Out of Step

There have been a few other mass-showcases of premieres over the years -- the New York City Ballet's Stravinsky Festival in 1972, and its biannual Diamond Project -- but none has produced so many brand-new, stylistically varied ballets stage-ready all at once.

The festival is just the kind of ambitious attention-grabber you'd expect from Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson, who in his 23 years at the helm has built the company into a world-class operation, known for its mastery of the Balanchine repertoire (which Tomasson had danced in his 15 years as a New York City Ballet principal) and its appetite for new material. Morris, for example, has had a deeper association with this company than with any other ballet troupe, creating eight works for it.

With this festival, the Icelandic-born Tomasson, who has frequently operated a step ahead of the rest of the field, made a credible stab at reinvigorating ballet. In this era of the identity crisis, all kinds of once-secure institutions -- from network television to your local newspaper -- are rethinking their relevance. In a need-it-now climate, what room is there for anything as intrinsically old-fashioned and leisure-dependent as the classical arts? As the ballet world lurches nervously forward, those who hold it dear are crying out for compelling new material. Especially the well-funded efforts that a large and respectable company like San Francisco's can bring forth.

But as a snapshot of where the ballet world is and where it's going, the festival was as predictable as the city's morning chill. No instant hit emerged. No one sought to turn classical ballet inside out, to take some audacious risk or to surprise us. In what ought to have been a smorgasbord of originality, there was a prevailing sameness: movement illustrations of the music, confirming that abstract works still reign and can be turned out quickly, as the festival structure mandates.

Where were the sharp observations, the storytelling, the emotional catharsis -- the wit? The answer, I think, is that perfecting those qualities takes more skill. And it takes more than the two- or three-week creation period that most of the choreographers had to work with. These are busy folks; Wheeldon's contribution was one of six new ballets he's created in as many months. Many of them are jetting from coast to coast and to Oslo, Copenhagen and beyond because so many troupes are desperate for new work, and they'll accept quick and sketchy because that's the kind of rut we're in.

This is not to say that the festival was entirely bereft. Of the 10 productions, four were solidly crafted, and they came from exactly whom you'd expect: Taylor, Morris and Wheeldon, as well as San Francisco Ballet's gifted choreographer-in-residence Yuri Possokhov. (Washington audiences may recall his radically imaginative and illuminating "Cinderella," which the Bolshoi Ballet performed at the Kennedy Center last year.)

The ultra-dependable Taylor, in his 70s the elder statesman of the group, gave us the most youthful piece, as well as the most distinctive in style and concept. His "Changes" was a gimlet-eyed view of the 1960s, with songs recorded by the Mamas and the Papas, and 11 long-haired dancers in bell-bottom retro wear that could have come from Haight-Ashbury's legendary Free Store. (Credit the inspired eye of costumer nonpareil Santo Loquasto.) The dancing, in starbursts or rounds of cyclonic abandon, makes shorthand reference to go-go and the Mashed Potato; chicks flirt and joints are smoked.

But there's a subtext of hypocrisy here. In the darker images of self-inflating power and manipulation, and with an ending that progresses nowhere but merely reprises the beginning, Taylor has something to say about the emptiness of all that Vietnam War-era energy and resolve -- and he makes a statement about now. In an election year where "change" has become the buzzword, he shows us just what little transformation mere words can bring.

It's tempting to compare "Changes" to "Company B," Taylor's 1991 masterwork also inspired by a war (World War II) and its youth culture (songs by the Andrews Sisters, swing dances). "Changes" comes up short -- it has neither the biting power nor the poignancy of the former work, perhaps because Taylor does not connect as personally and fondly to the '60s as he does to the '40s of his youth.

There was a stronger sense of personal motivation in Possokhov's "Fusion." It was also beautiful. The well-chosen music -- rhythmically complex selections by Graham Fitkin and one from Bollywood composer Rahul Dev Burman -- included peppery jazz and a Middle Eastern beat, building into a prolonged head rush. When I spoke with him after the premiere, Possokhov said he'd been intrigued by performances he'd seen of the Whirling Dervishes, and those Sufi mystics' melding of "spirituality and performance." It got him thinking about what he valued most in dance, he said: "Something touching your inside. Without that, ballet shouldn't exist at all."

In service to that romantic if old-fashioned sentiment, images of spinning drifted in and out of this piece -- particularly among the quartet of dervish-like male corps de ballet dancers, who were often pursued by the others. A sense of yearning and propulsion infused it all. A willowy, streamlined genie in her slim pants and bra top, Lorena Feijoo created a lasting impression of headstrong urgency, and even the delicate Yuan Yuan Tan, so often haughtily reserved, seemed to lose herself in this work's rushing waters.

Wheeldon's "Within the Golden Hour" followed "Fusion." This was unfortunate, for it was similar to Possokhov's ballet in its quasi-spiritual atmosphere and costuming (the women in Eastern-inspired tunics and trousers). "Within the Golden Hour," accompanied by Ezio Bosso's soft strings, seemed to continue the conversation Wheeldon had started with other cleanly sculpted pieces, such as "Morphoses"; it was all about how meltingly lovely the dancers could be, and how many subtle shades of feeling can be conveyed through partnering. As in his "Carousel (A Dance)," he also played with the theatrics of an ensemble, organizing the dancers into sweeping clockworks at the finish that had nothing to do with anything but sure looked clever.