Feature: 2022 Spring Festival at San Francisco Ballet School Offered an Early Look at Some Very Promising Young Dancers

Just after San Francisco Ballet concludes its season at the Opera House each May, its eponymous school presents a student performance that serves as sort of a tantalizing harbinger of SFB's future glories. Part of the deal with any ballet company is that a handful of beloved dancers will depart at the end of each season, so it a bit of a balm to get an inkling of the fresh talent that will soon be entering its ranks. Based on what I saw at a performance of the San Francisco Ballet School's 2022 Spring Festival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last week, I'd say the years ahead look pretty darned promising.

The evening kicked off with a massive "Demonstration" choreographed by Karen Gabay that gave most of the school's dancers a moment or two to shine. I was struck by how well-trained and stage-ready even the youngest dancers were. This was not one of those dance recitals where adorable moppets mess up accidentally-on-purpose as the audience coos. And the more mature students and trainees showed a consistent level of skill and refinement that suggested many of them will go on to enjoy successful careers in ballet. It was also a pleasure to see a more equal mix of ethnicities and a wider range of body types than we normally get to see in professional ballet companies.

Another bonus of the Spring Festival is the chance to see some new works by emerging choreographers within the company. SFB corps de ballet member Davide Occhipinti showed a lot of promise with his "Sunhead," a percussive gambol that was both a little retro and very contemporary. I particularly enjoyed his use of an identically-dressed trio of two boys and one girl (Benjamin Davidoff, Jasper True Stanford and Angela Watson - all terrific) that borrowed a Fosse-esque "Steam Heat" concept from the 1950's and updated it for our current times of more fluid gender expression. I'd be intrigued to see what Occhipinti could achieve if given the opportunity to work with the full resources of the SFB company.

The program concluded with a full-on presentation of Helgi Tomasson's Haffner Symphony, set to Mozart for a group of 14 dancers. This is a crisp, neoclassical piece that gives the dancers nowhere to hide, and everyone onstage danced with an alluring lightness and precision. The central couple of Jihyun Choi and João Percilio da Silva danced beautifully together and executed some fairly intricate partnering with a level of technique uncommon in dancers so young. As it turns out, Da Silva has already been accepted into the SFB corps de ballet for next season, and Choi is one of six newly-minted apprentices. They were just two of many dancers in the festival who showed immense promise, and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for them. I could easily see them fitting right in with any top ballet company in the country.

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