With 12 new works, two specially commissioned scores and the world’s first Björk ballet, the Unbound festival by San Francisco Ballet (SFB) properly lives up to its title. Yes, there may be some predictable names among the dozen commissioned choreographers; yes, there are only two women among them. But artistic director Helgi Tomasson has undertaken an exhilarating experiment in California – challenging audiences to take a risk on four ambitious triple bills and challenging choreographers to cut loose and play.
Arthur Pita has never needed permission to play. As delinquent and riotous as some of his choreography has been, the setting of eight Björk songs in Björk Ballet still looks like nothing he’s ever produced. Visually, the work is a cacophony of glamour, craziness and fairytale: the stage transformed into a spangled salt marsh by 40 clumps of silver grass; the dancers costumed by Marco Morante to become, variously, a tinsel-cloaked fairy with raspberry-pink socks, a tango diva, a scarlet butterfly and a chorus of clubbers in sequined muzzles.
There is a hint of a story in the fisherman figure who wanders through the piece, alternately wearing sad and happy clown masks. At moments he cast his line as if fishing for dreams, and it is perhaps those dreams that Pita hears in Björk’s music. The scenarios include a group of lovers, locked in an underwater embrace; a sexy goddess carried on a bier; and a classical rave. A stageful of ballet dancers pogoing in perfect first position to Hyperballad is a sight to see.
Viewed as pure choreography, some sections may seem disposable, even random, but as a synthesis of dance, music and design it becomes far more than the sum of its parts. Unlike so many pop-inspired ballets, Pita doesn’t ride the surface novelty of Björk’s music. Instead, he communicates something of the transgression, yearning, mischief and magic at its heart. Evanescent though it may be, Björk Ballet is a wonderful watch – surprising, mysterious and a ridiculous amount of fun.
Pita is one of four British or British-based choreographers to feature in Unbound, and while he and Christopher Wheeldon have worked with SFB before, David Dawson and Cathy Marston are making their company debuts. Marston’s Snowblind is the more substantial, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, a bleak fable of love, possession and loss that proves a smart choice for a one-act ballet.
Working with an arranged score by Philip Feeney, Marston whittles her material down to around 30 minutes of pure dance. She uses a modest-sized chorus to evoke the story’s crucial element of snow; her drifting choreography not only its figurative representation but also of the claustrophobic situation in which three characters – Ethan, his wife, Zeena, and the free-spirited Mattie with whom he falls in love – are trapped. There is a superb chemistry between casting and choreography. Sarah Van Patten is terrifyingly good as Zeena – her hands clawed, her spine rigid and her gaze steely with possessiveness and pain. Mathilde Froustey’s Mattie is her quicksilver opposite, light, sensuous and supple. Ulrik Birkkjaer’s Ethan, his back bowed from years of dutiful service, develops poignant layers of rectitude and longing.
Marston keeps her language plain and functional when she needs to move her story along, but it blooms vividly when focusing on the characters’ inner lives. In one finely judged image she has Mattie kneel and rest her head against Ethan’s leg, concentrating the spontaneity, sweetness and willingness that make her so lovable to him. When the errant lovers try to escape, and Mattie is paralysed in an accident, Marston masterfully tracks the changing dynamics of power in a trio that ends with the two lovers clasped in Zeena’s arms and Zeena triumphantly in charge.
Snowblind is the only literary ballet to feature in the festival, but some of the most abstract-seeming works carry an implicit theme or personal story. Gender identity is subtly addressed in David Dawson’s Animus Anima, which plays with the traditional dynamics of male and female dance languages. In The Infinite Ocean, Edwaard Liang contemplates death; in Bespoke, Stanton Welch meditates on the transience of a ballet career; and in Wheeldon’s Bound To, a cast of mobile phone-clutching dancers tackle the world’s addiction to social media.
Wheeldon doesn’t typically moralise as a choreographer, but this idea takes his work to some interestingly expressive places. When a phone-free Dores André tries to seduce Benjamin Freemantle into paying her proper attention, their duet becomes a cleverly evocative experiment in dysfunctional partnering; she initiating the moves, while he absent-mindedly responds. An intricately fluid, intimate quartet has four women recalling a time when they used to talk rather than text; while an affecting solo for Lonnie Weeks shows a man stranded in solitary anxiety, among a group of phone-transfixed friends.
What’s odd is how little trust Wheeldon places in his own language. Each section comes with a title projected on to the stage – “Open your eyes” or “Take a deep breath” – and in tandem with Keaton Henson’s overly saccharine score, these preachy little captions seem to trivialise rather than concentrate the choreography’s message. Dance often works its deepest effects through the gaps and ambiguities of its language. In contrast to Wheeldon’s over-signalling, the charm of Trey McIntyre’s Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem lies in its willingness to let the audience find their own way into the material.
The work is about McIntyre’s grandfather, who died after suffering years of dementia. Set to the waif-like folk songs of Chris Garneau, McIntyre’s choreography cleverly evokes the past without sentimentalising. Freemantle as the young grandfather dances among his male friends with a slightly stilted jocularity. He flirts with sweetly artless young women, and McIntyre adroitly captures their individual vulnerabilities in the rawness of the characters’ steps and their eccentricities of phrasing. At the end, when Freemantle is left alone, dancing a strange, ragged duet with a three-legged stool, we glimpse the pain of the grandfather losing his mind and the choreographer trying to piece it back together.
Flesh is a very personal work, authentic and generous; these are qualities disappointingly absent from Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Guernica. A homage to Picasso, it throws together sex, politics, cubism and Spain in a high-gloss spectacle of bull-horned lovers, flamenco and blood red lighting . It’s all too much and while I normally admire her work for its breadth of spirit, Guernica feels overwrought and hollow. It is marvellously danced, however, as are all the works in the festival. Even if there are moments when this elegant, versatile and committed company look as though they could have done with an extra rehearsal or two, it’s impressive how fully and deeply they embody the range of choreographic idioms that have been thrown at them.
Standout performances include Angelo Greco, his moulded line and impassioned attack beautifully showcased in the pure neoclassicism of Welch’s Bespoke; Yuan Yuan Tan, spooling her eerily graceful body though Liang’s Infinite Ocean; Sofiane Sylve magnificently regal in just about everything; and Maria Kochetkova as a ferocious modern-day Odile in Dawson’s Anima Animus.
The company shine in Justin Peck’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming, set to a sequence of tracks by M83 with 14 dancers dressed in trainers, shorts and jeans. Peck has a special genius for choreographing ensembles, creating surges and crosscurrents of dance that sparkle with brilliantly bevelled detail. The heart of this beautiful ballet lies in the long, quietly ecstatic duet for Sarah Van Patten and Luke Ingham – a sequence of low lifts, gently delineated balances, and unexpected changes of direction during which the two dancers seem to move together on a single breath.
I saw all 12 works over a weekend, and in that concentrated viewing some of the festival’s choreographers appeared markedly braver than others. But overall these ballets constitute a fine statement of faith in the future of the art form. If I were Tomasson and cherry-picking my dream triple bill, Peck, Marston and Pita’s works would be frontrunners, but Wheeldon, Dawson and McIntyre’s would not be far behind. Lucky San Francisco, to be so spoiled for choice.
• Unbound festival runs in San Francisco until 5 May.
