Sunday, March 13, 2011

A Season of Awe and Empathy


No less an authority than the esteemed Mark Morris considers San Francisco Ballet the best ballet company in North America. Even allowing for overenthusiastic hyperbole, there's no disputing that this troupe is way up in the top tier. (Morris's own renowned Mark Morris Dance Group does modern dance; when Morris feels like creating a ballet, he mostly does so for the San Francisco company.) So it may not be too much to say that you can leave a performance--virtually any performance--by SF Ballet feeling admiration, amazement, awe, even joy at having seen such stellar work.

This season, though, the emotions often fall into the realm of sorrow, sadness, and compassion, too. For the season's eight programs, artistic director Helgi Tomasson has chosen several pieces--and choreographed one--that are less abstract, more narrative, and very moving. A highlight was Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams, which is based on Chekhov's 1901 play The Three Sisters. This hour-long dance doesn't retell the tale as much as convey the lives and feelings of each sister: the lonely spinster, Olga; the unhappily married Masha, who briefly finds passion with a military officer; and the flighty Irina, who toys with and is fought over by two suitors. You feel for all of them, not least for Masha's anguished husband. That's because Tomasson trains his dancers to be superb actors, too.

Tomasson created his own emotion-filled dance in "Nanna's Lied," nine short scenes set to nine songs (sung by soprano Melody Moore) by Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender. The songs have that dark, lurid sound forever equated with the time and place in which they were written: 1930s Germany. So when the innocent Nanna first comes onstage with her little suitcase, hemmed in by cold, looming towers, as the orchestra plays "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" (The Ballad of Mack the Knife), you know she's not in for an easy time of it. And then an assortment of predatory men shows up.

The season started with the classic evening-length story ballet Giselle (peasant girl has her heart broken by a callous nobleman, goes mad, and dies) and will end with the contemporary evening-length story ballet The Little Mermaid (sea creature has her heart broken by a callous prince, suffers greatly, and dies). These aren't murder mysteries--there's no loss if you know how they end or have seen them danced more than once. One of the great things about SF Ballet is how strong the entire company is; you want to see what others will do in the same role or dance. With luck, we'll some of these dances performed again next year.


Photos c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet