Two Disappointing Premieres from SFB

Last night the San Francisco Ballet (SFB) presented the first performance of Dos Mujeres (two women). This was the final new program of the season. It consisted only of two works, both of which were premiere offerings. Furthermore, both of those works were choreographed by women.

The first of these was the world premiere of “Carmen.” This was created by Arielle Smith, set to original music by Arturo O’Farrill. The “second woman” of the evening was Frida Kahlo, around whose life the ballet “Broken Wings,” was created by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, working with different sources of Latin music. “Broken Wings” was first performed by the English National Ballet on April 13, 2016; and last night was its SFB premiere.

My overall impression of the evening can be easily summarized: “Women deserve better than this!” It seemed as if neither choreographer had the slightest clue about the nature of narrative; and, in both cases, the vocabulary of dance steps was limited and tedious. The closest “Carmen” came to any reference to the narrative for the opera by Georges Bizet came from a few well-chosen musical fragments deployed by O’Farrill for the introduction. The narrative itself substituted a diner (with Escamillo as the chef) for a gypsy camp and endowed Carmen with both a husband and a father. That said, it was next to impossible to extract from the choreography any sense of who was doing what to whom, leaving the viewer with little recourse other than to sit back and enjoy O’Farrill’s music.

Frida Kahlo (Isabella DeVivo) surrounded by the corps of “Male Fridas,” © Reneff-Olson Productions)

If “Carmen” made hash (seemingly the appropriate metaphor) out of Bizet, it was next to impossible to suss out just what “Broken Wings” was trying to make at all. For those of us that visit the War Memorial Opera House for opera as well as ballet, Gabriela Lena Frank’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego (the last dream of Frida [Kahlo] and Diego [Rivera]) was a tough act to follow. The ballet, on the other hand, took a fragmented approach to Kahlo’s tragic life and overwhelmed it with (count them!) two corps de ballet, one of skeletons (which made at least a bit a sense in the context of folklore) and the other of “Male Fridas.” (In the immortal words of Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”)

To draw upon a review that I encountered during my undergraduate days, this was a program that fills “a well-needed gap!”