Last night San Francisco Ballet began its run of the third program in its 2021 Digital Season, the second of its “mixed repertory” offerings. The program began on a refreshing high note with Alexei Ratmansky’s “Symphony #9,” setting you-know-which symphony by Dimitri Shostakovich. This was followed by a far less stimulating premiere of Danielle Rowe’s “Wooden Dimes,” explicitly created as a film. The descent plunged even deeper as the program concluded with Yuri Possokhov’s “Swimmer.”
The symphony that Ratmansky set, Opus 70 in E-flat major, figures significantly in the perspective of the composer’s biography. It was originally intended to celebrate the turning of the Eastern Front of World War II to Soviet advantage. The two symphonies that preceded it documented the darkness of Nazi occupation. The seventh (Opus 60 in C major) was written during the siege of Leningrad; but the last of its four movements still resonated with hope for the future. The eighth (Opus 65 in C minor) is far darker and may be the most poignant expression of war-weariness to be interpreted as music. With the reversal of the war’s fortune, Shostakovich envisioned a grand symphonic celebration, probably inspired by “the” ninth symphony in music history, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125 in D minor.
Things did not go according to plan, however. Progress was an on-and-off affair, over the course of which Shostakovich abandoned his original plan. By the time he pursued the final thrust on his project, Germany had surrendered unconditionally; and the score was completed on August 30, 1945, only a few days before the Japanese surrender. The finished project was far lighter than originally planned, as if the composer’s reaction to victory was a blend of exhaustion and relief. Rather than singing the praises of victory, the music seems to say little more than, “Whoopee, the war is over!”
That sentence is captured in Ratmansky’s choreography by a thoroughly engaging parade of light-hearted (and frequently sassy) riffs. It has many of the same tongue-in-cheek qualities that one encounters in George Balanchine’s “Rubies” (which will be seen performed by SFB beginning on April 1). However, Ratmansky has his own lexicon of moves and his own exuberant rhetoric. Watching the archival video from May 7, 2019, one gets the feeling that teaching the ballet was as much fun for the choreographer and his dancers as watching it was for the audience.
A reflection on Busby Berkeley in Danielle Row’s “Wooden Dimes” (film clip provided by Lindsay Gauthier, © San Francisco Ballet)
Those high spirits were nowhere to be found in Rowe’s film. Mind you, she may well have been inspired by the dances created by Busby Berkeley, intended to cheer up audiences in the depths of the Great Depression. However, while there was usually a bit of narrative behind some of the longer Berkeley routines, that narrative was kept thin to avoid drawing attention away from the intricate maneuvers of massive chorus lines. Rowe’s choreography is far from that grand scale of Berkeley’s work, but her narrative goes overboard with too many characters and descriptive adjectives in the program listing. The idea of using camera work to envisage patterns of movement that could not be observed by an audience watching dancers on a stage was definitely a good one, but Rowe never figured out how to provide her audience with content that would attract and sustain viewer attention.
Possokhov’s “Swimmer” also abounded with imaginative imagery for the audience. In this case, however, the audience was seated in the War Memorial Opera House, watching a performance on stage on March 20, 2016. However, instead of meticulously conceived camera work, the audience could simply view the dancers in a setting rich with projections and lighting effects. Unfortunately, the work was conceived as a continuous flow of ten scenes, which lacked any sense of narrative coherence. Indeed, there were three throw-away references to authors Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), and Jack London (Martin Eden), along with an inevitable nod to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.
There was far too much preening in how this narrative was conceived and far too little to draw audience attention. For that matter, the “interpretation” that seemed to be associated with Catcher in the Rye was nothing short of downright ludicrous. Structurally, the work had the annoying quality of rapidly proceeding through the first nine scenes and then lingering in the tenth for an eternity. It was also more than a little disconcerting that the moderately appealing score provided by Shinji Eshima should be pretentiously “invaded” towards the end of the ballet by Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.”
Those viewing the video of this program may wish to follow “Swimmer” by rewinding back to “Symphony #9” to refresh their spirits.
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