This year is the 10th anniversary of the San Francisco Dance Film Festival (SFDFF). There was a particularly rich offering of ballet amongst the screenings, three of which I made it to. As an East Bay resident, I wish all of the venues were closer to BART. Better yet, how about expanding the festival to include the East Bay? There are so many venues on this side of the bridge, I’m sure some would be happy to host!
Without further preamble:
Akram Kahn’s Giselle
Commissioned by English National Ballet in 2016, this production of the classic ballet Giselle was created by contemporary dancer and choreographer Akram Kahn. His Giselle, which bears little resemblance to the original beyond basic plot, is a somber affair set to a soundscape dotted with references to Adolphe Adam’s score. The ballet has become ENB’s calling card of sorts, touring the world and gathering accolades.
Though I was very excited to see this version, I was nervous. “You don’t mess with Giselle,” I once told my dad. It is full of iconic ballet moments, and it holds a special place in my heart as I got to appear as a Wili on the professional stage. Fortunately, Kahn’s production was so different that I didn’t even feel like I was watching Giselle.
Some notes would have helped; I kept wondering where the story was set. The look is stark and dreary, to me vaguely dystopian. None of the lighter moments from the original ballet have been saved: there’s no harvest festival, no peasant pas de deux, no flirtatious chasing around a bench. Instead the impact is in the collective and the communal. In Act I, it’s the mass of migrant factory workers, almost always dancing long, repetitive phrases of movement en masse. In Act II, it’s the Wilis, the ghosts of these workers, endlessly bourréeing and wielding long sticks which they use as prods and spears.
Things I didn’t like: the music, which was too unmelodic for my taste. When the Wilis hold the spears in their mouths; that felt too brutal. The camerawork. Act I in particular would have benefited from more stationary filming from a distance so you could see the whole stage. The impact of the choreography would have been greater.
Things I did like: the cast, with Tamara Rojo as Giselle, James Streeter as Albrecht, and a fantastic Jeffrey Cirio as Hilarion. The set. There was this enormous wall that rotated. Must have cost a fortune, but it was worth it. The overall effect of the ballet. It was much more of a downer than Giselle normally is, but the ballet itself was a success.
[Watch a clip of Akram Kahn’s Giselle here.]
Répétition(s)
Confession: I left work early to see this. (Sorry!) My junior year of college, I discovered the Paris Opera Ballet Etoile Aurélie Dupont. She was hugely inspiring to me as a dancer until her retirement in 2015. So the opportunity to see her again? Yes, I was going to make an effort for that.
Répétition(s) is a documentary that follows Dupont and Russian star Diana Vishneva as they learn and rehearse Ohad Naharin’s duet B/olero in advance of their performance at CONTEXT, Vishneva’s Moscow-based dance festival. The film is aptly named: “répétition” is French for “rehearsal,” and the subject is little more than watching the two dancers during one intense week of rehearsal in Tel Aviv.
Dupont only is interviewed. She makes the point that though she and Vishneva are both stars in the ballet world, they aren’t in the contemporary dance world of Naharin and so they must prove themselves all over again. That was something I noticed while watching. Amazing as these two women are, here they weren’t stars but rather a pair of dancers struggling to master unfamiliar movements. I imagine it was humbling, but perhaps also rather freeing.
I was also genuinely fascinated by the fact that the primary players were French, Russian, and Israeli—and so the common language was English, which wasn’t even anyone’s native language! It’s not so shocking, but when I imagine myself trying to learn foreign choreography in a foreign language… well, let’s just say I’m duly impressed.
This was a quiet film. It wasn’t exciting or revelatory. Certainly a treat to see Dupont and Vishneva in action, although I’d be lying if I didn’t say I greatly prefer seeing them in their element.
[Watch moments from Répétition(s) here.]
Romeo and Juliet
Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet is a staple of the Royal Ballet’s repertoire. It’s been broadcast as part of their cinema series, and you can buy it on DVD. One could say that it has been done. However, all of these recordings of the ballet have been your basic filmed performance with some zooming and angles—more or less the same as with Akram Kahn’s Giselle. With this Romeo and Juliet, Directors Michael Nunn and William Trevitt have restaged the ballet so that it plays like a movie, shot on location and half the length.
This makes for an incredibly immersive viewing experience (although that could also partly have come from my up-close view in the third row). Sometimes it was too immersive: when the camera was right there during the fight scenes, it was hard to watch, not so much because they were fighting as because it was hard to tell what you were actually seeing.
Because of the opportunities afforded by the set, which allowed the action to flow from outdoors to indoors and from one room to the next, the directors took (sanctioned) liberties with the choreography. Rather than see everything from straight-on, as you would in a theater, here you might see one group dancing around a fountain while another group crosses in front. It was supposed to feel like you were there, in the time and place, like watching a period film, except there’s no talking.
It’s a bit hard to explain! But the dancing was all excellent, and I liked the abridged length of 90 minutes. I didn’t feel that I had lost anything important choreographically, and in some cases the emotional impact seemed even greater. The ending, to me, was especially sad. In the theater, the curtain comes up and the dancers bow—you know that they didn’t die and that they’re going to go home and soak their feet. Here, though, their deaths appear final, and so painfully close to having been avoided.
This was the film’s first screening. What a coup for the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, to premiere such a special feature in its anniversary year!
[Definitely watch the trailer for Romeo and Juliet here, then scroll down and watch the short behind the scenes video as well.]
San Francisco Dance Film Festival
Akram Kahn’s Giselle—November 3, 2019, at the Delancey Street Screening Room
Répétition(s)—November, 5, 2019, at the Delancey Street Screening Room
Romeo and Juliet—November 6, 2019, at Lucasfilm Premier Theater
Going to the Ballet 