokhov and Christopher Wheeldon, all of which had their world premieres this spring at the New Works Festival in San Francisco.

Of the three premieres in this second stop on a four-city tour, Wheeldon's "Within the Golden Hour" on Friday deferred most heavily to the classical ballet style. The genius of the work lies in the subtle stretching of the traditional male-female relationship found in ballet's ubiquitous pas de deux.

Dance review: San Francisco Ballet in New York

Ben Finane, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, October 17, 2008

(10-17) 04:00 PDT New York --

Jorma Elo's "Double Evil," a work that subversively injects modern movements into classical ballet, was the electrifying highlight and audience favorite of the San Francisco Ballet's Program C, which opened Tuesday at New York City Center.

Program C, the final of three programs on the four-city tour, also included New York premieres by choreographers Val Caniparoli and Helgi Tomasson. All three of the works had world premieres in the spring at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House during the company's 75th anniversary season.