Review: NEXT@90 GARLAND / ROBERTS / ROWE PREMIERES at San Francisco Ballet Offers a Trio of World Premieres

San Francisco Ballet is opening its 90th season with the massively ambitious next@90 festival featuring 9 world premieres, most by choreographers who have never before worked with the company. The chief pleasures of any new works festival are the sheer delight of going in fresh with virtually no preconceptions, the chance to see new aspects of the home team's talents revealed by dancemakers who aren't already familiar with them, and hopefully discovering how this classical artform can still maintain its relevance in our post-postmodern world. Such festivals are the kind of thing hardcore ballet fans live for, but they are also readily accessible to ballet neophytes because none of the pieces requires previous knowledge of the canon - all you have to do is show up and let the dances wash over you. I attended opening night of next@90's first program featuring premieres by the estimable Robert Garland, Jamar Roberts and Danielle Rowe eager with anticipation, and based on the criteria above, I'd deem the program a partial success. The dancing throughout was simply smashing, even if the choreography and design at times was a bit hit and miss.

The program starts pleasantly enough with Robert Garland's Haffner Serenade, set to the eponymous Mozart composition. Garland has concocted a fairly straight-forward neoclassical ballet that is responsive to the music, employing a central male-female couple backed by a corps of 4 women and 4 men, and following a standard three-movement, fast-slow-fast progression. It's a breezy affair that is perfectly pleasant from start to finish, if rarely more than that. Even as Garland's clean, unfussy movement beautifully shows off the dancers' abilities and artistry, I couldn't get a bead on why the choreographer chose this particular music now, what about it spoke specifically to him. And I wasn't so much a fan of Pamela Cummings' costumes. Her hideous ruffled bibs for the men, tutus the color of a mint slushie for the corps women, and Pepto-Bismol pink numbers for the central couple served none of the dancers.

Esteban Hernández and Julia Rowe danced the central roles exceptionally well, both possessing a crisp lightness and an ability to articulate even the speediest of choreography so that we clearly see each individual position they move through even as they connect them into a single musical phrase while hiding all the work that goes into it. It's what I think of as the SFB signature style, and these two dancers have it in spades. There's nothing more thrilling than when Hernández takes to the air with impossibly high leg positions and lands soft as a feather, or how Rowe maintains a perfect line from her fingertips down to her toes even while whipping out a lightning-fast series of turns. The corps behind them was almost as good, with Luca Ferrò and Carmela Mayo especially intoxicating at they seemed to float on the surface of the music.

Next up was Resurrection by Jamar Roberts, a choreographer whose work I was especially intrigued to see on SFB. Unfortunately, while choosing some undeniably great Mahler music (the Totenfeier symphonic poem), Roberts has made one of those generically angsty story ballets that befuddle and bemuse and ultimately overstay their welcome. The printed program provides the following setup: "An austere and malicious Queen uses her powers of persuasion, beauty, and magic in her quest to find a suitor to love and assist her in the rulership of her tribe." Hmm.... God knows I love to see strong women onstage, but the scenario feels like a retread of Jerome Robbins' The Cage some 72 years later. I was also mightily confused by the inclusion of a secondary couple (perfectly well danced by Aaron Robison and WanTing Zhao) who feel completely superfluous. Just who are these characters, and why are they given such prominence only to soon fade into the background?

None of this would matter much if the movement itself were more compelling, but Roberts largely sticks to modern dance clichés - lots of impassioned reaching out of arms and contracting of torsos - that don't really challenge the SFB dancers and could be competently performed by just about any professional dance company. Not that the dancers aren't giving it their considerable all. If Dores André's performance in the central role doesn't come across as strikingly as it should, I'm not sure what else she could do to make the piece work. And as welcome as it was to see Isaac Hernández in the leading male role (back with SFB after a decade dancing in Europe), he wasn't given enough to do to register as more than a cipher. On the plus side, Jermaine Terry's shimmery, lacy costumes were attractive and evocative, and Roberts' own scenic design of graduated swooping arches leading the eye upstage to a black void was appropriately unsettling.

The final ballet on the program, Danielle Rowe's circus-inspired Madcap set to songs by Swedish theatre/pop composer Pär Hagström, is a whole other kettle of fish, mostly in a good way. As someone with a lifelong aversion to clowns and their attendant forced merriment, I struggled mightily for the first five minutes or so, not helped by a character called The Oracle spouting some maddeningly elliptical prose (though kudos to Jennifer Stahl for handling this with aplomb - ballet dancers are rarely called upon to vocalize). Things improved considerably once the rest of the cast of 12 was introduced, portraying various types of circus performers whose mystifying appellations (e.g. The Mirror, The Oom Pa-Pa's) are perhaps best dismissed.

Better to just let the piece unfold in its byzantine way and give in to its genuine quirkiness. An early segment where the dancers are seen only from the ankles down may be a direct crib from Tommy Tune's A Day in Hollywood choreography, but it's masterfully done and a sign that this is gonna be one weird-ass ballet. The solos, duets, trios and full company sequences that follow are a mixture of whimsical, melancholic and offbeat, before reaching a sort of "clown peeling off the mask" denouement that feels a bit hackneyed.

Along the way, though, there are many surprises and delights. I appreciated how Rowe's restless imagination shows a quirkier side of SFB than we normally get to see. I loved that she put Sasha De Sola, one of the company's floatiest dancers, in a more earthbound role that strips her of her usual gossamer line, and still De Sola succeeds magnificently. Or a delightfully antic trio for Max Cauthorn, Alexis Vades and Wei Wang that plays like a loopy distant cousin to the famous Russian trio from Nutcracker. And speaking of Wang, whenever Rowe has the cast dancing in unison with her unorthodox mishmash of ballet, modern and gestural moves, it is usually Wang who totally nails her unique style, perfectly balancing the balletic with the freakiness.

Best of all was a duet for Davide Occhipinti and Henry Sidford that was sinuous and yearning, sweet and a little sad. How refreshing to see two male dancers presented neither as macho rivals nor genial besties. Now, that's something I've never seen before, and exactly why out of the three ballets on the program, Madcap is the one I most look forward to revisiting.

[All photos by Lindsay Thomas]

Performances of San Francisco Ballet's next@90 Garland / Roberts / Rowe Premieres continue through Saturday, February 11th at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA. Running time is approximately 2 hours 5 minutes, including two intermissions. For tickets and additional information, visit www.sfballet.org or call (415) 865-2000, M-F 10am-4pm.

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