San Francisco Ballet. - City Center, New York, NY - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Robert Greskovic

Helgi Tomasson must certainly be doing something right. His San Francisco Ballet is a magnet for gifted and ambitious dancers. Since its last visit here, SFB's ranks have been enriched by the rare likes of ex-Bolshoi prodigy Yuri Possokhov, native Ukrainian Vadim Solomakha, and recent School of American Ballet product Jose Martin. Meanwhile, remarkably gifted company ballerinas such as Tina LeBlanc, Elizabeth Loscavio, and Katita Waldo continue to grow and amaze.

Second to his ability to attract and develop Fine dancers, Tomasson shows a knack for commissioning choreographers with contemporary interests to work with his dancers. This three-program run included recent works by Mark Morris, David Bintley, James Kudelka, and Val Caniparoli. Besides including Balanchine's vivifying 1972 classic Stravinsky Violin Concerto, the balance of SFB's repertoire was made up of ballets by Tomasson himself.

Because so many of Tomasson's accomplishments with SFB can read so splendidly onstage and on paper, it disturbs me to report how disappointing was the troupe's third visit to the city where Tomasson grew up aesthetically. indeed, Tomasson's past association with New York City Ballet provokes questions regarding what wasn't brought to City Center before puzzling over what was. If the reason brought only one ballet by Balanchine isn't related to the recently aired admission that NYCB has "the right to limit or prevent competing Balanchine ballet performances by visiting companies" [see Bernard Taper: "Balanchine's Will," Ballet Review, Summer 1995], I find Tomasson's mixed bills even more baffling.

Tuning Game, a premiere by Tomasson to John Corigliano's Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra, has all the luxury of a silk purse from its cast and all the drama of a sow's ear from its choreography. For starters, the ever-elated and eager Loscavio, in bittersweet-orange pointe shoes, tights, and tunic, is caught in Lisa Pinkham's artfully focused lighting atop a heap of seven men in sleek forest green (costumes by Martin Pakledinaz). Herewith the precisely contorting and clean-lined ballerina lives as a cross between the enigmatic "Unanswered Question' from Balanchine's Ivesiana and a refugee from Paul Taylor's Counterswarm. Felipe Diaz and Solomakha bound like happy pups about the gracious and grave Waldo in a meaningless romp to the "Song: Scherzo." Possokhov, majestically mobile yet on a slow burn in dull sand colors, performs an emptily athletic adagio ("Aria") with Loscavio in a magenta version of her not-exactly-becoming orange uniform. (And all the women sport arbitrarily screwy hairdos.) Everyone returns for "Rheita Dance," filled out by a female ensemble nicely dressed in rust-tone little outfits for more business.

Tomasson's other works have distinguishing music, lighting, costuming, and dance-step details, but none manage to amount to any more as dance-theater than does his latest work. Quartette (to Dvorak) glances toward Chopin dances by Jerome Robbins; Con Brio (to Drigo) toys with the perfumes of Le Jugement de Paris by Perrot. Sonata (to Rachmaninoff) works hard to be dark and dramatic and remains mostly in the dark.

Of the two pieces by Morris, Pacific (to Lou Harrison), looking like a modernist work with atypical pointes peeping out here and there, proves the happier event. Its three-man, four-woman, one-couple cast conjures a little world kissed by South Sea island airs. But Maelstrom (to Beethoven) falls perfectly flat. With the women in grossly cut dresses and the men in dull tights and blouses (by Pakledinaz), Morris's dance keeps hugging the wings or lingering through thankless, fussy labors.

Caniparoli's Lambarena (to a mix of traditional African music with Bach) gingerly blends danse d'ecole ways with those of indigenous African dance, and ends up swirling a debt to Jiri Kylian and Maurice Bejart. Kudelka's Terra Firma (to Torke) proceeds authoritatively, if somewhat turgidly, by way of repeated stubbed-toe pacings, toward its climactic third section. There, nine eye-catchingly long-stemmed SFB beauties prance and spiral prettily away from terra firma.

Bintley's The Dance House (to Shostakovich) may be the craziest ballet I've ever seen. Sounding and looking a little like MacMillan's Concerto, this deftly invented "classroom" ballet has distracting and/or grotesque designs credited to Robert Heindel but seemingly devised by the blue bogeyman who lurks throughout the proceedings, part Death in The Green Table and part ballet teacher in The Lesson.

Although both performances of Stravinsky Violin Concerto started off primly, the act of dancing Balanchine had an increasingly brightening effect on these dancers; by the end each looked extra-alive, even the ever-vivid Possokhov. If SFB's other Balanchines were left home on purpose, Tomasson's artistic judgment comes into serious question; if the reason flows from special rights granted City Ballet by the Balanchine Trust, the Trust's wisdom falls into even bigger question.