Luxury of talent: in San Francisco Ballet's sixty-fifth anniversary season, the dancers performed with a technical strength and dramatic clarity that put them at the top of the international standard.

In San Francisco Ballet's sixty-fifth anniversary season, the dancers performed with a technical strength and dramatic clarity that put them at the top of the international standard.

For his thirteen years as director of San Francisco Ballet, Helgi Tomasson has been pursuing the two big objectives: bolstering his company's performing ability and digging up new choreographic talent. The company's sixty-fifth anniversary season, presented February 3 through May 10 at the War Memorial Opera House, revealed that, while Tomasson, like everyone else, will have to keep looking for good ballet choreography, under his leadership SFB has become a company of extraordinary dancers--performers who are now at the top of the international standard of technical strength, clarity, and purity. This season it was the subtler, more difficult aspects of training that shone--heads, necks, shoulders, arms, and hands had a new articulateness and vitality.

As the season unfolded, one could watch real bodies becoming dancerly ideals. Regardless of the repertory or the role, it was repeatedly the dancers that one noticed--from the spontaneously realistic gestures of soloist Vadim Solomakha as the ardent Prince in Swan Lake to the bounding ebullience of Chidozie Nzerem and David Palmer's deftly timed ironic affection for Tina LeBlanc in Western Symphony, Julie Diana's radiant hopefulness as one of the Princesses in Swan Lake, Joanna Berman's intelligence in every ballet she danced, and Felipe Diaz, Kester Cotton, and Vanessa Zahorian's proud, clean line and persistent engagement in practically every role, no matter how small.

The company looked strong early on in an all-Jerome Robbins evening that was the best programming of the season. It featured the new Spanish principal, Lucia Lacarra, thin, long-limbed, and full-breasted, as a menacing mass of spiky, pawing limbs in The Cage. Palmer joins her as an outcast lover, neither one overacting, just delivering the choreography as fully danced as possible. That the whole company dances Robbins with intelligence and care, presenting his choreography exactly as it is without apology or embellishments, was richly apparent in his Glass Pieces, a nervy movement study of spatial play, pattern layering, and phrasing that accelerates and freezes with perfect economy.

James Kudelka's Some Women and Men, the third ballet for SFB by the artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, is a predictably complicated and mystifying work which demands dancing at an extraordinary speed. Tightly rehearsed, and beautifully danced by Christopher Stowell as the quizzical central character, it unfolds to Francis Poulenc's music like a series of grand beginnings where the meaning hangs just out of reach.

The other frequent guest choreographer for SFB, Frankfurt Ballet's William Forsythe, gave the company the American premiere of The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude. Like a bit of Forsythe Dada onstage, Vertiginous features two men in orange velvet Victorian swimsuits and LeBlanc, Katita Waldo, and Kristin Long in pond-green Bauhaus-style rigid tutus. Long was especially nice, with crisp directional changes and a wonderful solo displaying the tension of swiftly working legs and little lurches on pointe pulling against an equally dynamic torso. LeBlanc, back from maternity leave this season, was her usual superbly musical self as she stretched her port de bras so that her arms seemed to connect seamlessly to her torso in an easy rhythmic response to the music. The thrill of Vertiginous is not of exactitude so much as of pleasure, which lingers after the curtain falls, and where the puzzlement of Forsythe's hazy content is overridden by the technical sharpness and dating of the SFB dancing.

SFB resident choreographer Val Caniparoli's new ballet, Slow, set to Graham Fitkin's sparse string and synthesizer score, also reveled in the dancers' technical agility, offering a work of refreshing authority, but one at times still skittish and undeveloped in its invention. Set on a moonlit night in a box-like space with two rear doors, Slow is a portrait of the movement dynamics of ice skating sketched out between couples who flicker between platonic and amorous connections. Palmer repeatedly pulls Berman so that she can swoosh serenely past him, her feet in toe shoes flat on the floor, like a paper boat blown by the wind on the surface of a lake.

Before being sidelined by injuries midseason, Lacarra also made a memorable appearance in Balanchine's Agon, in which she danced the central pas de deux with Stephen Legate as an edgy, angular romance. Their shaping rendered it a clear narrative about a knotted, twisted communication rather than merely a feat of odd positions.

On this same all-Balanchine program, SFB became the first company besides New York City Ballet to perform Liebeslieder Walzer, a work that presents a dramatic challenge that will take the company a few more seasons to master. Sherri LeBlanc, in her biggest role yet, danced with grandeur, expansiveness, and mystery. Berman, who opens the ballet's second half with flying waltzing, shaped the ballet's plotless theme of coquetry and amorousness with her customary focus and absorption. Yet, for most of the eight-member cast, the throughline was missing, leaving the ballet feeling episodic and long.

Lar Lubovitch's full-evening Othello, the other major company premiere, was the biggest box-office hit of the season and a theatrical and aesthetic clunker. Danced by a strong and faithful opening cast that included Yuri Possokhov as the Moor, Yuan Yuan Tan as Desdemona, and Palmer as the malevolent Iago, the dancers approached Lubovitch's markedly sparse choreography the way one might a Balanchine work, trusting the movement to divulge its own meaning and emotional logic. It didn't. Characters don't develop, the drama doesn't build, and the result is a work in which the narrative message is faint and the choreography dependent on dancers to fill out the structural gaps. One was left feeling that SFB's dancing resources were wasted and its dramatic ones untapped.

The dancers and the choreography did come together happily in the closing work of the season, a stunning revival of Tomasson's 1988 Swan Lake. The final night of the season, twenty-one-year-old Tan, who seems to have taken Elizabeth Loscavio's old position as the dazzling young ballerina, and Solomakha danced the leads, heading a cast of teaching associate Irina Jacobson's exquisitely rehearsed, dreamlike swans. SFB is so good now that it can afford those greatest aesthetic luxuries of arrival--subtlety and understatement.

Janice Ross is a member of the dance faculty at Stanford University and a regular contributor to Dance Magazine.