Out of Step
An Ambitious Festival Shows That Ballet Is Stumbling Toward the Future

By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO

The ballerina dashed off a final volley of pirouettes and sprang toward her partner, who flip-flopped her neatly over his shoulder. With her legs splayed open across the underside of her wide-brimmed tutu, you'd think he was brandishing a big floppy pancake. It wasn't an elegant finish, but it was a grabber, especially since the rest of the program had felt like getting stuck in a bog -- and, predictably, the crowd stood and roared its thanks.

"Finally, a real success!" exclaimed one patron on his way up the aisle at the War Memorial Opera House, where he had just seen the last of 10 world premieres performed in three days by the San Francisco Ballet. Wonderful for him that he was pleased, but I was merely weary. Too many bad ballets, too few steps forward.

The company didn't envision its ambitious New Works Festival, the centerpiece of the San Francisco Ballet's 75th-anniversary season, as a microcosm of what's wrong with the ballet world. But the fact that this large outlay of money, time and talent -- unprecedented in its scope -- produced more mediocrity than revelation points to a big problem for ballet. Self-renewal is not its strong suit. Ballet does well with the old and the familiar -- whether traditional story ballets such as "Sleeping Beauty" and "Swan Lake," or their plotless offspring, the tighter, sexier undressed works of George Balanchine. This is largely what the ballet runs on these days. But in recent years, producing new masterpieces (not just new pieces) has become a challenge.

As a result, ballet companies rely on a stupefying amount of recycling. Surely no other art form has as limited a canon as the ballet world, which deals primarily in chestnuts leavened by a few contemporary hits.

This season, according to the service organization Dance/USA, the performances of 60-some ballet companies with budgets topping $1 million consisted mainly of full-length standbys ("Cinderella," "Dracula" and "Romeo and Juliet" are especially hot this year, in addition to "Swan Lake" and "Sleeping Beauty") and short works by Balanchine, Twyla Tharp and Paul Taylor. About one-third of this field, says John Munger, the group's director of research and information, is presenting occasional new material -- premieres created by their overstretched artistic directors or an adventuresome company member or one of a roving band of variously skilled freelance choreographers who make the rounds of regional troupes. Gauging by historical precedent, few of these new works will have much shelf life.

That is, unless they are made by a select few expensive and hard-to-get artists: Tharp, Taylor, Mark Morris, Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky.

Ballet's creativity problem feels especially ironic at a time when the training, career longevity and skill level of most dancers has never been higher.

"There's no shortage of good dancers. There's a shortage of courage," said Morris, the day after the San Francisco Ballet premiered his "Joyride" at the New Works Festival.

I have to agree. There's also a shortage of time. Balanchine, a ballet machine, was an anomaly, but other 20th-century masters -- Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins -- could let ideas germinate for months, even years, and they weren't pulled in 20 directions at once because the demand wasn't the same in their day. Works of art are rarely crafted on the fly, but longer gestation periods cost more. The quick turnaround required of most choreographers today produces too many flattened, undercooked works. As a result, ballet audiences are growing alarmingly accustomed to repetition and mediocrity.

Against this backdrop, the San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival had been ripe with possibility. It was an outrageously grand affair: $3 million poured into three programs, made up entirely of new material and danced consecutively throughout the two-week run in late April. The creative process, with the dancers sequestered in studios as one choreographer after another arrived to work with them, had stretched across five months.

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.

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."