Out of Step

Morris's "Joyride," which capped the second program, featured the least accessible music -- a commissioned score by John Adams ("Son of Chamber Symphony"), all fluctuating counts and quirky tick-tocks -- but was helped along by Isaac Mizrahi's brilliant, witty digital-age costumes: metallic skinsuits flashing LED numbers on their chest panels. (As one colleague noted, the dancers looked a bit like grown-up, slimmed-down Teletubbies.) In contrast, the movement wasn't brazenly new; it was academic, small-scale and quiet, exquisitely delivered by the ensemble of eight.

As for the other choreographers -- Stanton Welch, Julia Adam, James Kudelka, Margaret Jenkins, Val Caniparoli and Jorma Elo, as diverse a group of nationalities and dance backgrounds as you'll find under one roof -- none produced a piece worth a second look. All but Jenkins -- a Bay Area modern-dance choreographer -- constitute the ballet world's second tier of usual suspects, names who more or less routinely appear on programs around the country.

Plotless meanderings predominated. Kudelka's "The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful" offered up a gloomy and fundamentally dull vision of misogyny. Elo's "Double Evil," which contained that madly spinning ballerina described at the start of this article, and Welch's "Naked" trotted along slavishly and pointlessly to their music, like snapped-together stepchildren of William Forsythe, or Balanchine.

A bit of narrative was assayed by Caniparoli, whose dark and fretful "Ibsen's House" squandered Dvorak's gorgeous Piano Quintet in A on the endless lamentations of various Ibsen heroines. Adam's "A rose by any other name" told a reduced and fitfully charming version of "The Sleeping Beauty," but it felt like a poor attempt to mimic Morris's deft quirkiness.

Jenkins's "Thread," purportedly based on the myth of Ariadne, resembled the few other Jenkins works I've seen, a gradual accumulation of activity among small groups of dancers performing simultaneously. Building tension was a priority; conceptual clarity was not.

Including Jenkins in the festival amounted to Artistic Director Tomasson's single riskiest move. Though she's been heading her own group for decades, Jenkins is a newcomer to ballet and her choreographic method involves such utterly foreign (to ballet dancers) notions as improvisation, rehearsing in silence and measuring movement phrases in breaths rather than counts.

But risk was not what this festival was about. Its larger design was to focus attention on this company. The event was structured so that the whole lot of premieres could be seen in any three-day span during the run -- a particular boon for the press.

"It was a marketing strategy," Tomasson explained in his small office in the opera house a few days after the festival opened. A genial, soft-spoken man, he sported the air of a creative intellectual in jeans and a V-neck sweater, with fashionably square black-rimmed glasses dominating his pale Nordic looks.

"With this climate in newspapers, they are probably not going to send a writer here for 10 days. So what if I do it in three?" Blue eyes wide, he smacked a fist into his open palm in triumph. "It's never been done before!"

Tomasson rejected the idea of a retrospective in this 75th-anniversary season. "I felt we should be who we are now, and look forward," he said. "I don't want to play it safe."

Yet he did play it safe, in many respects. The festival idea was "really attractive for fundraising," said the ballet's executive director, Glenn McCoy. Learning of Tomasson's plans, "I thought there was a lot of upside potential on the revenue side," he said, and he was right. Money was raised through a $90,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant and more than a dozen foundations and private donors who gave at least $250,000; many gave more, he said.

Tomasson also minimized his risk by engaging well-established choreographers. Where was the talent we'd never heard of, the fresh voice? Who has the courage to find him or her? That won't happen in San Francisco, at least not anytime soon. The company has just released its 2009 season schedule, which reprises six of the 10 pieces from the New Works Festival. They will be interspersed with ballets by the always dependable Balanchine and a new production of, yes, "Swan Lake."