Now, It’s Only About the Dance, Not His Dancing

Yuri Possokhov is a heartthrob San Francisco Ballet principal dancer who, at 38, is beginning to think of choreography as a way of extending his career.

His “Damned,” which the company will dance this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, is only his second ballet. But at least in his current hometown, it was called “the dance event of the season.” After its premiere in April, San Francisco Chronicle dance critic Octavio Roca didn’t hesitate to say it fulfills the promise of Possokhov’s first work for San Francisco Ballet, “Margrittomania,” which won the Bay Area Isadora Duncan Award for outstanding choreography in 2000.

“Possokhov has choreographed great roles in his ‘Damned,’ meaty parts in which real dancers can create truth on stage,” Roca wrote. “New dramatic ballets are hard to come by, and choreographers who make great ones are very rare indeed. Yuri Possokhov is such a man.”

The dancer-choreographer has so far never performed in “Damned” and won’t here. He creates for others, not for himself, he says.

“I like to see other people on stage,” Possokhov said from San Francisco after a recent company class. “If I were dancing in it, people would be thinking about me as a dancer and a choreographer instead of thinking about the performance. I think it’s much better just to create choreography and leave the dancing to somebody else. In my mind, one plus the other doesn’t give a double plus. It gives a minus.”

“Damned” is a farewell tribute to his colleague and frequent partner, Joanna Berman, who retired from the San Francisco Ballet after 14 years as a principal dancer at the end of last season. But other company dancers--Lorena Feijoo and Muriel Maffre--danced it too, and they are the ones scheduled to dance the work in Orange County in its first performances outside the Bay Area.

Possokhov says he was inspired by a controversial 1988 modern-dress television version of the Greek tragedy “Medea” by Danish director Lars von Trier, whose “Breaking the Waves” was the 1996 Cannes Grand Prix winner. He had freely adapted a script by Carl Dreyer and Preben Thomsen that Dreyer never got to film himself.

“I thought it would be a perfect match for Joanna,” said Possokhov. “She is hugely versatile and the possibilities of what I could choreograph on her seemed endless. She has great dramatic capabilities and I wanted to bring those out in the work. This was a parting gift to her.”

The story is based on Euripides’ 5th century BC play about the god-woman Medea who avenges the betrayal of her hero-husband Jason by killing their two children and the princess bride he has taken for his political advantage.

“Greek plays are the most clear, without any extraneous elements,” Possokhov said. “They express much more than do those with a lot more stuff. They are role models of concise expression.”

But like Von Trier, Possokhov--and his collaborators, scenic and costume designer Thyra Hartshorn, and lighting designer Kevin Connaughton, avoided a strict historical approach and boiled down the story to essential confrontational scenes. Because he feels the ballet is not exactly the play, Possokhov calls it “Damned” to indicate the spiritual state of the characters.

“I wanted to evoke ancient Greek style, but I didn’t try to replicate it,” he said. “We were going for something timeless. This is one of the most emotionally interesting stories for me.”

The dance is about 30 minutes long and enlists three principals, two children and a corps of 16 to tell the story--Jason with his new bride, Medea reacting in rage but hiding her anger as she gives the princess a poisoned robe that will kill her, Medea still not assuaged, then killing her children, and Jason reacting in horror to what his action had precipitated.

The corps dancers, wearing white masks and flowing skirts, the women in flesh-toned leotards and the men bare-chested, function as a Greek chorus, observing the action, amplifying it and participating in it. Medea wears a dramatic brown dress, Jason wears a red shirt and grayish pants, and his princess wife wears a peach-colored tunic.

Possokhov, who was born in Lugansk, Ukraine, and trained at the Moscow Ballet School, said he is drawn by training and inclination to such narrative ballets. He danced mostly major story ballet roles for 10 years with the Bolshoi Ballet before joining the Royal Danish Ballet in 1992, which is where Dane Helgi Tomasson met him in 1993.

Tomasson, who had taken over the San Francisco Ballet in 1985, was setting his production of “A Sleeping Beauty” on the Danish company. He invited Possokhov to California to dance in a gala. In 1994, Possokhov joined the company as a principal dancer and moved to San Francisco with his wife, Anna, and his son Daniel; his daughter, Darya was born four years later.

Other company dancers began asking him to create short solos they could perform in competitions or add to their personal repertory, and success in doing that encouraged him to create “Margrittomania,” set to music by Beethoven as arranged by Yuri Krasavin, for the full company.

For “Damned,” he picked Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand as the main segment and framed it with the shorter “Pavane pour une infante defunte,” to both open and close the piece. The choice of the French composer is not obvious. Ravel is generally regarded more for elegance and sophistication of surface than for particularly dramatic depths. But Possokhov disagrees with the general assessment.

“Ravel is one of the more dramatic composers,” Possokhov said. “Some people regard him as art nouveau. I think the concerto is maybe the most dramatic music I ever heard in my life.”

The ballet came together quickly over three weeks last fall.

“I came into the studio with some ideas in mind. I knew the ideas and the structure, but I didn’t have all the details. Because the concerto is in one movement, I couldn’t cut it. It had to be played from the beginning to the end. I added the ‘Pavane’ to make the work more dramatically complete.”

Although Possokhov isn’t in “Damned,” his fans won’t be disappointed. He will be seen in the title role of Lar Lubovitch’s full-length ballet, “Othello,” later in the week.

“Othello is one of my favorite roles in my 21-year career,” he said. “I still want to dance. I know that my body is not so pliable as it used to be. I am not young anymore. I need to think more about this. For me, it’s a period of transition. I’m still dancing. Yet I want to choreograph more because the more you do, the more comfortable you feel doing it.

“Personally, I like to combine dance and the dramatic reason I’m doing it. You should act as well as dance, spreading your emotions around. This kind of dance is my main nature, thanks to my teachers. But I want to try the American style of ballet, which is more about dancing than about a drama or a play.

“I need to learn a lot about that. I’ve been inspired by Mark Morris and James Kudelka, who just use music. I think that kind of ballet expresses no less than dramatic ballets. I will try it and see how it goes.”

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“DAMNED,” San Francisco Ballet, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Tuesday-Wednesday, 8 p.m. Prices: $20-$75. Phone: (714) 556-2787. Also: “Othello,” Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m., and Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m.

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Chris Pasles is a Times staff writer.