One week after seeing Program 2: Classical (Re)vision at San Francisco Ballet, I was back for Program 3: Dance Innovations. I was pretty excited about revisiting a specific moment in Edwaard Liang’s The Infinite Ocean again and seeing Misa Kuranaga in Etudes, and I was curious about the world premiere by Trey McIntyre.
The Infinite Ocean, new at Unbound in 2018, is in many ways your basic moody abstract contemporary ballet. All the ingredients are there: leotards without tights; pointe shoes; plotless; ambiguous formations; unspecified longing; atmospheric lighting; gimmicky ending. Yet for all that, I like the ballet. Early on, as the group moved together or in canon, I kept noticing that the arrangement of the dancers or the sequence of their canon was always just short of symmetrical. Ballet loves symmetry. Audiences love symmetry. My balcony seat view is perfect for gauging the dancers’ success at achieving symmetry. Here, it was the almost-symmetry that caught the eye.
The ballet is built around two pas de deux for the principal couples: Sofiane Sylve and Tiit Helimets and Yuan Yuan Tan and Carlo Di Lanno. I was actively watching for the final moment in the pas for Sylve and Helimets, in which he magically pulls her from lying flat on the ground to arching back over him. Two years ago, that elicited gasps. This time, it was as though everyone knew it was coming and there was a collective—breath of relief, almost—that it was as we all remembered. (I really just want to try it! I left wanting to go into the studio and either try it myself or direct a pair of dancers in pursuit of it.) Sylve tends to be a very cool performer. Maybe it was the lighting, but she seemed somewhat warmer in this piece. The pas for her and Helimets in particular featured so many acrobatic lifts, many of them going over his neck and shoulders. Those lifts can be risky and can also seem repetitive, tending to rely heavily on the woman’s flexibility. Perhaps that’s partly why the final lift is so notable: it’s striking but in a fairly understated way. He’s kneeling, and she never becomes airborne. The pas for Tan and Di Lanno is, essentially, the same but different. Certainly, it suits Tan to a T. (You can watch a video of her with another dancer in this same pas here.)
The set for The Infinite Ocean has a ramp, so that the rear of the stage is raised all the way across the back, creating a horizon. The primary complaint I heard was that not enough was made of the ramp, and I agree. At the very end of the piece, Tan jumps backward off this edge. I wish she had jumped with more abandon! From my seat I could see the hands that catch her, which takes away some of the drama. But overall, I liked this ballet as much as I remembered.
Trey McIntyre’s new work The Big Hunger was next. I didn’t like it, that much I know. But did I dislike it? That I’m less sure of. The ballet is for three principal couples and a male corps. The set begins as an industrial space with a giant pillar left of center and a green exit sign. That falls away to become a graffiti’d exit sign on a massive concrete wall (pillar still there), all of which falls away to reveal a massive space with an enormous running figure towering over the dancers. The costumes, pictured below, look as though Elsa Schiaparelli (she of the “shocking pink”) collaborated with Lacoste (of polo shirt fame) on a 1930s style bathing suit (slightly baggy bottoms), and then halfway through all the garment workers took the designs and went to work for a denim factory (the same costumes but in blue jeans blue). The first two couples and the male corps, described in the program notes as “exit men,” wear these costumes, and everyone except the first couple also wears a neon pink wig, making them look more like human highlighters than exit men. The last couple is two men, and they come on wearing Matrix-style trench coats. By then, the wigs have also changed from pink to denim blue.
The ballet is ostensibly about “people overattributing significance to tangible things” (read the full program notes here). That didn’t come through to me. My main thought, while watching, was, “Why?” Why put a giant pillar in the stage space? So many dance studios occupy buildings with inconveniently-placed pillars; the dream is to have a clear expanse of room to move! Why the wigs? Why is the last couple two men? I was, in fact, incapable of attributing any significance to any of it. Which is not to say that I disliked it… And that’s where it gets tricky. Two images have stuck in my mind. In the first pas de deux, Sasha De Sola repeatedly found herself perched around Max Cauthorn’s neck, her legs straight out behind her but in front of him, her back arched up looking in the opposite direction that he was moving. The other is of the line of exit men, holding hands, running forward and one man (intentionally) running into the pillar. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be funny, or if it was a practical solution to some choreographic problem, but it got a chuckle out of me.
Nearly everyone I spoke to disliked this ballet. One thing I realized is that I felt The Infinite Ocean created a mood but this did not. That’s unfair. There was a clearly defined world. It just didn’t resonate with me. I remained outside, watching it, rather than being drawn in.
Etudes brought the evening to a very satisfactory close. Last season, the cast I saw looked sloppy in this ballet. Not so this time around. Misa Kuranaga more than delivered. Harald Lander’s choreography comes straight from the ballet classroom, which means there’s nowhere to hide when executing the steps. One girl traveled forward in the fouetté section, ruining the formation (see above comments on symmetry!), but otherwise the piece was much cleaner and more precise. I still maintain it’s a wonderful ballet primer for audiences. I would, however, be happy to see the “Sylphides” section cut. It ruins the flow, the progression from barre to center, without adding anything.
When the curtain came down I went literally running from the theater for my train. I would love for the big theaters there at Civic Center—the opera house, Davies Hall, and the Orpheum Theater—either to work with BART to make sure no one is waiting inordinate amounts of time or to program evenings that are, perhaps, just a bit shorter…
San Francisco Ballet: Program 3: Dance Innovations
February 18, 2020, at 7:30 pm, at the War Memorial Opera House
The Infinite Ocean, Edwaard Liang; The Big Hunger, Trey McIntyre; Etudes, Harald Lander
Going to the Ballet 