The San Francisco Ballet at The Kennedy Center

Last week I saw the San Francisco Ballet perform at the Kennedy Center. I do not think I had seen this ballet company perform before (or if I have, I never wrote a blog post about it). I was especially excited to see this performance because one of the pieces was choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon*, my favorite choreographer.

We saw three pieces that night, and all were pretty modern (i.e. no tutus or tiaras). I normally don't like modern dance, but I appreciated that they didn't perform what I consider to be "cliché modern dance": epileptic fits, rolling around the floor, waving translucent fabric around, all to the sound of unpleasant music. Modern dance can be beautiful, and I think this company did a pretty good job of it. All of these pieces premiered this past April, so it was exciting to see something really new.

Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem

This piece was quite complex because it had multiple parts, each with its own music (All written and performed by Chris Garneau; some of the songs were energetic, and others were slow.). The curtain opens and you see an image of a total solar eclipse. A male soloist (Benjamin Freemantle) starts by dancing on his own, and then he is joined by several other male dancers, all wearing white shirts and khaki capris. The dancing was rather playful: lots of skipping, hopping, running in place, that kind of thing. Most of the men had lithe, sinewy bodies, which I guess is the male body type the company prefers; they weren't the traditionally strong body type. At one point two of the men performed a pas de deux, and I was surprised that it didn't really have a homoerotic feel to it; my friend described it as "benign." Some women joined in later in the piece; WanTing Zhao is so thin that I couldn't help but think that she's the kind of ballerina that gives ballet its reputation for unhealthy women. But Isabella DeVivo and Steven Morse shared a dance together, and they were amazing! The piece ended with Freemantle shirtless and wearing essentially underwear, dancing with a small stool: sitting on it, carrying it, balancing it on his face. I don't like dances that use props; I think it's too literal and takes away from the pure art form. And then everything went black.

Even if I didn't like the stool, Freemantle was really amazing! Image found here.

After watching the piece, I read the notes in the program about it. The piece was inspired by the grandfather of the choreographer, Trey McIntyre. His grandfather died a few years ago, and McIntyre happened to see some old family photos of his grandfather in a football uniform with high-waisted trousers (hence the costumes). The eclipse backdrop was included because of a real eclipse, which McIntyre imagined to be a portal through time. The piece begins and ends with the same male soloist, and it is as if the dancer is the grandfather, and the separate dances are the beginning and end of his life. His grandfather had dementia and actually went out walking in his underwear, so the last part of the piece is a clear representation of that true story. I can appreciate the piece more when I know the background behind it, and I thought the program did a good job of articulating what McIntyre was trying to say and do with it.

Bound To

This piece had no costumes. These are just the dancers' own clothes. Image found here

This piece was all about how attached we are to technology and how it impacts our relationships with other people. This was the one choreographed by Wheeldon*. Unfortunately it was not as romantic as some of his other pieces (those are the ones I LOVE), but there were two pas de deux that were incredibly powerful, and they incorporated his style of having the dancers pretty much always touch each other in some way.

Image found here

This piece was also broken up into mini-sections. In the first, like the group photo above, the dancers are all staring into the lights of their phones and not paying attention to each other, even though they are touching. The second part was called "Open Your Eyes," and it was a dance between Dores André and Freemantle (the photo above features two different dancers from the same part). He's obsessed with his phone, and she's trying to pull him away and dance with him. He brushes her off or continues to look at the screen; for a moment he loses the phone and they have a connection, but the piece ends with him ignoring her once again for the sake of his phone. It was so heartbreaking! André did an amazing job portraying a woman in love who cannot get what she needs from the man she wants to be with. 

This move! Image found here

And this! Image found here

Another section was called "Remember When." The backdrop showed trees in the background, and the music featured sounds like children playing and birds singing. The dancers in this part were wearing comfortable, light-colored outfits to contrast with the dark ones associated with technology, and they did not have any phones. The connection between the dancers during this part, a step back into the past, was much stronger, and you truly felt friendship in this part. "Take a Deep Breath" was another pas de deux, but there were no phones in that one. Yuan Yuan Tan and Carlo Di Lanno were incredible together, and the lifts were amazing! At times it was like she was floating (see the photos above). The other two parts, called "Speeding Past" and "Trying to Breathe," emphasized how quickly time is going by, especially when we're attached to a screen, and that we can be overwhelmed, suffocated even, by technology but can't get away from it. The entire piece ended with Lonnie Weeks searching, yearning to get out of the mess, and no one would help him because they are consumed by their phones.

Anima Animus

I think this was my favorite piece of the evening. First of all, the costumes are very cool. The stark contrast between the black and white, with the illusion of transparent fabric in the back, was very striking. It almost had a skeletal or structural feel about it. And because of the bright white light behind them, the dancers almost looked like silhouettes.

Image found here

The zippers were a bit distracting, though. Image found here

There were lots of lifts in this piece, which I really liked. Also, there were many specific hand movements in the piece, and I appreciated the dancers' perfect form of their fingers. It's those little things that can make a big difference!

The program notes said that this piece highlights "Carl Jung's concepts of animus and anima - the male aspect of the female psyche and the female aspect of the male psyche, respectively." Essentially, the idea is that the female dancers would exude a strength that is usually saved for male roles, and the men would dance moves that are usually for ballerinas. But I actually didn't get that from this piece. I think it's because men were dancing in a somewhat feminine way in some of the earlier pieces of the evening (there were several pas de deux between two men), that it didn't seem out of the ordinary in this last piece. And I thought the women portrayed strong roles throughout the evening, too. Perhaps this specific message of this piece would have been more powerful had it been performed along with more classical ballet pieces.

I really enjoyed this entire performance, and I hope I can see the San Francisco Ballet the next time the company comes to DC!

*One of my previous blog posts highlights two of my favorite Wheeldon pieces (videos included).