Tragically, the number of ballet directors who can orchestrate good programmes and good openings is dwindling these days. Helgi Tómasson, of San Francisco Ballet, is one of the few who are still in the know, judging by the terrific bang with which his company opened last week in London.
Yet Divertimento No.15, at the beginning of the opening night in London, after an eight-year absence by the company, can also be read as a precise artistic statement that acknowledges the significance of that all-American choreographic tradition that is still very much informing what is being created in the US. A tradition, incidentally, that is preserved by San Francisco Ballet with great care and respect, as the near-perfect performance of Divertimento confirmed, restoring the faith of those who believed that Balanchine’s style was lost for ever.
Edwaard Liang’s Symphonic Dances is one of the many works in which the influence of that performance tradition can be seen. Stylish at times, this work is a game of patterns, in which more modernist and postmodernist ideas, such as shifting the action away from centre stage, strive to add to and modify well-established formulae. Alas, the dance never breaks out of the mould of the déjà vu, and never comes across as truly inventive. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic dances, moreover, is too bombastic a score for this kind of choreography, which ends up looking indigestibly retro. Fortunately, the evening closed on a high note with Christopher Wheeldon’s Number Nine. Visually quirky, with daring contrasts between the fluorescent yellow of the costumes and the equally fluorescent blue hues of the backdrop, this work is Wheeldon’s dance-making at its best. Fans of the British-born choreographer find in it a superb example of that breezily seamless, fast-paced action we have all learnt to love and admire in other internationally acclaimed works of his.
Here, too, the focus is on a captivating game of patterns, and on how each idea yields to another, in a choreographic kaleidoscopic crescendo to Michael Thorpe’s enthralling score. But unlike Liang in Symphonic Dances, Wheeldon breaks free from the constraints of a well-established performance tradition, twisting and adapting old tenets in a masterly way. Indeed, his success, and that of the evening as a whole, depended greatly on the sparkling performance of the San Francisco artists and, most of all, on their undaunted response to super-fast tempi — something we seem to have lost on these shores. All in all, there could hardly have been a better start to the new dance season.
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