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Robbins: Problems and Satisfactions

"Dybbuk," "Afternoon of a Faun," "Other Dances," "Glass Pieces"
San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House
San Francisco, CA
March 7, 8, and 10, 2006

by Paul Parish
copyright 2006 by Paul Parish

San Francisco Ballet's all-Robbins program ran for one week straight, Tuesday-Sunday. Houses were good the three nights I saw it, though none was sold out. Reviews that came out during the run were reasonable and respectful, which seemed about right.

The problematic aspect of the evening was the beautifully curated performance of Robbins's "Dybbuk," a ballet which he'd contemplated making, with Leonard Bernstein, for over 30 years but after he'd finally made it was never satisfied with. Bernstein's music sounds in places very like Stravinsky's "Les Noces," and Robbins's movement and mise en scène resembles it as well in its statuesque qualities. The audience gave the ballet a tepid reception—though perhaps many will be thinking about it later. I overheard puzzlement but no dissatisfaction. There was certainly no denying the clarity and force of the dancing, especially the men's solos, nor the communal power of the group dancing. Dybbuk is almost an hour long, the movement is highly inventive, there are occasions for angelic virtuosity, floating lyrical dancing, otherworldly effects, there's not a dead moment—and yet it seems a strangely thwarted affair, halfway between the worlds of telling a great story through movement and of abstract dance-drama. I don't think it works, but I'm glad to have seen it.

Both Channons I saw were remarkable. Gonzalo Garcia banked his fires and gave a powerfully restrained performance, while Pascal Molat brought a great deal of emotion through his breast and out through his arms, which made it a much more extravagant thing. I did not see Vanessa Zahorian as the heroine this year, but last year she premiered the role of Leah and danced with a fantastic marmoreal remoteness which made for a tonal coherence, as if one were dreaming this. This year opening night was given to Sarah van Patten, who brought a melting quality to the role that brought out other dimensions of the mystico-superstitious material: in one sense it was more naturalistic, showing more of Leah's hope-against-hope that she would be able to marry Channon, or be with him somehow—so when his soul possesses her, you saw and felt the violation, and she seemed almost literally thrashed to pieces in the exorcism.

If you knew it WAS an exorcism. For baffling reasons, the program did not carry a synopsis of the story. Even if Robbins did say that he wasn't trying to tell the story, but only making a distillation of its atmosphere, it seems a disservice to the audience not to make it clearer what "Dybbuk" is abstracted from.

On the other hand, Solomon Ansky's great play "The Dybbuk" is a masterpiece of late Romanticism. After seeing a video of the impressive 1937 movie, made in Yiddish by Feniks Production of Warsaw,
I realized that it's not only impossible to summarize, but that the ambiguity at its heart, which includes being open to the idea that good can come from evil (Channon cries out, "Help me, Satan!") would be impossible to make a case for nowadays, with pressures of political correctness coming from the left and those of the religiously orthodox from the right.

Rouben Ter-Arutunian's sepulchral décor, projected onto the cyclorama, looked like drawings from Kabbalah on antique parchment. Patricia Zipprodt dressed the dancers so they stood out against the gloom, male and female, very effectively, in white tights, over which many wore shrouds of white or black gauze. A band of angels had red streamers flying from their arms.

The dancers were one and all remarkable. In the solos, Hansuke Yamamoto and Steven Norman were most remarkable, but Garrett Anderson and Rory Hohenstein were valiant as well. Matthew Stewart, Jaime Garcia Castillo, and James Sofranko had that vivid and strange quality angels ought to have. Of  Leah's friends, Courtney Wright was the most glowing.

Martin West conducted the score with (occasionally barbaric) power. The orchestral colors included gongs, and memorably quoted the funeral bells of "Les Noces." Tim Krol (baritone) and Michael Trevino (bass) sang in Hebrew, but they sounded exactly like the voices in "Les Noces."

Also on the program were the San Francisco Ballet premieres of two pas de deux, "Afternoon of a Faun" and "Other Dances." In "Faun," of the two casts I saw, Sarah van Patten (with the fabulously handsome Moises Martin) brought a more fascinating natural sensuality to the role of the intruder, and bore away the feel of his kiss. She is a softer dancer than Yuan Yuan Tan (who danced with Martin's equally hot brother, Ruben Martin). Tan's built a lot like Tanaquil Leclerq, but her temperament is not so in-the-moment; rather, Tan gives the impression of having thought out her performance, prepared it to the last detail, and then of presenting it exactly as she meant to. Her look in the ballet was wire-drawn and fascinating, but she gave little sense of being actually in that space with that young man. (With van Patten, you can feel everything, even the weight of her hair.) Both pairs made the most of the stillnesses in the ballet, where the audience is invited to notice that time's passing and they are still in the same positions, and when there does come a change, how small the move can be that makes such an enormous difference.

With "Other Dances," so much depends on very small effects of style. It was of course made on Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov. To my mind, the dance is highly inflected:  it requires much more than Robbins's other Chopin ballets the épaulement, the head positions, the ways the eyes follow the hand, all those small things they start in on with the children— the very particular inflections of the Russian style, to make the phrasing have the accents in the right place. Tina Leblanc was at a disadvantage in this respect, and though her second variation was heavenly, and there were moments of such effortless suspension I was beside myself, there were also moments when her head seemed way wrong. She enjoyed a warm rapport with her partner, Joan Boada, but he also lacks the extraordinary gift for mime that Baryshnikov had (and still has), and though Boada's double cabrioles were perfection, and his taste generally refined, there were places where he had to do an acting trick (as when he must pretend to have lost his spot in a simple chain of turns and then let us know he knows that we know he was pretending) which he couldn't quite pull off.

Lorena Feijóo and Gonzalo Garcia brought it off almost effortlessly—Feijóo has the training for all those lines, and she also disciplined herself to dance it simply, softly, and with great freshness. As with LeBlanc, the second variation, with all its echoes of Raimonda, was her greatest moment.

The program closed with a smash with "Glass Pieces," which the audience loves and which the company really knows how to deliver. The stage has never looked taller nor more bursting with energy than in this urban folk dance. Katita Waldo and Ruben Martin brought out Egyptian overtones in the ballet's plastique that I've never noticed before, but since some of the music is from "Aknaten," that seems appropriate—and that frieze of dancers going across the back behind them certainly might look Egyptian if I could stop being fascinated by all its little changes and get far enough "back" from it to notice that.

Volume 4, No. 10
March 13, 2006
copyright ©2006 Paul Parish
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last updated on March 13, 2006