Box Office Ballet

In its 92nd season—its second programmed by still relatively new artistic director Tamara Rojo—San Francisco Ballet kept playing with box office strategies. Everything revolved around Liam Scarlett’s “Frankenstein,” which I’m beginning to think of as the ballet world’s “Phantom of the Opera,” a “high art” experience designed for middlebrow tastes. After regular-season performances in March, “Frankenstein” also got a late April season finale “encore.” This “encore” run practice was instituted last year, built on the idea that word of mouth will bring fresh ticket buyers. To judge by online sales data, it’s working.

Performance

San Francisco Ballet, “Van Manen: Dutch Grandmaster” and “Broken Love”

Place

War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, April 5, 17, and 18, 2025

Words

Rachel Howard

Dores André and Fernando Carratalá Coloma in van Manen's Grosse Fuge // © Chris Hardy

When it comes to sex, the challenge to shyer sensibilities is not subtle: “Grosse Fuge” is a ritualized copulation for four men and four women, to Beethoven’s Great Fugue. What’s refreshing to this American eye, though, is how it brings us a healthier Dutch attitude towards sexuality. The women stand in the back for the first section of “Grosse Fuge,” dressed in white leotards that look a bit like lingerie; as the music delivers strident phrases driven by the double-bass, the men make fists and flex biceps and swish around long black skirts, like peacocks showing off in hopes of landing a mate. When at last the women join in, a gentler musical theme has launched, but the women are hardly passive little flits—they flex and stand tall and even slap a male partner on the ass. (Twice, in case you missed it the first time, as a friend pointed out.) It’s the men who have to disrobe in a most vulnerable fashion, stripping off their skirts to reveal tiny shorts. It’s the women who arch their backs over them, initiating the real intercourse, and pressing the men’s heads commandingly to their crotches. (How’s that for empowering a woman’s desires?) And when the women latch on to the men’s belts, and the men slide them around on the floor between their legs, it’s the women who are holding on with a death grip, as a lyrical movement from one of Beethoven’s late string quartet provides a striking tonal contrast.

As to musicality—the other element my fellow-critic friend found challenging—I’d argue that “Grosse Fuge” is more musical than the great majority of contemporary ballets. It depends, of course, on what you consider to be “musicality”: illustration of the music or conversation with the music. Like Balanchine, van Manen has here listened for the music’s strife-riven essence and created a structure that respects the music’s logic and yet stands independent from it. The motifs are carefully chosen, and limited enough to accrue meaning (domineering V arms, turned in retirés that feel like a gesture of “no!”). Van Manen’s mastery at giving you just enough pattern to then delight you with deviation is thrilling. Stretches of lightning fast, inventive partnering alternate regularly with passages of walking as a formation, shifting directions like a flock. Even the overall scheme of having just the men dance, then the women, then partnering incorporates just enough unexpected but still logical variation: after two passages of couples, instead of taking us predictably to a third couple, we get two men in side-by-side unison.

San Francisco Ballet has danced “Grosse Fuge” before, but not since 2005, so this work is new to a fresh generation of dancers and looked that way on stage, mostly in a good way. But a former Houston Ballet dancer sitting behind me remarked that the opening night cast could have used another week of rehearsals to all come to agreement on the shapes, and I think that’s right.

The women were stronger than the men in that cast, especially Jennifer Stahl, who hit all the exposed leg extensions at the perfect height. Aaron Robison stood out among the men in the most frenzied passage, bringing just enough wildness to partnering Nikisha Fogo. Fernando Carratalá Coloma, a recent soloist hire who deserves speedy promotion to principal, best captured the slightly downcast posture at the heart of the style here. So did Rubén Cítores Nieto in the ensemble that I saw five days later, all the more magnetizing because of the disjunction of his doe-eyed, lovely face and his towering muscularity. Julia Rowe was also powerful in that cast, finally getting to do something other than the soubrette roles so often handed to her. And both Sasha de Sola and Sasha Mukhemedov, so different in physiognomy and technique, perfectly molded their bodies to the stringent requirements. (All due credit to stager Rachel Beaujean.)

Cavan Conley in Hans van Manen's “Solo.” Photograph by Chris Hardy

The middle two ballets on the van Manen program had also been danced by the company before, and in fact the evening’s highlight, 1997’s playful “Solo,” is so popular that Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was performing it just across the Bay for their Cal Performances visit as San Francisco Ballet’s bill opened. Opening night’s cast of Cavan Conley, Alexis Francisco Valdes, and Victor Prigent was gold standard, skittering and shrugging to Bach’s Partita No. 1 (so fast and devilish that it had to be heard recorded), but never sacrificing classical clarity. Among Thursday’s cast, all corps members, Lleyton Ho and Archie Sullivan weren’t yet commanding the shifts in dynamics. But Luca Ferro, who has shone in everything he’s danced this season, was a marvel, the shapes so sharp and distinct but the energy passing through him with an electric spark.

The enigmatic and moody “Variations for Two Couples,” from 2012, gave another opportunity to savor casting contrasts. Joseph Walsh and Frances Chung could not have been more coolly controlled on opening night, but Nikisha Fogo was also a thrill as partnered by Max Cauthorn in the fast, most traditionally classical partnering, set to Bach. (Those feet of Cauthorn’s, so flexible and held so high in his exquisite pirouette position! That magical softness in his every landing!) WanTing Zhao, barely seen this season, looked magisterial and mysterious paired with the tall and confident corps member Adrian Zeisel—I hope this is the beginning of a partnership.

The grand ensemble closer of the van Manen program was the weak point. Created in 1977 on the Dutch National Ballet, “5 Tango’s” is a perfectly agreeable treatment of Astor Piazzolla’s music, but the choreographic ideas don’t have the same density of van Manen’s best work, and the recorded music feels canned. (By contrast, the Ballet Orchestra’s blustery treatment of the Beethoven for “Grosse Fuge” was as key to the work’s charged atmosphere as the famous all-white set.) Esteban Hernández in a brief but swashbuckling solo and Dores André, prowling the stage with unflagging authority in her every over-the-shoulder glance, were the prime attractions here; in the second cast, Wona Park and Mingxuan Wang didn’t find the secret to projecting the same charisma.

Sasha Mukhamedov and Aaron Robison in van Manen's “Variations for Two Couples.” Photograph by Chris Hardy

Speaking of André, she was the reason to catch the Frida Kahlo-ballet program running in alternation with the van Manen. For the second half of that other bill, dubbed “Broken Love,” Rojo juxtaposed Ochoa’s crowd favorite with Frederick Ashton’s “Marguerite and Armand,” also returning from last season. André was given a single performance on the final night, with Cauthorn (also her real-life romantic partner) as Armand. These are, of course, iconic roles, created on Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in 1963; André and Cauthorn could not be more different from those originators and yet they seemed made for the ballet. André’s always-determined energy became poignant as her pointes stuttered across the floor to mark Marguerite’s consumptive weakness, while Cauthorn—typically so pure and innocent—found a genuine, nasty anger deep within. Their high point came in the scene when Armand confronts Marguerite at a party, snatching off her jewels in disgust (not knowing that she has abandoned their relationship at his father’s behest). This is a highly unnatural ballet, with off-the-charts moments of swelling melodrama supplied by Liszt pouring from the piano and orchestra in the pit, and yet that fight felt entirely naturalistic.

Dispiritingly, the same opera house crowd that had given the Frida Kahlo ballet an extended standing ovation just an hour earlier started trickling out while André and Cauthorn were still taking their first bows. I can’t understand it—and I hope that in seasons to come San Francisco Ballet can manage that age old challenge of not just drawing in fresh audiences, but helping newcomers develop an appetite for the good stuff.

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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