I’m still recovering from Olympic Fever. Did you have it too? This year it was brought on by ice dancing. I never know exactly what will trigger a full-blown case of Olympic Fever. In 2014, it was surprisingly women’s cross-country skiing. One afternoon, I sat at home and watched an absolutely boring race become one of the most exciting finishes I’d ever seen.

This year, as I said, my Olympic Fever was triggered by ice dancing. I always tune in to watch figure skating, but as early as the team event I was disillusioned by all of the falls. The jumps that the skaters are doing are truly incredible—quads and triple-triple combinations—but it’s hard to watch them fall over and over again. The ice dancing, on the other hand, has a much lower likelihood of falls with an arguably higher degree of artistry. For some reason in figure skating this is referred to as the “component” score, which I don’t understand at all.

From the get-go, the commentators made it clear that the battle for gold was going to be between the Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir and the French Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron. This turned into some truly thrilling skating, with me sitting on the edge of my seat during the free skate.

The Canadians were the sentimental favorites. Gold medalists in Vancouver in 2010, they came in second in Sochi. They took two years off and decided to give gold another shot in Pyeongchang. Virtue and Moir have tremendous chemistry on the ice. “Electric” would not be too strong a word to use for them. They wowed me in the team event and I was Team Canada when the ice dancing competition began. But then NBC did one of those featurettes on the French couple. The film emphasized the purity and lyricism of their skating. I love purity and lyricism at the ballet, so why not on ice?

The rumba was the prescribed dance style for the short program, which meant there was none of the lyricism from the French that I had been expecting. Neither short program, in fact, spoke to me, which made me all the more curious to compare the two teams in the free skate. By the time the French completed their routine to Moonlight Sonata, I was Team France. It really was so lovely. The program was beautiful in every sense of the word. The Canadians, however, were skating last. I didn’t think I was going to make it through—I was holding my breath, twizzling right alongside them as they skated to a medley from Moulin Rouge. And by they time they finished I had switched back to Team Canada. I chose chemistry over lyricism, excitement over loveliness. Because as beautiful as the French program was, it did not catch me up in it the way Virtue and Moir’s did. I’ve had “Roxanne” in my head for days now, and I’ve revisited their performances in Sochi and Vancouver (thank you, YouTube!). But I haven’t Googled “Papadakis and Cizeron” once. I don’t know much about ice dancing, but I do know what I find compelling to watch. And it’s saying a lot that they managed to be that exciting, even through the TV screen.

After the ice dancing, and the pairs (which I managed to miss completely), and the men’s, were the women. The battle this time was waged between two Russian teenagers. The broadcast was a Thursday night, and I was considering going back to see Justin Peck’s Rodeo for a third time at San Francisco Ballet. I liked it that much! In the end, I chose the ice skating. I mentioned in a previous post that there aren’t many things we all watch together anymore; the Olympics are one of them. I wanted to be a part of that collective viewership. I wanted to see who won the gold medal as it happened.

The night before the ladies’ gold medal event I had gone to see San Francisco Ballet in “Distinctly SF Ballet.” This triple bill featured works made specifically for SFB by choreographers connected with the company—Helgi Tomasson (Artistic Director), Val Caniparoli (Principal Character Dancer); Myles Thatcher (Corps de Ballet dancer).

The evening began with Tomasson’s On a Theme of Paganini. The ballet has 5 leads, who break into a pair and a trio. From the trio, two men were often paired, and they were not as together as they could have been! Having just watched all that ice dancing, I was newly aware of the importance of the skaters’ twizzles being in snyc. All three medal-winning teams had excellent twizzles, a step that I suspect looks much easier than it is. Well, here at the ballet, the men were not pirouetting in sync. I found myself thinking, “If they can do it on ice, surely you can do it onstage!”

Next up was Caniparoli’s Ibsen’s House. This ballet weaves together the women (and the men in their lives) from five of Ibsen’s plays, not telling a single linear narrative but rather creating a series of miniature portraits of the characters. The piece was well-danced, with a particularly vivid performance from Isabella DeVivo, but I found myself wishing I were more familiar with the source material. While the tone and atmosphere certainly came through (tense, fragile, fraught), how much more would I have gotten out of the ballet if I knew all the stories and characters?

Thatcher’s Ghost in the Machine, which premiered last season, ended the evening. It was not a favorite for me last year, and I did not like it any more upon a second viewing. Mainly, I find it overlong. There’s a lot of running. It does have some beautiful music, and I know that my seatmate found the central pas de deux incredibly moving. The beauty of ballet is that you never know what is going to hit you, or how. And with a triple bill, you have three wholly different chances to discover what you love. For my seatmate, it was Ghost in the Machine. For me, it wasn’t anything on this program—it was still Rodeo.

Rodeo and ice dancing.

San Francisco Ballet: Program 03: Distinctly SF Ballet
February 21, 2018, at 7:30 pm, at the War Memorial Opera House
On a Theme of Paganini, Ibsen’s House, Ghost in the Machine