SAN FRANCISCO BALLET STEPS INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WITH OLD AND NEW WORKS.

SAN FRANCISCO--With a nod in the direction of audiences' increased interest in full-length, narrative ballets and another toward the creation of new works, San Francisco Ballet's new season has one foot firmly planted in the past while stepping cautiously into the next century. Scheduled for the coming three and a half months (January 24 to May 7) are eight programs that ought to please traditionalists as well as more adventurous balletgoers.

Included among the offerings are two full-length works by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson; his Giselle, which premiered last season, and his Romeo and Juliet (1994). Audiences will also get a glimpse of into two nineteenth-century classics when SFB premieres the third act of Raymonda (to be staged by Patricia Ruanne, interim director of La Scala Opera Ballet), and the second act of Natalia Makarova's staging of La Bayadere.

In terms of world premieres, the news is both good and a little disappointing. For program six Tomasson bravely instituted a Discovery Program for which he commissioned six works by relatively untried voices, each of whose work is to be presented three times. Best known among them is Christopher Wheeldon from New York City Ballet. The others are SFB dancers and just emerging choreographers Julia Adam, David Palmer, Yuri Possokhov [profiled on page 60], and Christopher Stowell. Vladimir Anguelov, resident choreographer of the Kirov Ballet Academy in Washington, D.C., who choreographed a well-received work on the SFB School's students this spring, completes the sextet.

Insufficient rehearsal time, unfortunately, forced the cancellation of the only scheduled world premiere by an established choreographer, Lila York. It was to be a work primarily for men, choreographed to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. York will instead set her Celts, choreographed in 1995 for Boston Ballet. "It's a piece," the choreographer explains, "which I did before the Riverdance phenomenon. I am Irish, and I got the idea for it when I accompanied my parents to Ireland on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary."

The season also offers a second look at pieces that were new to SFB last year: Antony Tudor's sly Gala Performance (1938) and Kenneth McMillan's The Invitation, a jaded 1960 look at the bourgeoisie, in addition to the two commissions, Stanton Welch's Asia-inspired Taiko and Mark Morris's Popsicle-colored Sandpaper Ballet.

Representing the Balanchine legacy are reprises of Serenade, Prodigal Son, Bugaku and the SFB premiere of Symphony in Three Movements. In addition to David Bintley's The Dance House, the season also presents two additional Tomasson works, Beads of Memory, his 1985 tribute to Balanchine last seen here in 1992, and the highly expressionistic Nanna's Lied, to songs by Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender.