San Francisco Ballet in Morris’ Joyride. Photo by Erik Tomasson.
What you may notice first in the program handout for the fine all-Mark Morris retrospective currently on stage at the War Memorial Opera House with the San Francisco Ballet are the cast lists. The names of the dancers for each piece are all arranged in alphabetical order. Although episodes within the pieces are assigned soloists, Morris, I think, is the great democratizer of the traditional ballet hierarchy, and it doesn’t stop with the cast sheet. Peruse the list of 25 dancers who participate in Sandpaper Ballet and you will find the company’s veterans, like Tina LeBlanc, Pierre-François Vilanoba and Katita Waldo, dancing side-by-side with the most recent arrivals to the corps. Much, one might add, as would happen in any listing of the members of the Mark Morris Dance Group.
That leveling of the dancing field is only of the innovations that the famed modernist choreographer has brought to SFB during his extended relationship with the company, an artistic policy that has evolved into one of the signal accomplishments of artistic director Helgi Tomasson’s tenure here. Since Maelstrom in 1994, Morris has given SFB seven pieces, a significant body of work, and work of a curious kind. He operates here in the language of ballet and every new dance can seem like something of an investigation, what the French call une recherche into something of an alien field. Morris has never seemed much of a stranger to ballet because of his intellectual openness to all forms of movement and because of his acute response, emotionally and formally, to the music he chooses to set. After Maelstrom, more than one of us felt that we had penetrated a bit closer to the heart of Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio and, during a pre-premiere interview, I recall spending an hour poring over the score with him. There’s no music of that stature in the three-part Morris retrospective seen Sunday (March 15), the fifth program in the SFB’s 76th repertory season.
But there are delights and discoveries to be made. I have often thought that one of the reasons that Morris makes more dances for San Francisco than for any other ballet company, aside from the fact that he adores the entire crew, is that he has, at his disposal here, a first-rate ballet orchestra to work with, rather than the chamber ensemble that collaborates with MMDG. The experience, in some way, stretches Morris as much as it stretches SFB’s dancers.
San Francisco Ballet in Morris’ A Garden. Photo by Erik Tomasson.
For A Garden (2001), Morris turned to one of the least familiar of Richard Strauss’ orchestral pieces, the 1922 Dance Suite (after keyboard works of François Couperin). It has its charms, but they’re not a patch on another of the composer’s transcriptions of older material, the incidental music to Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Perhaps, because this music is so insubstantial, we may have underappreciated, on first exposure, the lovely moves that the choreographer prepared for 12 dancers, garbed in rust-colored shirts for the guys and simple black dresses for the women.
The music has lent the dance its open, courtly ambience; what you see or hear is what you get. Here, as much as in any Morris/SFB commission, you feel how much the stage represents a playing field for his imagination. The eight sections of the score (which sounded a bit muddy in David LaMarche’s performance), inspire a mercuriality in the movement. Morris sets up imposing diagonals only to demolish them a moment later. What persists is the tilted torso, the curved arms and the open palms, a symbol of honesty in some cultures and certainly applicable here.
This is a garden where little miracles sprout like wildflowers after a rain shower. Partnerships don’t endure, but they are to be savored while they happen. The tinkling “Carillon” prompts a virtuoso foray from Pascal Molat and a canon for three women, a physical representation of a musical form on which Morris wastes little time before moving on to an encounter for LeBlanc and Matthew Stewart. Bended knee courtships proliferate, Ruben Martin gently lifts Sarah Van Patten, but the mood is playful, rather than deathlessly romantic. Of all Morris’ contributions to the SFB repertoire, A Garden appears the most spontaneously wrought. Rarely has the company seemed to have so much fun with a dance. James Sofranko, Garen Scribner and Quinn Wharton were new to the piece and made much of the opportunity.
In the reprise of last year’s Joyride, the pacing seems a bit more studied, the musical performance of John Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony (under music director Martin West) a bit more cautious. I do think that the ever-changing meters of the work, for all their difficulty, are keeping the eight dancers on constant alert. This may be the most volatile and searching of Morris’ pieces for us. It seems a constant, even heroic struggle to come to grips with the score (which, ironically, was a SFB co-commission). Morris uses everything he’s got. We get fragments of ballet combinations, episodes of kickboxing, dance studio exercises and moments of immobility, as the dancers halt in their tracks and leave the stage.
There isn’t a predictable gesture anywhere, and in Isaac Mizrahi’s gold and pewter body stockings (with LED readouts suspended from the necks, flashing random numbers), the look is shiny, gleaming and a mite impersonal. In Sunday’s performance, I missed last year’s sensational pairing of Van Patten and Gennadi Nedvigin (won’t he ever recover from his injuries?), but Elana Altman and Martyn Garside (new to me in this work) were worth watching. Molat, Ruben Martin, Rachel Viselli, Hansuke Yamamoto, Vanessa Zahorian and the sleek Dana Genshaft completed Sunday’s cast. Why do I have the feeling that the oxygen tanks are waiting off stage?
Kristin Long and Pierre-François Vilanoba in Morris’ Sandpaper Ballet. Photo by Erik Tomasson.
In that regard, observers may struggle for breath during the more hilarious moments of Sandpaper Ballet (1999). With the dancers, all in Isaac Mizrahi’s inspired outfits (green gloves and body stockings green from the midriff down), all arrayed in grid formation, this piece resembles one of those kids’ toys, which, even after severe pummeling, always rights itself. The 10 brilliant little Leroy Anderson tunes Morris has chosen are the ideal accompaniment for these whimsical japes, which definitively shatter our notions of ballet hierarchy. Standouts Sunday included Sofranko’s aerial forays to “Trumpeter’s Lullaby,” Lorena Feijoo’s vamping to “The Girl in Satin” and Sofiane Sylve taking over Muriel Maffre’s old assignments and making them her own. No piece in the SFB repertoire leaves an audience happier, and woe to those gloomy souls who don’t “get” Leroy Anderson, conducted with enthusiasm by La Marche.
All of these ruminations prompt a question: Is there a new Mark Morris work in SFB’s near future? It can’t happen soon enough.
Program 5 of the SFB repertory season continues in alternating repertory through March 24 at 8 p.m.
Tickets: 415.865.2000, www.sfballet.org
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