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| Composer: Bohuslav Martinu Music: Sinfonietta La Jolla for Chamber Orchestra and Piano Choreographer: Christopher Wheeldon Staged by: Costumes: Lighting: Number of Dancers: Time: |
| Christopher Wheeldon’s Rush, the center piece of San Francisco Ballet’s third program surprised with its freshness and conventionality.
If you live in a Northern climate, you will understand the contradiction. There are days in late March or early April when Spring is just around the corner. The air has a blustery quality to it and feels fresh; breezes are almost, but not quite balmy. It’s an experience you go through year after year, and yet the experience is new every time. That’s how Rush felt. Wheeldon chose for his third SFB commission a lovely little score by Bohuslav Martinu, the Sinfonietta La Jolla for Chamber Orchestra and Piano. Even though written relatively late in the composer’s life, it had a vernal quality about it which no doubt contributed to Rush’s atmosphere. The piece embraces classical hierarchy: five couples form the corps who support and frame the two principals (Julie Diana and Damian Smith) and the soloists (Tina LeBlanc with Nicolas Blanc and Vanessa Zahorian with Pascal Molat). At the end they all rush forward with Diana and Smith at the center of a surging phalanx of beauty. Symmetry pre-dominates: opposing lines, double diagonals that reverse direction, women against men, lifts in canons and staggered entrances. Some of it felt inspired by the Prologue in one of those Sleeping Beauty productions in which not only are the fairies accompanied by cavaliers but Lilac has a retinue of attendants, both male and female. It’s all very orderly but also packed with activity. Wheeldon may love Papa Petipa but he is also a son of Balanchine. Rush splatters and explodes symmetry and order. The choreography plays with off-kilter balances and segments the upper body and the arms. There is a robust quality to these dancers, in part emphasized by the strong colors in both costumes (Jon Morrell) and lighting design (Mark Stanley). The choreography has a wind swept, pushing ahead quality to it. But the title seems wrong. It didn’t look rushed. There was no urgency, it just looked fast and a little jerky. Like pressing the fast forward button on the VCR. Casting the two new French dancers, Blanc and Molat, with their impeccable sense of style, with two of SFB’s fine women classicists, LeBlanc and Zahorian, was inspired. As it behooves a neo-classical work, Rush’s center piece is the pas deux. It is elegant, elegiac and dark, just like the black costumes of its protagonists. It’s a partnership in which the man sets the woman soaring but also where he turns her from an arabesque penchée into an upside down lift where she rests as if this was where she belonged. At another point Smith slides Diana on point and spirals her around him with her legs violently swinging. Towards Rush’s conclusion, the lights darken. Smith walks Diana backward, his hands cupping her eyes, when the corps couples gush in, all knotted up and gnarly. But as they head across the stage, their intertwinings open up, and the men end up by leading the women out by their fingertips. By the time, Smith removes his hands, the corps, like a bad dream, has evaporated. Diana leans over, cups his head, and he sinks to the ground as she disappears into the wings. As lovely an image as you would ever want to see from two dancers who are working on what may become an important partnership./ Review |
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| Rush |
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| "Rush," by Christopher Wheeldon, which was new at the Edinburgh Festival in 2003, new onstage in San Francisco last season and new this year by virtue of its amazing performance, offered Katita Waldo and Damian Smith the opportunity to create something unforgettable. After a predictably speedy, crowded first movement, full of spatial surprises, they emerged for the slower, more moody second. This lengthy choreographic investigation offered a perfectly in-sync combination of fresh partnering ideas by Wheeldon and amazingly poised, passionate dancing, especially by the ballerina.
Wheeldon, a British dancer turned choreographer now in residence at the New York City Ballet, has the knack for turning classical vocabulary just slightly on its ear. In the faster first movement, he seemed not to be creating dance to go along with the music -- Bohuslav Martinu's "Sinfonietta la Jolla" for chamber orchestra, played deliciously by the orchestra under the direction of Andrew Mogrelia -- as much as harnessing the energy the music unleashes and having his own say. That's the sign of a brilliant choreographer, to have the confidence to venture in and out of the sway of music, not to become enslaved, no matter how "beautiful" it is./ Review |
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| Steven Norman in 2005 performance. |