Ballet Season’s End Disappoints

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House San Francisco Ballet began the conclusion of its 2022 season with the first of eleven scheduled performances of Swan Lake, the last of which will take place on Sunday, May 8. Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson created his own staging but drew upon Lev Ivanov for most of the second act and retained Marius Petipa’s choreography of the “Black Swan pas de deux” in Act 3. Sadly, except for the splendor of a well-coordinated corps de ballet of 30 swans in the second act, the affair was a relatively lackluster one.

The primary problem seems to have been that Tomasson was more interested in an abundance of “pure dance filler” episodes than he was in accounting for a rather awkward narrative that heavily demands Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” His decision to begin with Rothbart (danced last night by Daniel Deivison-Oliveira) transforming Odette (Frances Chung) into a swan fit comfortably into the introductory music composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; but, once we enter the world of Prince Siegfried (Joseph Walsh), we have to contend with a plot that advances by fits and starts, frequently punctuated by extended dance episodes that put the narrative on hold.

Mind you, there was no shortage of high-quality dancing during the course of those episodes, whether we were in the “mortal” world of Siegfried, his mother (Anita Paciotti), and his tutor (Ricardo Bustamante) or in the “fantasy” world of all those swans. As a result, when those worlds collide during the third act, the attentive viewer has become so wrapped up in the “divertimento of nations” that the melodramatic plot line is all but forgotten. The impact of the crisis of that melodrama is so muddled that its resolution in the final act devolves into an ambiguity that allows each viewer his/her/their own opportunity to make up how the story ends.

The precision dancing of the four cygnets (Julia Rowe, Norika Matsuyama, Ellen Rose Hummel, and Isabella DeVivo; photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of San Francisco Ballet)

Perhaps George Balanchine had the right idea. Extract the second act of the ballet (that “fantasy” world of the enchanted swans). This allows the audience to enjoy the splendid choreography of a divertissement with minimal intrusion of any plot elements.