Two and a half weeks passed between seeing Cinderella and seeing Program 2:  Classical (Re)Vision—an unexpectedly lovely respite, I must confess, from going to the ballet.  When you go all the time, even when you like what you’re seeing, it occasionally feels like a chore rather than a treat.

But those two and a half weeks were probably anything but restful for San Francisco Ballet.  On January 30, news broke that choreographer Liam Scarlett was being investigated for sexual misconduct at the Royal Ballet School.  Proactively, wanting to be on the right side of the outcome, a number of companies worldwide pulled Scarlett programming and commissions.  Among those was SFB, who was set to perform his Hummingbird on Program 2, which opened on February 11.  Even allowing for the likelihood that the company had a bit more notice than the public, they still only had a couple of weeks to reprogram and rehearse.

In the end, I was very pleased with the approach SFB took.  Rather than replace Hummingbird with another 30-odd-minute ballet to complete the triple bill, they programmed three different combinations of three very short works, with a different trio performed at the various shows.  Half of the eight short works were seen at the gala.  But the gala audience is different (and smaller) than the repertory season audience, which means that these pieces will gain wider exposure.

At the performance I attended, the three pieces were Val Caniparoli’s Foreshadow, the pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, and Helgi Tomasson’s Soirées Musicales.  My only complaint was that it felt a bit like whiplash going from one to the next, and I was ready to go by the time these ended, as it seemed surely I’d seen enough variety for one evening.  Soirées Musicales appeared at last year’s gala, danced by Misa Kuranaga and Angelo Greco in both instances.  It is highly technical and extremely classical; the audience went wild for the bravura dancing they delivered, all tricks and turns executed with panache.  The pas de deux from After the Rain is, I believe, a popular favorite and a modern classic.  Choreographed to music by Arvo Pärt that is lulling in its repetitiveness, and danced by Yuan Yuan Tan and Luke Ingham, the piece leaves you in a trance.  It’s a wonderful showcase for Tan, showing off her flexibility and sometimes creature-like quality while also pulling a softness out of her.  (Here’s a video of them in rehearsal for this ballet.)  I wrote about Foreshadow just last month here.

Opening the evening was Bespoke, choreographed by Stanton Welch for the Unbound Festival in 2018.  Unbound was supposedly about the forward-looking trajectory of ballet:  what is it like today and how might it look tomorrow, as opposed to how we think of ballet in the collective consciousness.  Bespoke rests in a solidly neoclassical world.  Welch’s choreography is difficult, with no room for error in white costumes against an otherwise all-black stage.  I recognized the use of devices from other of his ballets, in particular entrances and exits from a curtain at the back of the stage. Choreographically, I appreciated the challenge Welch gave the dancers.  As an audience member, I think it could be about five minutes shorter.

Mark Morris’s Sandpaper Ballet rounded out the evening.  Choreographed in 1999, the piece, which I had not seen before, felt fresh.  Sandpaper Ballet is witty and whimsical, with a percussion-heavy score made up of music by Leroy Anderson (of “Sleigh Ride” fame) and grass-green costumes that extend to the tips of their pointe shoes and the ends of their gloved hands.  I liked everything about this piece, except the ending, which petered out.  I liked how egalitarian the onstage world was.  The dancers were listed in the program alphabetically, and aside from a pas de deux, there are no principals or soloists, the whole cast bowing together.  The music is playful, and the movement follows its lead.  Sometimes it seemed just on the edge of under-rehearsed, but I think that’s actually the dancers’ attempt to capture the tossed-off, carefree, jaunty style that Morris was going for.

[Watch a short clip of Sandpaper Ballet here.]

This post goes live the same day that I go see Program 3.  Back at it!

San Francisco Ballet:  Program 2, “Classical (Re)vision”
Bespoke, Stanton Welch; Foreshadow, Val Caniparoli; Pas de deux from After the Rain, Christopher Wheeldon; Soirées Musicales, Helgi Tomasson; Sandpaper Ballet, Mark Morris