DANCE REVIEW : Morris Plus Beethoven Wreaks ‘Maelstrom’

Choreographer Mark Morris has abandoned his recent irony and returned to his unique sense of musicality to create “Maelstrom,” which is receiving its premiere performances this week by the San Francisco Ballet at the War Memorial Opera House.

Only this time, as seen Wednesday, his much-admired musical talents have turned out an odd and unsatisfactory work, although the company dances it well.

Morris sends seven couples surging in various plotless combinations and permutations to Beethoven’s Piano Trio No. 4, Opus 70, No. 1 (“Ghost”). He again spices balletic technique with folk motifs and gymnastic movements. Again he finds movement motivations in the rhythmic subdivisions of measures, a mosaic technique of construction that worked so wondrously for him when he applied it to Vivaldi and Handel.

But against Beethoven’s longer lines and contrasting themes, the results often looked busy, fussy, arbitrary and insensitive.

The recurring disjunctive patterns--dancers running in and out or making dead stops, flexing a foot or hand to break the line or push the air or accentuate a musical pause--best fit the musical starts and stops in the final presto, but did not reveal anything about them. In the other two movements, the choreography appeared even more disassociated from the music.

Maelstrom, indeed.

James Ingalls created the moody lighting and the cloud backdrops. Martin Pakledinaz designed the ruby, bare-shouldered gowns for the women, and the matching romantic outfits for the men.

Violinist Roy Malan, cellist David Kadarauch and pianist Roy Bogas played the Beethoven score with reasonable sensitivity.

Apart from Helgi Tomasson’s overwrought pas de trois love triangle “Forevermore” (Dvorak) danced lyrically by Sabina Allemann and dutifully by Rodolphe Cassand and Yuri Zhukov, the rest of the program provided two related examples of other plotless responses to music.

The kaleidoscopic neoclassical symmetries of Lew Christensen’s “Vivaldi Concerto Grosso” looked less taxing to the dancers than did such obvious inspirational sources as those found in Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” which closed the program. Still, Allemann brought Swan Queen amplitude and stillness to the Second Movement, in an otherwise decidedly uncrisp performance of the work.