San Francisco Ballet. - War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, California - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1994 by Janice Ross

There is a tendency to divide up San Francisco Ballet's 1994 season as if one were giving out Academy Awards: Best Choreography goes to Mark Morris for his Maelstrom. Best Full-evening Programming goes to the all-Jerome Robbins program. Most Evanescent Choreography goes to Anna Laerkesen's Sighing Land. Best Dancing in Search of a Vision goes to Helgi Tomasson's Romeo and Juliet. It was that kind of season.

For the past couple of years the Tomasson ascendancy at SFB seems to have been leveling off. Strong dancing and first-rate training of the company are now firmly established, but local audiences are still waiting for Tomasson, who just completed his eighth year as director, to establish a choreographic identity for the group. What is needed is not so much a style as an out-look about dancing, a consistency as to how dances are made to divulge their contents and how they are fitted into an evening, a season, or a company repertoire, in a way that reveals the sensibility of the artistic director at work.

I felt the lack of this most strongly in Tomasson's big premiere of the season, his first evening-length Romeo and Juliet. A visually stunning work with High Renaissance-styled sets and costumes by Tomasson's finest collaborator, Jens-Jacob Worsaae, this Romeo and Juliet seems unwittingly Balanchinean in its focus on the logic of steps as the fulcrum around which the ballet revolves.

Framed as a day in the life of Renaissance Verona, the ballet begins cinematically at sunrise with Romeo gazing forward in time at Juliet in a distant window; by the ballet's closing scene set at dusk the lovers will have come together, been separated, and then been reunited in death at the fading of daylight. All three casts I saw (Tina LeBlanc and guest artist David Palmer, Joanna Berman and Jeremy Collins, and Elizabeth Loscavio and Anthony Randazzo) danced this as a richly urban Romeo and Juliet where tensions keep simmering in the crowd scenes, boiling from shoving into lunging sword fights. Romeo and Juliet's love, too, seems to flow just as immediately from the charge of surrounding tensions.

Particularly in the balcony pas de deux, dramatically the weakest moment in Tomasson's version, there is little emotional modulation, although in all three casts the Juliet performed heroically. The dancing feels more about exhibition than tenderness, with phrases repeating rather than evolving as Romeo catches Juliet in a swoon of passion and runs her across the stage, Soviet-style, before the hushed farewell on the stairs where "lips do what hands do" and kiss.

On the final weekend of the season Loscavio and Randazzo, on whom the roles had reportedly been created but who had been sidelied with injuries much of the season, danced at last, performing with a realism that felt more like recovered emotion than a dramatically placed portrayal shaped by the choreography. Denis de Coteau lent consistently fine support from the pit.

Portrayals in the supporting cast settled in nicely in the two months between the ballet's March premiere and its closing performances the first week of May. Christopher Stowell as Mercutio was wickedly comic, mocking Jorge Esquivel's Tybalt with a savage eye for movement mimicry. In alternate casts, David Justin and Mikko Nissinen dazzled as Mercutio and Benvolio, respectively, Ashley Wheater's Paris gave a finely nuanced portrait of patrician restraint, and Katita Waldo's street harlot was memorably spirited in a dramatically thin role.

The choreographic feast of the season was Mark Morris's Maelstrom, a three-movement exposition of Beethoven's Piano Trio in D Major (Ghost), that seems simultaneously a portrait of a tempest on land, sea, air, and within the soul. James Ingalls's shifting cloudscape on the cyclorama moves from azure storm clouds to the red anger of a city on fire as fourteen principals and soloists (with all the women on pointe) traverse the stage in dramatic pairings and eddies of motion that might happen at the stage's perimeter, as with Evelyn Cisneros and Loscavio, or dead center with Grace Maduell, who pirouettes with legs that pointedly shift from straight to bent as the ballet accelerates toward its finale. In the final moments of Maelstrom the vantage point seems to be Morris's own In the Upper Room, where he, like Tharp, layers speeds and movement colors and textures in a physical rush to adumbrate the haunting restlessness of what is, in this instance, the music's central "ghostly" theme.

The two other new works of the season, Donald McKayle's Gumbo Ya-Ya and Jerome Robbins's In G Major (a company premiere), were in the former instance defeated and in the latter enhanced by context. Gumbo Ya-Ya, part of the Kennedy Center Ballet Commissioning Project, had the misfortune to be paired with the impenetrable modernist addition from last season, Redha's La Pavane Rouge. Reportedly intended as a metaphor for man's destruction of his natural environment, Gumbo Ya-Ya features A. Christina Giannini's set of a huge parachute-like tree, a raffia-skirted shaman, and a narrative that is too ambitious for the choreography's literal and more intimately scaled portraits of the dehumanizing effects of urban life on natural man. In G Major is a relatively minor work to Ravel by this major choreographer, but its packaging as one of a trio of Robbins piano ballets made for the richest evening of comparative viewing all season.