NEWS
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Feb 17, 2010
Ghosts, the Ballet
Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco
Bay Area Reporter
Making waves
San Francisco Ballet's programs 2 & 3
by Paul Parish
Critics came from several New York papers to report on San Francisco Ballet's programs 2 and 3, excellent mixed bills which opened last week and continue through this Sunday at the War Memorial Opera House. The critics were here to see how the company dances the great Balanchine pieces on program 3, and most of all to check out the impact and potential staying-power of the new work on program 2, Ghosts, the fifth new ballet choreographed for SFB by the bright-shining young choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. It turns out to be a silvery, shimmering, floating tissue of melancholy, with dancers drifting in currents they make visible as if they were suffering a sea change before our eyes. The mood is not tragic but mysterious, and the dancers delivered the goods, the audience roared its approval, and the Times critic gave a lot of space to its praise. There is reason to hope it may become a classic and join the other ballets on the two bills, which are all of them more beautiful than they can be danced.
What do we mean when we say something is a classic? Aside from the throwaway slang sense, "classic" means it's something that you'd want to see or hear again, because there was more there than you could get the first time. If you still think it's a classic after the third time, it's because you're still sensing ways it coheres that make it answerable and speak to you from an even deeper level, as if it knew you in return.
Wheeldon can give you that feeling. He can let the dancers' weight pour down through the body into the floor (which was developed by postmodern contact-improv dancers) and make it into an oceanic spectacle. Ghosts might be showing us the Wreck of the Titanic in extreme slow motion. Waves of dancers pour across the stage, sometimes sliding down onto their backs, receiving the weight of another dancer as if the impetus came from beyond themselves. The corps dominates the ballet to the point where it seems an organism, though there is a gorgeous, melting pas de deux (danced ravishingly by Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith) and a very vivid trio dominated by the diva Sofiane Sylve, who alone of all the dancers seems to be fighting for control, and even at the end seems to be swimming as if on a dolphin's back to safety as the curtain comes down on the whole doomed world.
