Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Ballet (SFB) launched its 2022 season, which will celebrate the 37th and final season of Helgi Tomasson as Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer. Tomasson’s trajectory began with a scholarship at the School of American Ballet in New York when he was seventeen years old. He then advanced into the Joffrey Ballet, followed by the Harkness Ballet, and finally the New York City Ballet (NYCB), where he danced for fifteen years. His tenure in San Francisco began in 1985 after he left NYCB.
The high point of last night’s program reflected back on his experiences at NYCB and its repertoire of choreography by George Balanchine. The final selection was Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a choreographic interpretation of a symphony that launched the career of Georges Bizet when he was at that same age of seventeen. Appropriately enough, Balanchine created this work for the Paris Opera Ballet during his tenure as guest ballet master there in 1947. (Ironically, while Bizet composed the music in 1855, the score was only discovered in 1933; and Balanchine first learned about it through Igor Stravinsky.)
The first appearance of an ensemble of men in the final movement of “Symphony in C” (photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of SFB)
The choreography is the perfect example of how Balanchine would allow himself to be guided by the music. Indeed, back in my student days, when I could not get enough of either the music or the choreography, I used to claim that I could watch a silent film of the ballet and hear every note that Bizet had written in my head! Last night all those fatuous memories flooded back into consciousness. I recalled how each of the first three movements had its own ensemble of dancers and how all three of them gradually filled the stage for what may well be the grandest of grand finales.
This grand finale of Balanchine was complemented by one of Tomasson’s own efforts at choreography guided by the music. “Trio” is a setting of another four-movement composition, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s D minor Opus 70 string sextet (pairs of violins, violas, and cellos), given the title “Souvenir de Florence.” Those who know their Balanchine history know that his first creation in the United States was a setting of Tchaikovsky’s Opus 48 in C major for string ensemble, the ballet being given the simple title “Serenade.”
One can easily speculate that the spirit behind “Trio” amounted to a reflection on “Serenade.” Indeed, it is easy to assume that the spirit was made flesh in Tomasson’s setting of the second (Adagio cantabile e con moto) movement. Nevertheless, as one considers more intently the syntax, phrasing, and rhetoric of “Trio,” it becomes quickly apparent that the capacity for expressiveness is a pale shadow when compared with “Serenade.” Mind you, there is a certain lumbering quality that emerges when the music is performed by a full string ensemble; but it would have been impractical to expect a string sextet to carry the weight from the Opera House orchestra pit. To be fair, the dancing did its best to breathe life into the choreography; but earnest interpretation can only go so far when there is to little to interpret.
Nevertheless, there was a coherence to “Trio” that was seriously lacking in Cathy Morrison’s latest venture into narrative. “Mrs. Robinson” is based on one of the most successful films of the Sixties, The Graduate. It amounted to a bedroom farce that reflected the tempers of the times. The narrative was based on a novel of the same name by Charles Webb, but the deadpan comedy reflected the talents of screenwriter Buck Henry and director Mike Nichols.
In the film Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has just graduated from college and has no idea what to do with his life. Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) is a sex-starved victim of suburban angst, who finds diversion in seducing Braddock. In the course of encountering the Robinson household, Braddock falls for Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. This variation on a “triangle plot” is relatively slim; but the script has no end of comic turns, most of which unfold in passing by bit players.
Apparently, Marston wanted to reinterpret the narrative from Mrs. Robinson’s point of view. Considering that the point of view of both the novel and the film was that of an omniscient observer, Marston’s ambition was bold. Sadly, it was not particularly successful. There are seven soloist roles in her choreography, and it takes a while for mind to adjust to which dancer is executing which role. Furthermore, the scenario begins with our first view Braddock (presumably after his graduation ceremony); so any sense of point of view is never established particularly clearly. The result was a rather tedious slog that would leave anyone familiar with the source (film or novel) disappointed by the lack of wit and anyone else just plain mystified.
No comments:
Post a Comment