ZANELLA'S NEW BALLET: ZANSATIONAL!
        Capping a Highs-and-Lows San Francisco Ballet opening   
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of April 9-16, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 88
             It was pure serendipity that Helgi Tomasson ever ran across the extraordinary Italian choreographer Renato Zanella, thanks to a dance DVD from the Paris Opera that contained a Zanella piece as a non-sequitur afterthought. Tomasson chased him down and nailed down the breath-taking world premiere “Underskin” brought to the Opera House on April 8 before a highly receptive San Francisco Ballet audience.
            Zanella’s half-hour-long “Underskin” is based on a nebulous search in an avant-garde forest. A woman in skin-tight black and long pigtail, looking more like a black snake than truly human, carries out endless solos portraying what may be the mystery of the unknown. (The choreographer however claims other motifs in his written notes.) Her  movements, from the rocking shoulders to the huge bounds about the stage are arresting and original. In movement she contrasts markedly with three equally high-energy women, variously partnered by a corps of bare-chested males flying by at dazzling velocity. Adding to the heightened drama was Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night,” a score vacillating in late-romantic chromaticism---itself searching for elusive goals.
            Anne Marie Legenstein had created the women’s ingenious mottled costumes, each unique. Among the dancers (casts will rotate!), I was especially struck by the soon-to-retire Katita Waldo, who could make even her hand gestures do the talking, and the black-snake figure of the relative newcomer Sofiane Sylve, who has to be considered the fastest-rising artist in the company.
            Much in the spirit of the classic “Les noces,” village scenes dominate the émigré Alexei Ratmansky’s “Russian Seasons.” Though it goes on much too long, it is a charming and somewhat humorous piece with flat-footed village dancers and bumpkins squiring around their very pretty, very slender ladies in a series of vignettes. There are many falls (which may or may not convey a death theme) along with lifts, and a finale with what I took to be a wedding but isn’t (it’s simply about purity, says the choreographer).
            The program opened with a sure cure for insomnia, “Haffner Symphony,” an old-fashioned confection full of porcelain-doll figures and tutus, badly in need of choreographic inspiration. David Karapetyan, the remarkable soloist who spins “backward” in mid-air (turning to his left rather than the right), gave it more than it deserved.
            San Francisco Ballet in Program 6 at the Opera House, S.F. through April 21. Helgi Tomasson, artistic director. For info: (415) 865-2000, or go online. 

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2010
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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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