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With Humor and Flair

It’s a new era at Smuin Contemporary Ballet, but incoming artistic director Amy Seiwert was still invoking her old boss pre-curtain as the company toured its first program under her leadership to the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek. “As Michael used to say, if you like what you see, tell a friend,” Seiwert announced, wearing a green silk dress with punk combat boots and raising an eyebrow beneath her exuberantly ponytailed hair. “And if you don’t—keep your big mouth shut.”

Performance

Smuin Contemporary Ballet: Dance Series 1

Place

Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA, September 27 2024

Words

Rachel Howard

Smuin in Amy Seiwert's “Renaissance.” Photograph by Chris Hardy

That’s classic Smuin humor for you. The 16-member company he founded comes with a colorful backstory I found myself sharing with a ballet fan new to the Bay Area over intermission. Here’s the saga: Michael Smuin once co-directed San Francisco Ballet with Lew Christensen. With “Dance in America” televised specials to his credit and a loyal audience in his pocket, Smuin was the heir apparent in 1984 when Christensen died. But the San Francisco Ballet board went a new direction, choosing the more restrained classicism of Helgi Tomasson’s leadership. So thirty years ago Smuin founded his own chamber troupe to continue in his brasher, showman style. The utterly surprising chapter came after Smuin’s sudden death in 2007, when his leading muse Celia Fushille became AD and stretched the repertory in ways no one would have imagined, adding works by the likes of Jyri Kylian, Stanton Welch, and Helen Pickett while still keeping old-school Smuin fans satiated with his ballets. Which brings us to this current chapter, as Seiwert—a former Smuin dancer who got her choreographic start with his encouragement—begins to stretch the rep even further.

With all that in mind, there was a lot of good news on this triple-bill to tell a friend.

The news isn’t so much in the choreography as it is in the presence the fresh rep allowed Seiwert and her right-hand woman, ballet master Amy London, to bring forth from the dancers. Michael Smuin’s works demand a bright-eyed, unabashedly hammy approach, and even as the rep shifted over the years, this influence often seemed to bleed into the non-Smuin works. I don’t mean to denigrate the dancers’ performances—there was always much to admire, and former Smuin member Erin Yabrough-Powell deserves her own star on the Bay Area dancer Walk of Fame—but there was also a faintly canned quality, an inauthenticity. On this first program under Amy Seiwert, the relationship between the dances and the audience felt changed.

Smuin in “ByChance” by Jennifer Archibald. Photograph by Chris Hardy

The opening octet “ByChance,” a commission from the prolific Jennifer Archibald, began the evening in a somber mood—no grooving house music here, as in her recent crowd-pleasing hits for BalletX and the Kennedy Center’s Pathways to Performance project, but a stitched-together soundscore of worried minimalist strings and dark synthesizer sounds from Ezio Bosso and Roger Goula, and a visual scheme of dark sleek dancewear (by Susan Roemer), and vectors of light cutting through fog. Fast, inventive partnering with suddenly staccato solo moments emphasized the difficulty of maintaining relationships. Hands hung in the air like claws, or exploded over a partner’s face. Three unison men had a passage of floorwork that showed Archibald at her most naturally propulsive. 

I caught a pervasive sense of ghostly loss as eerie voices entered Goula’s score, but could not make out a thread of thought related to the ballet’s purported subject of chance encounters. This did not matter in the final pas de deux between Terez Dean Orr and Ricardo Dyer, her legs swimming through the air, his partnering so slow and soft. The music was from Pēteris Vasks’s heartbreaking “Plainscapes” for piano and strings. The levitating duet would make a strong ballet excerpted on its own; I think I would prefer it that way.

Amy Seiwert knows and loves the company’s core supporters and is taking care to carry them along through this evolution. I would never have thought to compare Matthew Neenan’s “The Last Glass,” from 2010, to Smuin’s ballets, but that’s what Seiwert did in her pre-curtain speech. In the works’ character sketches and implied relationship narratives, it’s possible the choreographers could occupy some small shared space in a Venn diagram. But the differences are notable: Smuin would never have worked with music as ironically hip as these songs by Beirut, aptly enough described as a “wild street-parade sound of American indie-rock” in the program. Nor would he have made the majority of the movement so grounded and lightly absurdist (think Mats Ek with the spinal convulsions toned down), and the relationships so nuanced.

Smuin in “The Last Glass” by Matthew Neenan. Photograph by Chris Hardy

“The Last Glass” brings us into a faintly sad-circus world of navigating love’s terrors with five contrasting couples. In design, it feels shaggy—why are there two coquettish ballet-doll women among the menagerie, neither strongly contrasting nor operating as a pair? But oh, the dancing! Cassidy Isaacson brought her usual gutsy abandon to an athletic yet intimate duet with Gabrielle Collins that sent them spinning on their heels into each other’s arms and canoodling on the floor. Maggie Carey began and ended the ballet in tiptoeing terror and helpless longing for Yuri Rogers’s dreamy attentions. For the first time in years of watching her, I felt not only impressed, but deeply moved. And oh, the ensemble work! Every step as precise as a gesture, and breathing as one.

Seiwert closed the bill with one of her own best works, 2019’s “Renaissance,” the hit of the company’s summer tour to New York. The music is mostly Slavic folk songs delivered with heart-piercing strength of spirit by the women’s vocal ensemble Kitka; the movement is both flowing and grounded, as in a motif of a stomping wide second plié, hands in fists; and the theme is women’s solidarity, but handled with a refreshing breaking of binary schematics, the men moving in an out of the interconnected society. Again, Isaacson had a free-flung, commanding solo. Again, Dean Orr and Dyer partnered with the loveliest softness. 

Dean Orr is several months pregnant, a fact she was happy to make public in an interview last month; she has never danced better. Neither have her colleagues. No one seems to be selling anything. Everyone gives the impression of merging with the moment.   

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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