By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
and dance
Week of April10-17, 2011
Vol. 13, No. 87
The San
Francisco Ballet saved the sexiest for the last mixed-repertory
program, which runs through April 20.
A stage full
of brief flesh-colored costumes, and seemingly
naked dancers provocatively sniffing each other like canines, is the
essence of
Wayne McGregor’s flamboyant “Chroma” (2006), just brought over from the Royal Ballet in London. This was
the climax (excuse the expression) of a highly effective trio of
ballets in
Program 6, all created since the year 2000. And they were danced
exquisitely,
despite the high physical demands of the choreographies.
The clever set
of “Chroma” looks like a chamber of a
modern-art museum---hospital-white walls, and a huge picture frame in
the
middle, out of which images walk and start dancing, sometimes poking
their
bottoms out provocatively toward the audience. There are moves that are
grotesque and impulsive. The dancers wiggle and twitch, with joints you
were
unaware ever existed. Partners are
whipped around and lifted upside down in what looks like very well
organized
chaos. The contemporary score by two composers is raucous and violent.
Significantly, the younger audiences toward the rear cheered this one
wildly.
And that exuberant reaction will not be lost on management in planning
next
season.
Despite my
misgivings about his “Number Nine,” I find Christopher
Wheeldon among the most inventive choreographers around. He has done
six
original ballets for the SFB, with “Continuum” and “Ghosts” at the top.
In “Ghosts”
(2010) he’ll have a big knot of people untangling and scattering, like
a
classic diffusion experiment in the chem lab. There are windmilling
arms, and
bodies sliding and rolling cross the floor. There is no corps de
ballet---all
have distinct roles to play. And the score, a dark, string-orchestra
piece with
piano, is a brooding animal, more suggestive of ghosts than the dancers
themselves. The April 9 evening performance was marked by Sofiane Sylve
in the
lead, followed by Maria Kochetkova and Vitor Luiz doing a love duet. A
French
woman, and a Russian-Brazilian pair: How international can a troupe get?
“Ghosts” was
distinguished by a kind of shipwreck remnant
suspended overhead, in pieces, so that different parts could move,
while
dancers watched below, a mite apprehensively, never quite trustful of
the
suspension.
In spinning,
every dancer has a preferred direction, leaping
mostly toward the right. But then you get a superb soloist like Gennadi
Nedvigin whose preferred direction is to his left, running opposite to
his
partner(s). It’s something like being left-handed, only in pairings,
the
movement runs contrary and the dances may need reshaping consequently.
He
worked around this inconsistency nicely in a couple of allegro segments
with
Vanessa Zahorian, as well as in some turns alongside Jaime Garcia
Castilla for
Tomasson’s “7 for Eight” (2004), sets to keyboard concertos of Bach.
San Francisco Ballet’s Program 6,
running through April 20.
Opera House, S.F. For info: (415) 861-5600, or go online.
©Paul Hertelendy 2011
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Paul Hertelendy 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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