The San Francisco Treats: Ballet Rich in Rare Delicacies

Is San Francisco now ballet's new boomtown? This is where you'll find the nation's oldest ballet company, the San Francisco Ballet, which last April marked its 75th anniversary with a New Works Festival that produced 10 world premieres. If solid gold was conspicuously absent from that affair, the effort yielded a handful of interesting works, more than can be said for the ballet output of any other city in any recent season.

Lucky for us, an appearance at the Kennedy Center is also part of this company's birthday celebrations. Armed with two of the best of its festival premieres -- one by Mark Morris, the other by Christopher Wheeldon -- the troupe on Tuesday night gave one of those rare performances that starts strong, continues to build and ends in heady gobs of Chantilly cream and Cointreau.

Delicious, sophisticated and very satisfying stuff, indeed. (The company's stay in town continues tomorrow through Sunday, when it performs "Giselle." )

The troupe opened the program with a classic: a polished account of George Balanchine's "The Four Temperaments." It's no surprise the dancers shone in this work. Former New York City Ballet principal Helgi Tomasson has led the company for nearly a quarter century; he was a reliable and courteous Balanchine dancer, and he is a serious and tasteful director. His dancers have a uniform appearance: linear and lifted up in the ribs. They show us the classical vocabulary stretched to the extreme, as Balanchine intended. Legs swing up to high noon, feet are arched like talons, spines bend back to tomorrow, particularly in the case of Taras Domitro, a recent Cuban acquisition who danced the "Melancholic" variation in "Four Temperaments."

Domitro looks young enough to play the title role in "Billy Elliot." This boyishness coupled with his ability to fold himself over backward, or to wheel around and plunge precipitously to the floor, made his solo all the more poignantly desperate. Another moment to relish was the unhurried musical ease in Vanessa Zahorian and Joan Boada's pas de deux in the "Sanguinic" variation, where Paul Hindemith's majestic score seemed to swirl around them like water.

In case we hadn't gotten enough of the dancers' stunning lines and musicality -- and we hadn't -- both the Morris and the Wheeldon works expanded on these qualities. It's no wonder that Morris's "Joyride" and Wheeldon's "Within the Golden Hour" suited the company so well, as both choreographers have worked with these dancers on previous creations.

Morris has the deeper history; "Joyride" is his eighth work for the San Francisco Ballet. Perhaps that accounted for the work's calm self-assurance. Morris worked with a minimum of movement motifs -- what linger in the mind's eye are lots and lots of pirouettes, a splayed-out arabesque and a kind of protective, inward-curving crouch, what you might do to shield a child from the wind. This economy is striking, for "Joyride" is just that: a work of rushing, bounding, swooping flight. But you see the human contours, rather than a mass of steps. The beautiful lines, the curves, the amplitude. It's a tribute to human perfection, really, in all the variations you can get from eight fine-tuned classical dancers.

Right about here we ought to mention that the music to which Morris crafted this highly organized vision is John Adams's breakneck "Son of Chamber Symphony." It's all rumbling piano and excitable brass, melodies that appear and disappear and rhythms you can't count. It was more cohesive Tuesday than when I heard it at the ballet's premiere in April, though still rather hard to take. You can only marvel at Morris's fearlessness in making a dance of it. And such a dance -- not one that hits you over the head with blazing physicality, but one that makes an earthy, living song out of balletic precision. Isaac Mizrahi's costumes added a whimsical but somewhat chilling note. With their metallic skin suits adorned with breastplates of flashing LED numbers, the dancers were like artifacts of the digital age, bearing inscrutable countdowns. Yet Morris turned them back into warm bodies.

Although he speaks "ballet" fluently, Morris is native to the modern dance world, and you see that in his expansive, out-of-the-box approach to ballet. Wheeldon, formerly of the Royal Ballet and New York City Ballet, is rooted in a more traditional view, and it was fascinating to see these two men's approaches side by side.

"Within the Golden Hour," accompanied by string compositions by Vivaldi and Ezio Bosso, was a heavily perfumed exotic dream: The women were compliant and goddesslike, the men were perfect gentlemen and willing forklifts. The partnering, as you expect in a Wheeldon work, was breathtaking. Women blanketed themselves over their men, were whirled around as gently as a sigh. Katita Waldo and Damian Smith found a cha-cha in a section of steadily plucking strings, and turned it into ecstatic play.

This work was the audience favorite, and in truth, you can't find any fault in it. I prefer Morris's daring, however. "Joyride" was not as easy to connect with as "Golden Hour." But where Wheeldon luxuriated in conventional beauty, Morris posed thorny questions about energy and time. That countdown was our own.