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My peskiest friend convinced me and the Bane to accompany her to the ballet yesterday evening. I had very low expectations about the San Francisco Ballet, having seen them in do a rather poor production of Swan Lake sometime in 1996. It was strange to be at the opera house for a non-opera. Notice that the San Francisco Opera has a ballet company, namely the San Francisco Opera Ballet and that the San Francisco Ballet does not have a ballet opera, whatever that would mean. It would be utterly amusing, or surreal, to have a normal ballet with an opera inserted somewhere in the middle.
The ballet was George Balanchine's Jewels, a plotless ballet in three parts, these being "Emeralds," "Rubies," and "Diamonds." This work premiered in 1967 at the New York City Ballet. "Emeralds" is set to Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), music from his Pelléas et Melisande and Shylock. The music is romantic and the dancing reflected this. It was pretty, delicate, and flowing. "Rubies" was set to Stravinsky's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (1949 version), which had a jauntiness to it. The music wasn't fantastic, so it didn't upstage the dancing. There was much swaying of hips, sharp angles, and abandon. "Diamonds" was set to Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 3 in D Major Op.29, but with the first movement cut out since Balanchine didn't think it was good for dancing to. The music was beautiful, I occasionally missed whole parts of the dancing because I was listening to it instead of attending to the ballet. What I saw looked very nice and traditional.
The dancers did not impress me, they did not land quietly and the ladies en pointe had a tendency to squeak from lack of rosin or some such problem. There were also problems of unison and of symmetrical positioning.
The audience acted as if they were watching a sporting event, which was disquieting. They clapped a lot during the dancing, especially if something was particularly athletic, and I found it very disruptive.
Friday, January 25th, 2002Went to see Dance Theatre of Harlem last night with a certain pesky friend. They performed three ballets, the first of which was Viraa, choreographed by Laveen Naidu to the music of Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 2. It was the most ballet like of the three that we saw, and included 14 dancers. Andrea Long and Eric Underwood were the principal dancers, and they were very elegant.
The second ballet was Augustus van Heerden's Passion of the Blood, a dramatic ballet in six scenes set to Jesus Villa-Rojo's Cello Concerto No. 2, Francesco Tarrega's Capricio Arabe, and Issac Albeniz's "Sevillanas" from Suite Espanola. The story line is from Bodas de Sangre by Garcia Lorca, which accounts for why the whole thing reminded me of David Wood's piece based on The House of Bernarda Alba. As dance, Passion of the Blood wasn't really to my taste, mixing up too much drama with ballet weakens both arts. But it was pretty and the dancer who played the part of groom was incredible. Ikolo Griffen was graceful even when standing still. As an aside, during the applause a person behind us kept calling the dancer who played the betraying bride a "dirty heifer." It was hilarious, especially since she was the tiniest dancer of the whole show, she was petite and ultra-thin.
The last ballet was Return choreographed by Robert Garland, set to music by James Brown and Aretha Franklin. It had a lot of sass. I liked how ballet technique blended into jazz, break dancing, swing, it worked in a way that was appealing. It is rare when a blend of disparate elements come together in a way that doesn't bring each part down to some lowest common denominator. Perhaps part of the reason is that ballet often lacks a kind of humanness.
Ballet is definitely a conundrum. It depends on the human body in a most basic way, you can't have dance without humans, and yet, dancers try very hard to beat their bodies into submission. There is a certain line of the body that is appreciated in ballet that is extreme. Some dancers wish embody pure movement, and go through quite a mortification of the flesh in order to get there.
Anyway, I must have enjoyed myself, because I felt completely disoriented and
dizzy afterwards, and I had a dramatic fall outside of Zellerbach.
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