Saturday Matinee

and the 2008 American Tour

David Arce and Lorena Feijoo in Caniparoli’s Ibsen’s House. © ErikTomasson

Wow, this got buried in my Drafts folder, but I figure better late than never! Especially now that the SF Ballet season is over, my blog muse has flit away and it’s been harder to blog these days, in addition to the craziness that is work. Post-New Works Festival (PNWF), it’s exciting to look back and to see that it just wasn’t the cherry on top of the 75th anniversary sundae for the SF Ballet, but it was much more than that. It symbolized the direction of ballet’s future, with its innovation, use of technology, and a brilliant showcase of gloriously solid dancing deeply rooted in ballet’s tradition.

Judith Mackrell (of UK’s The Guardian ) spoke glowingly of what the New Works Festival symbolized to the dance world, and wondered if ballet’s future is in America, where the festival “makes English ballet look secretive and cautious”. Mackrell refers to the open symposiums that SF Ballet hosted, and the openness and the willingness to speak with audiences about issues relating to the future of ballet. Sarah Kaufman of the Washington Post took a more cynical view of the New Works Festival and what it meant for ballet’s future saying, “in recent years, producing new masterpieces (not just new pieces) has become a challenge. As a result, ballet companies rely on a stupefying amount of recycling”. It’s possible to think this way if you walked into the festival expecting a movement vocabulary of steps never seen before that everyone loved unanimously. I’m in the school of thought that ballet will grow and change in the same way as evolution has shaped biology – adapting in increments in response to the culture of the moment, evolving almost imperceptibly so that in 50 years we’ll look back and be surprised that ballet will look as different as Bournoville is to Balanchine, and as Ashton is to Forsythe.

Even though the festival is over, the good news is that SF Ballet is going on their American Tour later this year. It’s almost guaranteed that they will be showing a huge chunk of their new works to the rest of America. Starting in September, SFB will be touring Chicago, New York City, Orange County, and Washington D.C. Be sure to check them out in your town!

San Francisco Ballet: Touring