Review: San Francisco Ballet's STARRY NIGHTS at Stanford Live Offered Up a Sumptuous Summer Evening of Dance

For we fogbound San Franciscans starved for classical dance and warm weather come August, there is nothing more enticing than the prospect of spending a night out under the stars with San Francisco Ballet. Thus, the company’s recent two-night run of its Starry Nights mixed-rep program at the Frost Amphitheater on the Stanford University campus promised a most welcome respite from our usual summertime doldrums. The glorious outdoor setting, though, comes with the added challenge of programming ballets that won’t get lost in such a vast arena or seem unfocused when presented with simplified lighting and basically no scenery, and on those counts Starry Nights wasn’t a consistently successful evening.

The program opener, Yuri Possokhov’s Violin Concerto which premiered at this year’s next@90 festival, certainly suffered in those respects. Stripped of its scenic elements and performed in fading twilight, the ballet felt somewhat diffuse and amorphous, which made the limitations of Possokhov’s choreography more apparent than they had been on the Opera House stage last winter. Admittedly, Possokhov chose for himself something of a fool’s errand by devising new movement to the same Stravinsky score that Balanchine used to create his similarly-titled 1972 masterwork.

Possokhov’s steps stay within the bounds of classical ballet while he throws in some Balanchinian hip thrusts, arm semaphore and hitch steps that pay homage to the master. But he lacks Balanchine’s supreme gift for creating movement that floats so exquisitely atop the lines of Stravinsky’s angular score that choreography and music meld as one. The cast of 15 danced with zip and polish, but where things really came together was in the smashing central performances of Sasha Mukhamedov and Joseph Walsh. Her Russian lineage affords her an elegance and mystique that played beautifully off his American openness and bravado, mirroring the duality that is baked into the piece, given that both the composer and choreographer are Russians who became residents of the U.S.

The middle section of Starry Nights consisted of four contrasting pas de deux, each beautifully performed, and it was here that the program really took flight. From the moment Katherine Barkman and Esteban Hernández bounded onstage to begin the “BLACK SWAN” pas de deux from Swan Lake, it was like the proceedings kicked into a whole new gear.  Barkman showed off her feathery arms, languid balances and fizzy fouettés for days. Hernandez veritably burst from the stage wings with commanding jumps for his grand allegro variation. As they took their bows to hearty bravos, you could practically feel the audience sighing, “Yes, this is what we came to see!”

And yet the high point of the program was still to come – in the form of the entrancing Frances Chung and Joseph Walsh (the man was certainly having a very good night!) in an excerpt from William Forsythe’s Blake Works I set to pop star James Blake’s soul-searching “The Color in Anything.” Chung has only recently returned from a second maternity leave, but you would never know it from the fierce commitment and supple articulation of her dancing. Now in her 23rd year with the company, I swear she is dancing better than ever. The remarkable shadings and nuances in her performance showed exactly what a mature dancer can do to use technique in the service of expressing complex emotions. In this contentious yet tender duet of a couple striving to regain their footing, she and Walsh had a terrific rapport. As they grappled to reconcile conflict and tenderness, their relationship just felt so incredibly alive and intimate.

The ballroom pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella wasn’t in the same league choreographically, but was beautifully danced by the radiantly romantic Sasha De Sola and the charmingly gallant Luke Ingham. This was followed by Balanchine’s frothy Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, a party favor of a ballet that has more tricks up its sleeve than is at first apparent. Its ebullient spirit makes it exactly the kind of ballet that plays beautifully to an arena crowd, and it was given a deliciously effervescent performance by Wona Park and Aaron Robison. He thrilled with the elevation of his jumps and his leg positions in the air. She gave the finest performance I’ve yet seen from her, tearing through the fiendishly difficult, lightning-fast yet playfully fluid footwork in the allegro section, articulating every beat and stringing the steps together into delicately-filigreed musical phrases. Truly astonishing.

The program concluded with Danielle Rowe’s Madcap, also from the next@90 festival. This ballet is such a mashup of the entrancing and the off-putting that it can induce a feeling of whiplash. To be fair, though, Madcap is also the piece that suffered most from the amphitheater setting. With its emphasis on intimate moments and facial expressions, this ballet was bound to get lost in the vastness of the Frost. While I found the opening sequence’s ponderous, fluty-voiced narration about dreams and reality to be as irritating as nails on chalkboard and certain subsequent sections overstayed their welcome, the ballet did have three sensational movements along the way, all for men.

Rowe’s delightful whizbang trio for Jacob Seltzer, Alexis Francisco Valdes and Wei Wang played like the Trepak from Nutcracker hopped up on acid and a surfeit of gummy bears. Davide Occhipinti and Henry Sidford were heartrending in a slippery duet that was sad, sweet and haunting in equal measure. And Parker Garrison was spectacular in a rubber-limbed, off-kilter solo. Rowe’s choreographic imagination shone brightly in those three sections. The movement was fresh, interesting and carried real emotional weight, plus it paired perfectly with Pär Hagström’s idiosyncratic Mitteleuropean oom-pah band meets twinkly vibraphone score. If only the entire ballet had been that transporting.

Still, I was left with memories of all the wonderful performances from the evening dancing through my head, not to mention the pleasures of spending a ravishing summer evening at the ballet.

(all photos by Chris Hardy)

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