Dance Review
Making Ballet Speak in Many Languages
San Francisco Ballet in Ratmansky and Morris Works
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
San Francisco Ballet
From left, Rebecca Rhodes, Diego Cruz, Francisco Mungamba and Alexandra
Meyer-Lorey, in Edwaard Liang's "Symphonic Dances," at the David H.
Koch Theater.
By
BRIAN SEIBERT
The high and rising international reputation of the San Francisco Ballet derives from its deep bench of talent and its commitment to new work.
The mixed-bill programs that the company is presenting during the first
week of its visit to New York put forward both strengths at once. After
an opening night
on Wednesday at the David H. Koch Theater that offered three New York
premieres of recently choreographed pieces, the troupe went one better
on Thursday, with four.
“From Foreign Lands” (2013), by Alexei Ratmansky, is not in the class of
that in-demand choreographer’s best work, but it shares the warmth, wit
and affection for ballet conventions that make him so sought-after. The
piece, with 1884 music by Moritz Moszkowski, is a suite of six
balleticized national dances: Russian, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish
and Hungarian.
The Russian and Spanish sections pair two couples each, the second with
partner-swapping, Spanish temperament and curling wrists. The Hungarian
closer features the full cast and bouncy strides. In the Italian
segment, the explosive Pascal Molat puckishly squires three women. In
the German, the glamorous Sofiane Sylve flows among three men. When the
men aren’t attending to her, they make complementary shapes, alone or
together — the work’s richest moments.
Mark Morris’s “Beaux” (2012) challenges ballet’s conventions the most
and is the most beautiful. Its nine men begin as a fence of X shapes,
facing away so that we see their backsides. Their tight unitards and the
backdrop, both by Isaac Mizrahi, restyle military camouflage in
sherbert-shaded oranges, pinks and yellows. Their pliant backbends and
chest-forward soaring as they’re carried high by other men are ballet
moves you see only women doing elsewhere on the program.
Much of the beauty stems from how matter-of-factly this is treated. The
manner is formal and informal, contemporary and classical, now
suggesting a Thomas Eakins composition of men and boys at leisure, now a
procession on an ancient Greek amphora.
Constructed largely of trios, daisy chains of men, the work responds to
its music, a concerto and two pieces for harpsichord by Martinu, with
canon patterns and intricate turns in the cadenzas. But Mr. Morris also
develops his own motifs with perfectly placed variations. The winding of
three men joined by hand becomes an unwinding. Solo actions are
repeated by the group.
In seeking to reinvigorate academic dancing, “Classical Symphony”
(2010), by the company’s resident choreographer, Yuri Possokhov, is
neither as fluent as “From Foreign Lands” nor as original as “Beaux.”
Its torso undulations are the kind of unthinking update that cheapens
ballet. But the work has verve, drive and invention.
The tension in Maria Kotchetkova’s neck distracts from her precision in,
say, a series of fouetté turns that change orientation. Hansuke
Yamamoto, eliciting gasps with whip-around jumps, embodies the work’s
bravura, the men whipping up excitement as they whirl around the women.
The final work, Edwaard Liang’s “Symphonic Dances,” is the longest, at
about 40 minutes, and felt even longer. Its eponymous music, by
Rachmaninoff, is the most programmatically dramatic, but its
choreography the least thrilling. Mr. Liang’s innovations are ungainly,
his graces commonplace. An all-male segment reminds us of what Mr.
Morris is reacting against.
A pas de deux for Yuan Yuan Tan and Luke Ingham displays Ms. Tan’s regal
delicacy, despite odd work for her elbows, and Ms. Sylve gets another
chance to cast her spell. When the groups costumed in orange or yellow
by Mark Zappone merge, the effect is quite pretty. But compared with
“Beaux,” pretty isn’t enough.
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