NEW ACQUAINTANCES, OLD FRIENDS AT SFB.

NEW ACQUAINTANCES, OLD FRIENDS AT SFB 

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET WAR MEMORIAL OPERA HOUSE SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA JANUARY 24-APRIL 22, 2001

Offstage this year, the San Francisco Ballet stumbled with an insouciant advertising campaign that promised youthful, affluent, leisure-driven dot-commers (be there any still around) exotic explorations of the flesh for the price of a ticket. Onstage, the company's sixty-eighth season attempted to satisfy more fundamental cravings, as Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's repertoire choices extended and subtly transformed the company's profile. Exotic explorations were not completely neglected, but it was the basics that thrilled most.

The troupe's seven programs (reduced from eight to accommodate the debut visit of the Paris Opera Ballet within the S.F. Ballet's mandated weeks in the Opera House) featured a mere pair of world premieres by Mark Morris and Val Caniparoli, but interest ran high, too, for three contemporary European choreographers who had not previously figured, except tangentially, in the company's planning.

Tomasson chose astutely with Nacho Duato's 1998 Without Words, a sequence of torrid, small ensembles (four couples) that occasionally fused potently with the Spanish choreographer's music, six Schubert lieder arranged for cello and piano. The couplings, mixing the erotic and the contortionist, and all performed in flesh-colored skivvies, arrived February 20 without a major publicity buildup, and proved the unheralded triumph of the season.

Less persuasive was the company's first mounting of a complete Roland Petit ballet, the 1974 gloss on Alphonse Daudet, L'Arlesienne. Some European dances are probably fated to lose their spark somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, and it happened here. Luigi Bonino's staging failed to clarify the plight of the protagonist, Frederi, who rejects and re-rejects his bride, Vivette, before and during their wedding night. The assemblage of villagers (a cynical take on the arrangement of the corps in Bronislava Nijinska's Les Noces) never assumed its implacable individuality, and a cloud of chi-chi descended over the entire enterprise. Petit's cheesy use of the familiar Bizet incidental music (the Farandole as accompaniment to a suicide?) and his nightclub chorus lines didn't help. The dynamic Pierre-Francois Vilanoba and Lucia Lacarra, once a member of Petit's Ballet National de Marseilles, imbued every gesture with uncommon fervor at the April 8 matinee.

Also from abroad came Hans van Manen's Black Cake, a 1989 party piece that looked swell on the January 24 gala, but wore out its welcome when it entered the subscription repertoire. The choreographer's cynical take on the duet form, elucidated in a string of social dances, and his sophisticated musical jokes have their admirers, but the considerable best of van Manen was not on display here.

If the price of introducing Jerome Robbins's 1953 Fanfare (February 2) was the permission to stage Dances at a Gathering next winter, then it was worth importing this choreographed introduction to Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Yet, there was an air of condescension in the narration (spoken by Julian Lopez-Morillas), while Irene Sharaff's appallingly bulky costumes suggested a television variety show of the medium's infancy, and too readily obliterated the movement. It's a work best consigned to student matinees.

With the introduction of A Garden (seen February 24), the San Francisco Ballet became the only ballet company in the world capable of mounting more than a single evening of Mark Morris's dances. The famed modernist's fourth piece for the troupe emerged the most personal and affectionate of the lot, and the one that most blurred the stylistic disparities between works for his own troupe and those for ballet dancers. While exploring the classical vocabulary, Morris also favored the intimate exchanges that make the performances of the Mark Morris Dance Group look so felicitously familial. Yes, there is an unofficial "Morris unit" within the San Francisco Ballet; the choreographer recasts a particular complement of dancers on every visit, and they consistently repay the honor.

Here, Joanna Berman, Damian Smith, Tina LeBlanc, and Gonzalo Garcia (February 24) stood out in the twelve-member team, as Morris devised an elegantly patterned movement scheme to Richard Strauss's Tanzsuite for Orchestra after keyboard works of Francois Couperin. Symmetries prevail in the eight sections, while Morris remained alert to the kinetic possibilities inherent in the discreet but distinctly modern orchestrations: A trumpet riff sent the dynamic Garcia soaring above his colleagues. A Garden, pliantly conducted by visiting Neal Stulberg (one of the best guests in this audition season for music director), also delivered an honest-to-goodness duet, a first for Morris here. Berman and Smith, who began draped over each other, unfurled like a flower in full bloom and cadenced their courtly exchanges with a canonic series of torso squiggles. The effect was delectable.

Caniparoli's Death of a Moth (February 2) was equally unpredictable. To get to the heart of the piece (set to Carlos Surinach's turbulent Concerto for String Orchestra), you had to sweep away all the baggage--the program superscriptions about moths, Sandra Woodall's murky entomological decor, and a six-man corps who milled meaninglessly. What remained was a set of five sizzling duets, all treacherous in their distributions of weight and dramatic lifts, and all theatrically incendiary. Vilanoba and Cuban sensation Lorena Feijoo led the parade of confrontations, but the entire cast relished the supreme risk-taking of Caniparoli's choreography.

Where Tomasson betrayed his roots in Balanchine was in the casting. Tossing favorite dancers an unusual assignment to see if it sticks to the wall was once standard operating procedure in halcyon New York City Ballet days, and Tomasson exhumed the tradition with Lacarra this season. Where simplicity and unswerving musicality were demanded--in the middle movement of Tomasson's Prism (which came home this winter after its New York City Ballet premiere last year) or the second movement of Balanchine's Symphony in C--the Spanish ballerina took refuge in facial posturing and over-extended limbs. In both cases, Lacarra's alternate, Yuan Yuan Tan, allowed the score to inspire her and heaped glory upon herself.

Although no stars were born last winter, a few finally shone in their firmament. Of the three women dancing their first Sleeping Beauty, it was Vanessa Zahorian's fearless and immensely articulate Aurora (March 18) that left one astonished at the company's current strength. On the male side, Garcia continues to refine an all-encompassing technique, while Michael Eaton exhibited a polish that recalled Tomasson's own performing manner. For sheer bravado, the prize went to Muriel Maffre, who deserted the Lilac Fairy for Carabosse and invested the portrayal with such delectable malice that one was genuinely sorry to witness good triumphing over evil.