Confession:  I have never seen Disney’s The Little Mermaid.  Not all of it, anyway—I was so afraid of Ursula as a child that I could never make it through the film.  John Neumeier’s ballet of The Little Mermaid is darker and weirder than Disney’s, and of course does away with singing crabs.  My assorted thoughts about the production and performance follow.

Yuan Yuan Tan was exceptional as the titular character.  She embodied the “creature” quality of the Mermaid so well, with her long, thin limbs and her extreme flexibility.  The Mermaid’s movement is both fishy and angular, and Ms. Tan’s arms were alternately boneless and seemingly double-jointed, as needed.  For much of the first act, the Mermaid has her tail, implied by her very long, very wide-legged silk pants.  She often dances in tandem with three “tail handlers,” one carrying her and two manipulating the fabric of the tail.  Under the sea, in her element, the Mermaid is elegant and regal.  Ms. Tan carried herself with calm confidence, with the assurance of belonging.  But once the Mermaid becomes fully human, wobbling painfully on new legs, Ms. Tan’s whole carriage changed.  Not only did she have a funny, scuttling walk, looking awkward in her pointe shoes, but even her upper body closed in.  She so clearly conveyed the character’s discomfort in her new skin.

This is the only ballet I can think of, offhand, in which pointe shoes signify the human state.  What do I mean?  While most female roles in big and/or story ballets are danced en pointe, I would argue that pointe shoes are associated most strongly with their ability to make a character otherworldly—the sylphs, Wilis, and nymphs that populate so many ballets.  It’s the shoes that allow a dancer to float, to appear weightless, and so to seem magical.  Here, the Mermaid becomes the most civilized, human version of herself when she finally dons pointe shoes like all the other mortal women.  The pointe shoes help her fit in.  And, at the end, resigned to a human life without her love, she is quick to cast them aside.

I do not want to see this ballet again.  Right now, I mean.  But this is exactly the kind of ballet that one should see again with multiple casts—how does each dancer make the Mermaid her own?  This has, I believe, become a signature role for Yuan Yuan Tan, and I can see why.  She gives a deep and nuanced performance.

The story of The Little Mermaid is not told simply. Neumeier adds a layer, a Poet who remembers a wedding of a friend which makes him sad, and that memory morphs into the Mermaid and the rest of the fairy tale.  This didn’t quite work for me.  Or, rather, I didn’t find it necessary.  I would have been fine with just the tale itself. What did work for me were the wonderful scenic elements, also designed by Neumeier.  I loved the undulating neon rods signifying the waves, and the simple form that hinted at a church, and the railings and smokestacks of the ship on which much of the action takes place.

My primary complaint, however, is going to make me sound like a broken record: there wasn’t enough dancing. There was lots of movement, of course, and stage action, and storytelling, but there weren’t long sections of straight dancing.  At least, there didn’t seem to be to me.  Walking to the train afterward, a friend said, “I was surprised there wasn’t a main pas de deux, either for the Prince and the Mermaid or for the Prince and Princess.”  And she was right; there wasn’t one.  In many ways, I have gotten used to stories being told through a series of pas de deux.

In the program notes, Neumeier remarks, “I always think the job of a choreographer is not to put steps together; it is to create worlds.”  And he absolutely did.  In The Little Mermaid, he has created the Mermaid’s world, twice, as sea-creature and as human.

San Francisco Ballet:  The Little Mermaid, a ballet by John Neumeier after Hans Christian Andersen
April 23, 2019, at 7:30 pm at the War Memorial Opera House