DISCOVERED IN AN INCUBATOR.

DISCOVERED IN AN INCUBATOR SAN FRANCISCO BALLET WAR MEMORIAL OPERA HOUSE SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA JANUARY 24-MAY 17, 2000

REVIEWED BY JANICE ROSS

High-tech "incubators" are a way of life in the San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley, and for its sixty-seventh repertory season San Francisco Ballet spun out the aesthetic equivalent--a week of programs to nurture new ballets by four company dancers who are emerging choreographers. There was a new vibrancy in the theater for the brief run of the two Discovery programs that showcased these works. At the premiere of Julia Adam's Night, the Opera House exploded in the biggest standing ovation in recent memory.

Adam, the only woman among the Discovery choreographers and a budding dancemaker for local companies, created Night as a richly physical and drolly inventive portrait of sleep disorder as an enviable state of innocence. Adam's ballet opens on the novel image of diminutive Tina LeBlanc, one of the company's signature classical ballerinas, swooning in a deep sleep and lying across a group of men who crouch in a downstage corner. Rising, she winds her way across the stage in movement phrases so deftly musical that they seem to evolve internally as she arches, rolls and pounces, smartly fitting this movement text to Matthew Pierce's gently melodic and minimal score that was commissioned by Adam. On her somnambulistic journey, LeBlanc encounters curious architectural structures of other dancers, including three women in a huge tube of stretch jersey who slither and ripple across the stage like a wayward vessel of rounded forms. With each new phrase, Adam thoroughly works the choreography through a fresh movement vocabulary so that Night unfurls the way our minds think, with phrases accumulating, climaxing in rich little physical insights, and then subsiding. Adam's brilliance in Night resides in the way she can generate and sustain a very complicated stage picture, one that starts deep in the physical actions of each of her eleven dancers.

Yuri Possokhov's Magrittomania is most inventive in its visual presentation of Belgian painter Rene Magritte's Surrealist images of ordinary objects metamorphosing into unfathomable strangeness. Possokhov uses excerpts from fellow Ukrainian Yuri Krasavin's film scores and abridgments of familiar Beethoven works. Yuan Yuan Tan as a mysterious woman in red, and Roman Rykine, Joan Boada, Stephen Legate and Guennadi Nedviguine masterfully dance his tasteful choreography. Symbols from Magritte works--shrouds covering the heads of The Lovers, raining Magrittes from Golconda and black bowler hats from The Meaning of Night--adorn the choreography. Performed next to Adam's Night, where the invention begins in the movement, Possokhov's Magrittomania locates its invention more in the ballet's visual design elements.

Invention was rich in performances of individual dancers, particularly the young corps de ballet member Gonzalo Garcia, who danced soloist roles throughout the season with exuberant passion and clear dramatic focus. Fellow corps member Peter Brandenhoff brought intensity and sensuality to a rich variety of roles, from a thoughtfully shaped Hilarion early in the season to the young man in MacMillan's The Invitation, where he exudes goofy nascent sexuality. This ballet was made remarkable by the splendid and intense partnership of Brandenhoff and Julie Diana as the hapless young victims at the center of MacMillan's sordid, overwrought 1960s tale of sex as power play. Diana, although not a technically strong dancer, was splendid from the first moment--childlike, with an incessant fussiness as she kept grabbing and then smoothing her party dress. She has an effortlessly floating jete. She established a fine stage rapport with Brandenhoff, suggesting they were a pair of sweet innocents who struggle through the difficulties of adolescence encumbered by tortured British sexuality.

The additions to the classical side of the repertoire this season were Natalia Makarova's staging of Act II of La Bayadere and Rudolf Nureyev's version of Raymonda, Act III. Both stagings were curiously idiosyncratic. In Bayadere, the physical effort rather than the evocation of a fantastical image dominated, so that the entrance of the Shades felt more militaristic than shadowy. Joanna Berman performed Nikiya with her customary intelligence and verve, but here, too, Makarova's conception was not that of a floating dream. Raymonda Act III was staged as a heavy Hungarian-flavored wedding feast in deep tones of red and black and with more of an air of seriousness than celebration. Berman danced valiantly here as well, pushing for speed and a real bounce of energy.

While the company continues to dance more splendidly than ever, overall the season had a certain slackness. On many nights, audiences seemed smaller and applause milder than in the past, which is why the enthusiasm around the Discovery programs loomed so strong. In the week following these new choreographers' premieres, it was announced that three Discovery works--Night, Magrittomania and New York City Ballet soloist Christopher Wheeldon's Sea Pictures --would be returning next season. It's nice to see that the notion of an incubator's best inventions going public holds sway, even at the ballet.