Next year will see the first San Francisco Ballet (SFB) season to be curated by Artistic Director Tamara Rojo. The reason that sentence begins with “Next year” is that this coming December will still be devoted to over two weeks of performances of Helgi Tomasson’s choreography for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet score. In that context the new season will “officially” begin with the Opening Night Gala for the 91st season on January 24 of next year.
I suspect that I am not the only one wondering if and how the choreography of George Balanchine will fit into the repertoire that Rojo has planned. The answer is that Balanchine’s full-length ballet A Midsummer Night’s Dream will return. Those that attended opening night on March 6, 2020 will probably recall less about the performance and more about the leaflets handed out during intermission that marked the beginning of lockdown conditions in response to the threat of the COVID-19 virus. Midsummer will return next year with a run of performances between March 12 and March 23. The choreography will be situated in set designs by Christian LaCroix, which will be seen in the United States for the very first time.
Royal Ballet dancers Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin in the title roles of Frederick Ashton’s “Marguerite and Armand” ballet (photograph by Tristram Kenton, courtesy of the Royal Opera House)
The Balanchine program will be preceded by a program entitled British Icons, which will run from February 9 to February 15. Those “icons” are two of Balanchine’s contemporaries, working at the Royal Ballet: Chief Choreographer Frederick Ashton and Artistic Director Kenneth MacMillan. Many of Ashton’s works were created for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. The one that will be performed on this program will be “Marguerite and Armand,” based on the novel La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils, with influences by Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata. Ashton used Franz Liszt’s B minor piano sonata as the music for his choreography. The MacMillan selection will also involve a bold selection of the music, Gustav Mahler’s orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde. Drawing upon that title, MacMillan named his ballet “Song of the Earth.” Because Mahler’s thematic material drew upon Asian sources, MacMillan’s choreography was inspired by two Japanese theater styles: Noh and Kabuki.
Between Balanchine and the British “icons,” Swan Lake will be given a series of performances from February 23 to March 3, using the choreography created by Tomasson. Another “retrospective” selection will be a program of three of the ballets that were created for the next@90 festival that began the current SFB season. One of those will be Yuri Possokhov’s “Violin Concerto,” which amounted to his rethinking of the choreography that Balanchine had created for Igor Stravinsky’s violin concerto. The other two works will be Nicolas Blanc’s “Gateway to the Sun” and Danielle Row’s “MADCAP.”
More forward-looking will be the opening program of the season, which will run from January 26 to February 1. This will be a world premiere performance of a commissioned work that will bring choreographer Aszure Barton together with composer Floating Points (known to his friends as Sam Shepherd). This will be a full-evening ballet entitled Mere Mortals, and it will mark the first time that SFB has commissioned a female choreographer. The music will scored for orchestra and electronics, and the electronics will be performed by Floating Points in “real time.”
At “the other end” the season will conclude with a double bill of Latina choreographers. Arielle Smith has created her own approach to the “Carmen” narrative, and her choreography will be receiving its world premiere. She will work with a newly commissioned score composed by Arturo O’Farrill, which incorporates Cuban folk music. The other choreographer will be Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, whose “Broken Wings” will explore the life and work of Frida Kahlo. The composer for this ballet has not yet been named, but the original score will draw upon both mariachi sources and Mexican folk music.
The new season has its own home page, which includes hyperlinks for subscription renewals and new subscriptions. Currently, only renewals are being processed. New subscriptions will go on sale later this summer. Individual tickets will be available for purchase in the fall.
No comments:
Post a Comment