Looking Back--and Ahead--at S.F. Ballet : Company ends season,looks forward to Paris

Onstage at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Ballet is in the last moments of its 56th repertory season. And what ballet finale could be more celebratory than the end of George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” with something like 40 dancers deployed in brilliant formal cascades of classicism?

Just ahead lies one of the biggest challenges of the year: an engagement from May 18-25 at the Festival de Paris. The invitation came two years ago and the company estimates it will cost $250,000 to accept.

Quite a gamble: Not long after former New York City Ballet dancer Helgi Tomasson became artistic director in mid-1985, people started reclassifying San Francisco Ballet as a national (rather than regional) institution. The company has danced abroad before (Tokyo and Singapore in 1987, for example) but this appearance in the birthplace of ballet represents a daring bid for major international recognition.

Calculated risk is clearly part of Tomasson’s recent decisions: bringing an American “Swan Lake” to Paris for the first time, for instance, or choreographing a dance-drama about Joan of Arc instead of another of his lyric tutu-and-tiara showpieces.

However Tomasson also continues to pursue his original goals: improving the overall level of dancing in the company while exposing everyone to a wide range of creative approaches.

As a result, the 1989 season has embraced everything from the pristine classicism of “Swan Lake” through Balanchine’s multifaceted genius (five pieces) to the playful, home-grown neoclassicism developed by Lew Christensen and the abrasive avant- or apres-classicism of William Forsythe.

Indeed, much of the repertory has focused on extending or broadening the classical tradition, starting with the buoyant Americana of Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo” and Jerome Robbins’ “Interplay” and proceeding through the stark fusion of idioms in Jiri Kylian’s “Forgotten Land” down, down, down into darkest Forsythe turf.

By now, the remarkable breadth of this repertory is expected from San Francisco Ballet. So the big jump in awareness and excitement that greeted Tomasson’s 1987 season (the first he planned from the ground up) was not duplicated in 1989. Instead, the season has confirmed and consolidated the company’s reputation.

Running from late January to early May, the repertory season divided 65 performances among eight different programs--only one of them (“Swan Lake”) a full-evening ballet. Mastering the styles of a dozen choreographers can prove a daunting workload for the dancers, but sometimes the process has fostered unexpected growth.

For example, Anthony Randazzo began the season as a promising refugee from National Ballet of Canada--elegantly proportioned, well trained but easily tired (especially in Balanchine) and none too authoritative. By May, however, he had developed enough stamina to breeze through Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant” and Forsythe’s “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” on the same program, looking nearly ideal in both. In the same period, Elizabeth Loscavio showed comparable development--from sweet prodigy to seasoned pro.

Because Forsythe’s alternately quirky and propulsive Dada extravaganza “New Sleep” had generated a big fuss two years ago, “In the Middle . . . “ became this season’s flashpoint. Created for the Paris Opera Ballet in the same year as “New Sleep,” it is simpler structurally but just as insistent that the academic ballet vocabulary become a wholly contemporary movement-language.

Working again to an apocalyptic electronic soundscore by Tom Willems, Forsythe fuses the essentials of classicism with late-’80s street style. If you think of ballet steps as if they were tough moves that any teen-ager could pick up break-dance tricks, you can glimpse something of Forsythe’s intentions in shaping this plotless, brutally inventive chain of confrontational dancing.

The gestures, slouches, shrugs and manner of walking are instantly recognizable, even for an opera-house elite that’s only seen young working-class people on TV or from a moving limo. The force and aggression of public relationships are also built into the daring balances and whiplash contortions of the work.

But this isn’t street-dance or jazz-dance or modern-dance. And it sure ain’t performance art. Call it People’s Ballet or Euro-Ballet or just Dirty Ballet. Any which way, it’s lucid classical dancing without a historical frame around it, and there’s nothing like it, anywhere.

The title? It’s a note on decor: As a reflection, Forsythe says, of “the vast gilded interior of the Paris Opera,” he hangs two golden cherries on an otherwise empty stage. The title documents their placement.

Forsythe’s ballets always demand a love-it-or-leave-it commitment from the dancers and this season that same attitude has spread into more familiar repertory. For example, San Francisco Ballet always danced Balanchine capably, but, in 1989, dancing “The Four Temperaments” seems to be a deep, shared, physical need .

This last-chance, gotta-dance compulsion appears especially strong in the dancers prominent in both ballets (Tracy-Kai Maier, Marc Spradling, Jamie Zimmerman and Randazzo) but it is also reflected in the high achievement of corps member Antonio Castilla in Balanchine’s “Melancholic” solo.

And it can give even the circusy “Corsaire” pyrotechnics a new edge--especially when Alexi Zubiria adds spectacular Mukhamedov-style twists to every turn in his solo and ends a series of them with his arms thrown so wide the Opera House stage suddenly isn’t big enough to hold his passion for movement.

Unfortunately, even the fiery Zubiria, the vibrant Joanna Berman and the powerful Christopher Boatwright can’t salvage choreography with no movement dynamic: David Bintley’s “The Sons of Horus,” for example, a piece about Egyptian mummification that is almost as bloodless as its subject. Bintley specializes in dance as design and most of this 1985 piece (music by Peter McGowan) resembles animated pictograms: a flip-book of hieroglyphics. Whenever it actually dares to move through space, you can be sure it’s stealing more from Glen Tetley than from the Book of the Dead.

In contrast, the dancing in James Kudelka’s “The Comfort Zone” (reviewed earlier in The Times) surges like a force of nature, developing its structure and statement about relationships as a response to its accompaniment, Beethoven’s mighty Triple Concerto.

Three people together achieve harmony, but two bring discord in “The Comfort Zone,” and in the interplay between supportive friends and divisive lovers (Randazzo opposite Evelyn Cisneros at her most soulful) Kudelka creates one of the towering achievements of the season.

Tomasson’s two new works also generated unusual interest, if only because they bore so little resemblance to the artful, delicately effervescent pieces that he choreographed or restaged in the past. “Handel--A Celebration” (previously reviewed) scrambled excerpts from “Alcina,” “Xerxes,” the “Water Music” and “Royal Fireworks Music” in a grandiose formal suite displaying the salable talents of the company principals.

It may have been the most predictable and least musical achievement of Tomasson’s career--but its glittering vulgarity made it nearly as popular as the “Corsaire” pas de deux, and it will be back next season.

“Reflections of Saint Joan” won’t, however, and that’s no loss. Using the same Norman Dello Joio score that evolved into the accompaniment for Martha Graham’s magnificent “Seraphic Dialogue,” Tomasson produced a stuffy mime-pageant with no life or originality whatsoever.

The only major dancing opportunities come early: Joan suffering in prison and then recalling her life as a farm girl. Thereafter, it’s waxworks tableaux with scarcely any sustained dance expression.

As a lustful guard who manhandles The Maid, Timothy Fox is the only subsidiary dancer with a chance to make any impression, and the role of Joan is so locked into dutiful storytelling that even a dancer of Sabina Allemann’s remarkable emotional resources emerges colorless.

Who would trade this flat charade for Tomasson’s charming, imaginative “Ballet d’Isoline” (1983), with its gracious, intricately embellished reflections of a luscious Andre Messager score? Or who would exchange it for “Giuliani: Variations on a Theme” (1984), with its wit and subtly diffused technical fireworks?

Often damned with faint praise, these divertissements are beautifully crafted bagatelles worth far more than the labored magnum opuses that Tomasson unveiled this season.

Nobody can accuse Tomasson of not taking chances at San Francisco Ballet. But maybe next season he should take a sharper look at his own talent, as well.