Sometimes when I watch performances I write down notes in the program during intermissions, but more often than not… I tweet. (Hat tip to Carla Escoda of Ballet to the People and her bite-size reviews!)
March 30: San Francisco Ballet, Program 5 (Tomasson: The Fifth Season, Liaang: Symphonic Dances, Robbins: Glass Pieces).
Intermission 1 at @sfballet. Fifth Season: clean, forceful; Frances and Davit were esp lovely.
The Music and the Mirror now has a Facebook page! Yay, another bit of Internet to move into and make pretty. Not that anyone had been clamoring for it (yet!), but I figure, hey, I spend a fair amount of time on Facebook…maybe you do too?
Check it out and “like” for assorted ballet and dance tidbits and of course notices of new blog posts. Enjoy!
Sounds like a pair of mythological creatures, no? These are the names of two pieces danced by students of the San Francisco Ballet School trainee program at a free noontime performance today. Over my lunch break I headed to San Francisco City Hall to check it out, and as always was impressed and inspired by these kids (pre-professionals really).
I think I had seen these pieces performed before, at the Ballet 101 session that included an introduction to the trainee program (and a trip to the costume shop: definitely a topic for another blog post, with pictures!). Dunas and Spinae are choreographed by Francisco Mungamba and Myles Thatcher, respectively, both former SFB trainees who are now in the corps with the company.
I only recently found out about these free performances at City Hall, called the Rotunda Dance Series. Presented by Dancers’ Group and World Arts West, they usually happen once a month and cover a wide range of dance styles, so if you’re in the area, check it out!
War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco — March 23, 2012
I went to see San Francisco Ballet‘s Program 6 last Friday night: Raymonda Act III (Nureyev), RAkU (Possokhov), and the world premiere of Guide to Strange Places (Page).
Raymonda was a glittering gala with Sofiane Sylve in command, and Guide to Strange Places was a striking work that I’d like to see again, but that evening I was completely blown away by RAkU. It was so dramatic and powerful that even after the intermission I was still reeling from the emotional punch. Yuan Yuan Tan, who is of course lovely and haunting in everything, was no less perfect here.
RAkU premiered last year but I didn’t see it then, so I’m glad it was programmed again this year. And I felt like I had an additional musical appreciation of RAkU thanks to the Ballet 101 talk I attended (which, yes, I need to blog about) with composer Shinji Eshima and conductor Martin West. By the way, the ballet orchestra has just released a recording of the score.
The story of RAkU is based on the burning of Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion in 1950, but set earlier in the samurai era. Here are excerpts featuring Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith, and a short interview with Yuan Yuan Tan:
Amazing. Definitely see RAkU if you can. Remaining performances for Program 6 are tomorrow afternoon and evening, March 31; and Tuesday evening, April 3. The main cast I saw on March 23 is listed below:
This year I decided to start seeing as much ballet as time and money will allow (in addition to my San Francisco Ballet subscription which I’ve had for a few years now), and boy, it is hard work! Ha, not really, but my already glacial blogging pace hasn’t kept up so far. My performance reviews end up being tweets at intermission:
Intermission 1 at @balletsj. Paquita was lovely, soloists especially strong. (Tho I think the danseur could smile more! So serieux!)
So given the fact that I’m seeing another performance tomorrow night and next Friday night (San Francisco Ballet’s Programs 6 and 5, respectively), let me catch up with a quick listing of what I’ve seen recently and call it a day.
Whew. I used to keep a spreadsheet of the ballets I’d seen–nerd!–with the pieces and choreographers noted; I need to get back to that! It’s nice to look back and jog your memory if and when you’ve seen a certain piece before.
Aside from San Francisco Ballet, the other companies above are ones I saw for the first time: Company C, Diablo Ballet, and Ballet San Jose. It was great to check these folks out, and I look forward to seeing more of them in the future.
By the way, to help dispel the myth of ballet as a wholly expensive pursuit (or an image of me as made of money), let me say that there are a bunch of ways to save money on tickets. Keep your eyes peeled for discount tickets on Goldstar or on deal sites like Groupon. Or check if the company you want to see offers standing room or rush tickets or other discounts. I try to post ones in the Bay Area to my Twitter feed when I come across them. (Full disclosure: Thanks to Diablo Ballet for inviting me as press to their performance in Walnut Creek.)
All right, enjoy the rest of the week, and I’ll leave you with this video by Company C, which was shown as a prologue at their recent performances:
I went to the San Francisco Dance Film Festival for the first time last week and had a great time. Apparently it’s a relatively new festival, just having started in 2010, and it takes place mainly at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center. Friday evening’s program consisted of seven short films and a feature called Claude Bessy: Lignes d’une vie.
Selected shorts
All of the shorts were well done, and if I had to choose a favorite perhaps it would be In a Moment. About a man who loses his memory following a car accident, the film plays with themes of time, memory, and relationships.
Another interesting short was Beautiful Illusion, which drew me of course since it has ballet, but its spark is in the tension between the beauty and pain of ballet. A woman dances through an art gallery, and a few times she pauses while an X-ray image is projected onto her body; the words are not mere labels of bones but of a dancer’s potential injuries. The entire four-minute film is available online:
Again, they were all interesting in their own ways, but I’ll give another honorable mention, to There, Again, a project that began as a staged dance performance on a set with four dancers, each in one of four small, linked rooms. Everything from the lighting and staging to the music and choreography itself is mesmerizing.
Lignes d’une vie
The second part of the evening was devoted to a documentary on legendary Paris Opera Ballet dancer and educator Claude Bessy. Actually I didn’t know anything about her beforehand, so the film was both entertaining and informative for me. What a career, from Paris to New York to Hollywood and back. I loved all the archival rehearsal and performance footage. (It draws from many sources, including a couple of documentaries on the POB school, parts of which I’d seen online before.) Watching Lignes d’une vie makes me want to jet off to see the Paris Opera Ballet and the Palais Garnier this very minute!
Following the screening, director Fabrice Herrault was on hand for an insightful Q&A along with San Francisco Ballet principal dancers Pascal Molat and Sofiane Sylve. Pascal (below, far left) especially talked about his experience at the school and Madame Bessy as a “tough love” kind of figure.
I enjoyed the evening so much I wish I’d also gone to the other festival programs, especially to see Never Stand Still and Joffrey. In any case I hope to make it to many more festivals in the future!
[Addendum (March 22): The festival awards have been announced, and if you missed out on the shorts, some of them will be screened at the San Francisco Public Library on Saturday, April 21 (2 p.m.), and Wednesday, April 25 (5:45 p.m.), as part of Bay Area Dance Week.]
