A San Francisco Ballet Season

San Francisco Ballet delivers one of the most intense home seasons in the dance world, a scheduling crucible that artistic director Tamara Rojo, in her four years of leadership, has tried to change without success. Because the company shares the magnificent War Memorial Opera House with the San Francisco Opera, and the singers occupy the theater all summer and fall, the Ballet can only use the stage from December through May. So, while most troupes prepare a spring season and perform it, then move on to prepare a fall season and perform it, San Francisco Ballet dancers spend August through November creating and rehearsing ballets for all six programs all at once. Come December, they blast through a month of “Nutcrackers,” then launch themselves into everything from Petipa classics to wildly un-balletic contemporary works with less than two weeks between each program to fine-tune roles they learned back in October. In this recent season’s most extreme turn-around, the dancers whiplashed from an all-Forsythe program to “Don Quixote” in just eleven days.

Nikisha Fogo and Joshua Jack Price in “Don Quixote.” Photograph by Lindsey Rallo

Is this a recipe for forging some of the most physically resilient and stylistically adaptable dancers on the planet, or a sure-fire way to rack up workers’ comp claims? Whichever the case, it makes for a roller coaster ride, followed by an end-of-season tsunami of dancer posts on Instagram, the highlights blurring into one chaotic memory. And yet, while snapshots from “La Sylphide,” “Diamonds,” and “Mere Mortals” crowd my brain, there’s one standout image I can’t forget: Joshua Jack Price as Basilio in “Don Q.”

It was certainly a surprise to see him cast for the March run, especially opposite one of the company’s most confident principals, Nikisha Fogo, as Kitri. Hailing from Australia, and having come to the SF Ballet School from a Prix de Lausanne scholarship, Price has shown great promise since his apprentice days, but he hadn’t danced many principal roles, let alone a full-length. For “Don Q,” he cut his curly hair close on the sides and pulled it off his forehead to create a swaggering pompadour. Traipsing about the stage as that mischievous young barber in sunny Spain, he suddenly became the sexiest guy within 100 miles of the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, the impression had as much to do with his dancing as his coiffure.

What instant stardom! Within five minutes, it was apparent that far from being nervous to partner the wily Fogo, Price’s ease on stage, born from unshakeable command of his bodily instrument, was helping her relax, too. It turns out Price is a Baryshnikov type, his compact biomechanics so efficient and his proprioception so sure that his low-arabesque pencil turns in Act One looked like they could drill a hole straight into the center of the earth. His pirouettes are not just secure but musical, so natural is his ability to speed or slow them. His jumps have terrific height—landing his double saut de basque to the knee, he threw his head dramatically back, nothing to lose. In pure strength, he had no trouble carrying Fogo, a tall dancer, halfway across the stage in a one-armed lift. (For that matter, Fogo had no trouble carrying herself—what a clean, lovely adage she gave us in the difficult Act Two dream scene.) Through it all, Price merged with his character’s moment, teasing in the Act One flirtations and tender in the Act Two gypsy scene, which in former artistic director Helgi Tomasson’s staging adds a swooning guitar-strumming duet for the lovers set to interpolated music.

Price was so strong he nearly set the standard of artistry for this run—but that honor went to Gabriele Francesco Frola. New to the company from English National Ballet, Frola especially impressed in that melting Act Two pas de deux, commanding the mood with such ease that the lover’s intimacy almost made me blush. He and the extravagantly shoulder-swishing Sasha De Sola were deservedly given opening night, a shocker in which Frola danced like one of the all-time greats, his form nearly perfect, his energy radiant, his freedom in bravura steps so total that, in the tavern scene, he seemed to step out of turns like a race car driver exiting a Ferrari—until suddenly, while launching the Act Three coda, Frola came down wrong on his foot and limped off, injured for the remainder of the season.

Even with his Act Three truncated, comparing Frola to the other Basilios made for a fascinating study. (I caught all the casts except Wei Wang and Wona Park.)

Sasha De Sola and Francesco Gabriele Frola in “Don Quixote.” Photograph by Lindsey Rallo

In the Petipa classics, of course, strengths and compensations are laid bare. Esteban Hernandez has long been a company treasure for his boyish sweetness and his pristine petit allegro capabilities, but his Basilio was less than virtuosic, both by choice and by necessity. Whereas Frola flipped De Sola in the air before plunging her into the Act Three fish dive, Henandez opted for the no-flip version; at the same time, Hernandez’s jumps were lower, so where Frola threw in top-difficulty bravura steps, Hernandez went for cabrioles and simpler stuff. Finishing a pirouette to the knee, he even landed on his butt and laughed it off, and we loved him for it. What Hernandez has going for him, aside from his affability, is a collaborative partnership with the tiny-but-powerful Katherine Barkman, and he seemed to realize it was her night. Barkman seized it, her huge brown eyes feisty, her positions textbook perfect, her energy atomically charged. It was a bonus for the audience when Rojo came on stage to promote Barkman to principal during the bows, but it also would have been a crime to keep her from the top rank a moment longer.

Of course, the San Francisco ballerina who has been all over social media is the punk-styled firebrand Madeline Woo, and she too was a spectacular Kitri, but her partnership with Cavan Conley lacked spark. Woo had been rehearsing with Frola in the fall, and why she was paired with Conley instead is a bit of a mystery. One of my favorite dancers since he joined the corps from Tulsa Ballet in 2018, Conley was terrifically bright and charismatic in Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes” this season. But “Don Quixote” tested his bravura limits, and he seemed self-consciously aware of this. The charm that flows from him in the contemporary repertoire got clamped inside tight shoulders and a set jaw. Like Hernandez, he opted for the simpler jumps and turns, seeming to have problems with the alignment of his head in pirouettes. Woo paid no mind and gave us her usual athleticism with extra flash. Her Kitri was a bit meta, seeming to wink at the audience during the big fan-flapping backbends on her knee.

Rojo designed the core of this year’s season as a ballet history lesson, but out of order: instead of progressing from nineteenth-century Petipa to 20th century Balanchine to twenty-first-century William Forsythe, we started with a Balanchine triple-bill and launched forward to Forsythe before circling back to Petipa and “Don Q.” In terms of getting the best juice out of the dancers, this worked.

The February arrival of Forsythe’s “Blake Works” triptych in San Francisco (it had previously been performed by La Scala) felt, if we can use the metaphor in a seismically sensitive region, earthshaking. I attended four times, running into excited dancers and ballet-lovers also back for seconds and thirds. “They’re getting even more musical!” a former star member of Lines Ballet gushed to me during intermission at the program’s final show. Indeed. Forsythe has a long history of transforming San Francisco Ballet’s dancers, tracing back to the company’s 1987 commission of his “New Sleep.” In “Blake Works,” he worked his magic on a new generation.

Madeline Woo and Joshua Jack Price in William Forsythe's “The Barre Project.” Photograph by Chris Hardy

The recorded music, of course, is by James Blake, the edgy British R&B/pop singer-songwriter, whose tunes have obsessed Forsythe for the past decade. But the “music” is also by Forsythe himself, in the counter-rhythms he shows us via the slinky-sharp, syncopated steps. (This irrepressible gift for imagining his own compositions within and against what is heard is the quality that puts Forsythe in league with Balanchine, after all.) The first act “Prelude” section of “Blake Works” offered us this most spectacularly, complex chains of bodily rhythms unfurling in the long silences between Blake’s electronically fuzzed vocals. “The Barre Project,” created over Zoom during Covid, then gave a series of soloists the chance to “werk,” their saucy hips propelled by loud club beats. The closing “Blake Works I,” originally made in 2016 on the Paris Opera Ballet, capped everything with stage-sweeping ensembles, and a painfully vulnerable duet at the center.

Joseph Walsh emerged as the Forsythe dance par excellence. In fact, he almost seemed to be the company team captain, especially in the “Prologue,” where a couple times I heard him whispering the counts for an ensemble line to all start on one breath. The wholeness of his dancing is something I can’t quite explain, but what makes Walsh especially spectacular is how naturally he shifts from a feat of the highest technical refinement to a relaxed human presence. That Jerome Robbins quality of “just dancing” for the others on stage is his instinctual mode, and it is painful to think he might be nearing the latter days of his performing career.

“Prologue” offered breakout moments for younger dancers, especially when the superhumanly plastic Luca Ferrò and the less refined but wonderfully thoughtful Dylan Pierzina stepped into its opening duet. “The Barre Project,” meanwhile, was a nonstop virtuosity parade: Conley, Fogo, and Ferrò all left their mark on it. Woo became its poster girl, unforgettable in a hip-swishing, ballroom-influenced duet with Price. Barkman reigned again here too, the current of energy in her pelvic swivel almost obscene. (Interesting effect for a dancer whose default persona is sassy yet wholesome.)

My favorite segment of “The Barre Project,” though, was the gentle, almost prayerful “Lullaby for My Insomniac,” which gave Wona Park the chance to be quietly heartbreaking. What a special dancer she is—when so much of the current female roster seems to specialize in attack, Park marries speed and strength to an essential softness. She shone in virtually everything this year: Balanchine’s “Serenade,” Yuri Possokhov’s new “Onegin” (as Olga), and especially “La Sylphide.”

It was then fascinating to see Seojeong Yun, a soloist, step into the “Lullaby” role after Park. She too was deeply musical and angelic—and yet the hand movements that with Park looked so regretful seemed with Yun more like “choreography,” not quite on the level of subtly beseeching gesture. But no doubt for Yun that next level of artistry will come. Among other emerging female talents in the company, the tall and dignified Jaycee Gailliard proved her soloist worthy chops—and got promoted to demi-soloist at the end of the season. And Isabella DeVivo hit the music with a vengeance. She was, alas, under-cast in every other program this past season.

Meanwhile, fellow fans who also came to see “Blake Works” three or four times will surely cry foul if I don’t credit Wei Wang, breezing through the battu marathon of “Blake Works I” and turning all those Vaudevillean flourishes into winkingly regal moments worthy of King Louis XIV himself. Watching from the wings, Forsythe himself must have thought he’d gone to heaven. As Joseph Walsh replied to one of those “season photo dump” posts on Instagram, “Next SF Ballet level: unlocked.”

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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