That be music, obviously.  Why then is so much of ballet and modern dance
"unmusical"? Why do we have choreographers - including some ballet company
artistic directors - whose work you can watch with one finger firmly
implanted in each ear while humming any old music you fancy?

Whatever the reason (just plain lack of talent?), it's all the more
important and joyous when you find dance-makers on the order of Balanchine,
Robbins, Taylor, Kudelka, Forsythe, and others in whose veins music flows.
In San Francisco and Berkeley, where we watched over the years the
emergence of Mark Morris as one of those exalted ones (his new "V" is
a contemporary masterpiece), there have been young SF Ballet dancers as
well showing great promise.

The role of music is supreme in every one of Val Caniparoli's works, Julia
Adam's "Sleep" is a joy in the same manner, and now we have an outstanding
dancer, originally from the Bolshoi, whose inventively, vitally musical
choreography now graces the stage of the War Memorial.

Tonight's premiere of Yuri Possokhov's "Damned," to Ravel's "Pavane for a
Dead Prince" and the Piano Concerto in D Major (performed excellently under
the baton of Jean-Louis LeRoux, with Roy Bogas as soloist) simply confirmed
the exciting news from the San Francisco Ballet's last season: this is a
major artist in the making

A year ago, it was "Magrittomania," Possokhov's dramatic, wildly
imaginative, engrossing, entertaining, contemporary (and yet classically
"clean") work, fused with Yuri Krasavin's funny/stunning variations on
everything-Beethoven.  And now, it's a starkly dramatic - no, tragic -
work, the story of Medea.  Ravel, although he might not have known it,
wrote the perfect score for it, and Possokhov's use of the music now
imprints his images on the music.

Joanna Berman, in the title role, danced her best - something to say
as this illustrious career is drawing to a close - with a dramatic
interpretation that avoided all the expected shortcuts to portray a story
the end of which is known to everyone.

Berman's dancing was scary and yet generating sympathy, a kind of
understanding.  Roman Rykine's Jason and Yuan Yuan Tan's Princess were
both fabulous, the two dancers in peak form.

Possokhov's sense of theater is marvelous, whether in the blaze of the
Princess' death, the masterful staging of the killing of the boys under a
huge black cape, the whirl of movements and images from the large corps in
Thyra Hartshorn's stunning masks and white costumes.  (Hartshorn was also
responsible for the scenic and costume design of "Magrittomania.") There
are some minor rough spots in "Damned," especially in the corps' movements
upstage, but the news about Possokhov is all good.

Speaking of Morris, as we were above, he too was on the program (along with
Helgi Tomasson's "Silver Ladders"), represented by his "slumming piece,"
his Warhol-equivalent of dancing soup cans, "Sandpaper Ballet."

Speaking of music, as we were above, who could bring out such MUSIC from
Leroy Anderson (yes) as Morris - supported nobly by the SFB Orchestra,
under Paul Hoskins' direction.

Imagine a clever high-school dance gala, to "Song of the Bells," "The
Syncopated Clock," "The Typewriter," and the like, but add two dozens of
the company's best dancers and make them - and the audience - swing.

What a rich, powerful company this has become, with the likes of Lorena
Feijoo, Gonzalo Garcia (!), Stephen Legate, Muriel Maffre, Guennadi
Nedviguine, Katita Waldo, Vanessa Zahorian among them - "they could be
stars anywhere," and here they are, in Isaac Mizrahi's always-ghastly but
this time funny costumes (white top over green everything else), dancing
in the corps, being bells, typewriters or whatever you'd like. . .  to
the music, always with the music, of the music.

And that is the trick of the "musical choreographer" - the music can
be anything, even Anderson's improbably, infuriatingly, delightfully
inappropriate "ballet score," but where there is talent, there are rewards.

So there they were, 25 of SFB's finest, arms and ponytails flailing, a
Balanchine-like pattern broken up again and again, with a "lost" dancer
here and there, finding his or her place just in time with the music, it's
all swinging good fun, really big smiles, "Fiddle Faddle," "Jazz Pizzicato"
and "The Girl in Satin" - just what we need after a heavy date with Medea.

Janos Gereben/SF
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