Last year’s Unbound festival of new works continues to loom large at San Francisco Ballet, with a number of said new works returning to the stage this season. Two of them appeared on Program 5, “Lyric Voices”: Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem, choreographed by Trey McIntyre, and Bound To, by Christopher Wheeldon, sharing the stage with a world premiere by Yuri Possokhov.
I did the marathon last year, attending all four programs of Unbound. It was an artistic overload, too much really to fully process all 12 new ballets. But I do remember that I had liked both the McIntyre and the Wheeldon. Meanwhile, no one seated around me at “Lyric Voices” had seen either! I was quite surprised, though I shouldn’t be. My ballet-viewing habits are somewhat more… excessive, shall we say, than most.
[To see what I said about all 12 premieres last year, you can read that post here.]
This time around, I am prepared to state with confidence how much I like Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem. McIntyre has a unique ability to create a mood onstage that registers all the way out into the audience. He is aided by his musical choices, which tend to have lyrics. I’ve probably said it before, but I’m saying it again now: music with lyrics simply seems to automatically produce more mood/feeling/ambiance. This is maybe not so surprising. More surprising is that I find this to be the case regardless of whether the choreography directly embodies the words or not. At no point was I aware of McIntyre translating the lyrics into movement. It didn’t matter. The music set the tone and his choreography did the rest.
My only two quibbles with the ballet were that I think McIntyre’s work is generally better suited to a smaller, more intimate venue, and that if you are seated upstairs, as I was, you couldn’t see any of the backdrop. I knew, from an informative Instagram post, that the backdrop featured a sun and moon aligned, a nod to the solar eclipse that occurred on McIntyre’s first day of rehearsal and which he conceived of as a portal through time. However, from my seat in the balcony circle, I could see neither sun nor moon!
My evening at the ballet peaked early; Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem was my favorite on the bill. It was followed by Wheeldon’s Bound To. Bound To is not first-rate Wheeldon. But neither is it bad, and he seems to be experimenting with some new things (flat shoes for the women, same-sex partnering), for which credit is deserved.
The key element of the piece are the cell phones the dancers carry, their faces glued to them at the beginning, gradually relinquished, and then taken up again at the end. Hunched over my own phone at intermission, I felt sheepish. Here I was, no better than the anonymous figures in the ballet, more consumed by the activity online than in person! And I was especially aware of my location, not far from Silicon Valley. When one dancer plucked the phone from another’s hand and ran offstage, the audience laughed in commiseration. Later, waiting for a train, I heard someone say, “That piece with the cell phones was so sad.” I wondered if she was aware of me next to her, tapping out a message on my own phone—relaying, in fact, her comment.
Yuri Possokhov’s “…two united in a single soul…” took the myth of Narcissus as its starting point. That’s all I knew about the piece going in, my primary motivation being to see Yuan Yuan Tan and Sofiane Sylve. I would have liked more of both of them here.
Halfway through the piece, I decided to throw the myth out the window. It was not clear to me what anything onstage had to do with Narcissus. I thought maybe if I tried to watch it as simply an abstract ballet I would enjoy it more. Did this work? Up to a point, yes. At least I wasn’t trying to follow a story! But it didn’t help explain the countertenor (beautiful voice) who sang onstage, never directly interacting with Joseph Walsh as Narcissus but always there. It didn’t explain some of the various scenic elements, or who or what any of the other dancers onstage were meant to represent. Afterwards, I consulted the program. Although there’s a whole page devoted to the premiere, my understanding remains limited. The most notable thing was the ending, a trick of lights and mirrors, and I won’t give it away.
“Lyric Voices” is running concurrently with “Space Between,” which also features an Unbound reprise, Björk Ballet, in addition to a world premiere by Liam Scarlett and the return of Justin Peck’s Rodeo. That last one I can’t wait to see again.
San Francisco Ballet: Program 5: Lyric Voices
March 27, 2019, at 7:30 pm at the War Memorial Opera House
Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem, Trey McIntyre; Bound To, Christopher Wheeldon; “…two united in a single soul…”, Yuri Possokhov
Going to the Ballet 