A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE THE BREAK-THROUGH "GOLDEN HOUR" 
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of April  6-13, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 89
          Were I to see only one ballet this year, I’d want it to be Christopher Wheeldon’s astonishing “Within the Golden Hour,” with a whole vocabulary of beautiful moves you have never seen before. This great creative force, who until last year was resident choreographer of the NYC Ballet, has created a whole new wave.
            Wheeldon has the S.F. Ballet dancers slide and glide in a most fluid fashion, producing some of the finest poetry I’ve ever encountered in modern ballet. Women’s arms float like willow branches in the breeze, and their torso-swaying motions are softer than fur. The dancers have a feathery flow, performing to a Ezio Basso score that is mostly lullabies and mostly minimalist.
            There are also trompe-l’oeil dazzles---think Moiré fringes---when lines of dancers wigwag irregularly before one another. And then there are the men, sprawled and spread on the floor like spiders sleeping ---or maybe ready to pounce. Sarah van Patten, Maria Kochetkova and Katita Waldo (three very different dancers) come together in creating the new, spare style. 
            This was 34 minutes located somewhere between inspiration and exhilaration. If the SFB decides to revive it every single year, fine by me!!
            The rest of the program that opened April 3 was predictable: The Balanchine “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” transferred the spiky music to Yuan Yuan Tan’s movements. Fortunately, besides being a prime ballerina, she is something of a contortionist who can master the pretzel positions she’s expected to do.  
            The audience came ultimately for the Robbins-Gennaro “West Side Story Suite,” drawing liberally from the 1950s musical about gang warfare, something of a “Romeo and Juliet” set in the toughest parts of New York City. There was a lot of singing from the show, either by the dancers or by some imported talent, none of them up to Broadway standards. The dancers however managed great fight scenes, “America,” and of course the Latino “Mambo.” But too much was left to the great versatility of song-writer Leonard Bernstein, which can achieve only so much without the horses on stage to pull the load.
            San Francisco Ballet in Program Six, running April 3-9. Opera House, S.F.  For info: (415) 861-5600, or go online. 

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2009
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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