{"id":11214,"date":"2014-04-17T19:45:51","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T02:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=11214"},"modified":"2014-04-17T19:45:51","modified_gmt":"2014-04-18T02:45:51","slug":"program-6-san-francisco-ballet-performance-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/program-6-san-francisco-ballet-performance-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Program 6 — San Francisco Ballet Performance — Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Program 6<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

San Francisco Ballet Performance<\/p>\n

April 15, 2014<\/p>\n

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Program 6<\/em> is three distinct ballets:\u00a0 Maelstrom<\/em>, Caprice<\/em>, and The Rite of Spring<\/em>.\u00a0 Maelstrom<\/em> was conceived and choreographed by Mark Morris, a sometime collaborator with the San Francisco Ballet, to Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, Op. 70, No. 1.\u00a0 I don’t know why they called this “Maelstrom<\/em>.”\u00a0 There is nothing of a maelstrom in it.\u00a0 It is a rather tame ballet.\u00a0 The most interesting movement was the second, to the “Ghost” movement of the Beethoven Trio.\u00a0 The name “Ghost” doesn’t apply very well to this music either.\u00a0 The music is somber, even melancholy, but I don’t know what that has to do with a ghost.\u00a0 My experience with ghosts is limited, but encountering a ghost is almost always a disturbing experience, or at best, enigmatic.\u00a0 A ghost is usually sinister, foreboding, even malevolent.\u00a0 But the music in Beethoven’s trio does not feel that way, nor does Morris’s dance.\u00a0 I got the feeling that this Beethoven Trio does not lend itself well to dance, and maybe that is why this ballet never got off the ground.\u00a0 The third movement is energetic and relatively light hearted.\u00a0 The dance throughout this movement consisted of brief segments of dancers in twos and threes.\u00a0 They would make a very brief appearance on stage, dance a brief vignette, and then exit to be replaced by another small group for another very short interlude, then exiting similarly, and so forth, through the entire movement.\u00a0 This structure of brief episodes strung together gave the movement a very choppy feel.\u00a0 It must have been intended for people with short attention spans.\u00a0 The dance was furthermore not very interesting.\u00a0 It had a sameness to it that became monotonous after a while.\u00a0 The dancers did the best they could with it, but I didn’t think it was a very good concept.<\/p>\n

Caprice <\/em>is a world premier by San Francisco Ballet director Helgi Tomasson, set to music by Camille Saint-Seans.\u00a0 This ballet was very well conceived, beautifully executed, imaginatively staged, and very interesting to watch.\u00a0 I had the feeling that I was watching a master craftsman showing us what he’s got.\u00a0 The movements were strong and decisive showing a lot of variety and imagination.\u00a0 The highlight was the second of two adagio movements with two long male-female duets followed by the two couples sharing the stage.\u00a0 The music was adagio, that is, a rather slow tempo, but it was not sad, somber, melancholy, or nostalgic.\u00a0 It had a rather positive spirit, and underlying sense of well being and optimism.\u00a0 The dance reflected that, which I was very pleased to see.\u00a0 It was a male-female duet that was close, if not intimate, but at the same time, not overly emotional.\u00a0 It was not restrained either; it was stalwart and sedate.\u00a0 Tomasson hit it just right.\u00a0 He had superb dancers to work with.\u00a0 Luke Ingham is a magnificent specimen of masculine humanity who performed several impressive solos as well as the duets.\u00a0 Caprice<\/em> is an excellent ballet, and a pleasure to watch.<\/p>\n

The Rite of Spring<\/em>, set to music by Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, was the dramatic climax to the evening.\u00a0 This ballet is visually captivating against a rich and varied musical score.\u00a0 The dance perfectly mirrored the mood and temper of the music.\u00a0 When a dance performance does this, it intensifies the emotional impact on the viewer.\u00a0 The dancing underlines the emotional tone set by the music and realizes the musical mood in a visual experience.\u00a0 But the dance also interprets the music and imparts a sense and a meaning to it that it might not have simply as a listening experience.\u00a0 This ballet makes that point to the hilt.<\/p>\n

There is a strong erotic feeling throughout the ballet that at times becomes downright lewd.\u00a0 Movements are bold and forceful.\u00a0 There is strong connection between the sexes.\u00a0 Males and females strongly interact with one another with clear erotic intent.\u00a0 But what happens?\u00a0 The strong eroticism is decisively repudiated, in a similar vein to Wagner’s opera, Tannh\u00e4user.\u00a0 In Tannh\u00e4user, after a brazenly erotic opening where Venus is unabashedly worshipped, Tannh\u00e4user decides to forsake her for Mary, the mother of God.\u00a0 The rest of the opera is the unfolding of this conflict in Tannh\u00e4user, and in the end Venus and erotic love is spurned.\u00a0 In this ballet one of the girls in the group of dancers is singled out and ritualistically killed as a sacrifice.\u00a0 And that is how the ballet ends, with a girl being executed for reasons we are not given.\u00a0 It is bleak and rather abrupt and comes across as a negative judgment on the manifested eroticism of the girls throughout the ballet.<\/p>\n

What is the nature of this sacrifice and why was it done?\u00a0 In the program we are told that the ballet reflects a practice of “primitive” people.\u00a0 “Primitive” people kill one of their daughters as a ritual sacrifice.\u00a0 Oh, really?\u00a0 It’s too bad the primitive people are not here to mock and deride this ridiculous depiction of themselves.\u00a0 Possokhov says that he believes it is abnormal people among the primitives who decide who should be killed.\u00a0 That is why we have the two males with their bodies painted to represent a sort of shaman, who dance in a shared skirt throughout the ballet.\u00a0 I guess that passes for abnormality.\u00a0 But in a primitive tribe leaders are chosen by consensus.\u00a0 One becomes a leader naturally by strength of personality and by displaying leadership skills that are crucial to survival of the entire group.\u00a0 A leader cannot effect anything without the backing of many if not most of the group.\u00a0 So an action of this magnitude that would deeply affect the entire group must be the responsibility of the entire group and not just a few aberrant leaders.\u00a0 In other words, Possokhov’s conception of this ballet is based on nonsense.<\/p>\n

The oldest man-made figures are nude females.\u00a0 They go back some 25-30,000 years.\u00a0 Primitive people worshipped females.\u00a0 They exalted female sexuality.\u00a0 In the Old Testament one of the greatest disgraces for a woman was to be barren.\u00a0 Women were brought up to have sex and to have babies.\u00a0 It was necessary.\u00a0 It was vital to the survival of the tribe.\u00a0 Fertility of the flocks, the game animals, and especially fertility of the young girls, were the highest values in primitive societies.<\/p>\n

As Robert Graves observed in his study of Greek mythology,1<\/sup><\/p>\n

The whole of neolithic Europe, to judge from surviving artifacts and myths, had a remarkably homogenous system of religious ideas, based on the worship of the many-titled Mother-goddess . . . Ancient Europe had no gods.\u00a0 The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought.\u00a0 She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father.\u00a0 (p. 13)<\/p>\n

It is civilization that seeks to kill the sexuality of women.\u00a0 Once it began to matter who the father of a child was, then necessarily female sexual behavior had to be curtailed.\u00a0 This began with the development of private property and inheritance.\u00a0 Once there was an estate to divide up after a man died, it became imperative to know which kids belonged to which man.\u00a0 In a society that lived off the land by hunting and gathering this was not necessary.\u00a0\u00a0 The invention of private property and the acquisition of durable wealth meant that females had to become monogamous — which they had never been prior.<\/p>\n

So this ritual sacrifice that we see in The Rite of Spring<\/em> is a sacrifice demanded of young women by civilization<\/em>, not by so-called “primitive” people.\u00a0 There is a lie being told here, an arrogant misconception, that we<\/em>, the civilized ones, are superior to the “primitive” people of long ago who supposedly sacrificed their young women — for what?\u00a0 It doesn’t make any sense.\u00a0 It is we<\/em> who sacrifice young women; it is we<\/em> who crucify them; we<\/em> destroy them in order to maintain a society based on wealth, inequality, and inheritance.\u00a0 That is why their natural eroticism has to be stifled.\u00a0 We modern people are the abnormal ones, not the primitive tribes who are no longer here to answer for themselves.<\/p>\n

The Rite of Spring<\/em> is a bold, imaginative ballet with a confused, distorted message, but it is nevertheless a mesmerizing spectacle.\u00a0 I would say it is one of the best ballets I have seen, really a masterpiece.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it displaces the carnage that we wreak upon the psyches of women, and blames it on a false conception of the long lost past, when the real villains are here and now.<\/p>\n

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1.\u00a0 Robert Graves (1955 [1992]) The Greek Myths: Complete Edition<\/em>.\u00a0 London:\u00a0 Penguin Books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Program 6 San Francisco Ballet Performance April 15, 2014     Program 6 is three distinct ballets:\u00a0 Maelstrom, Caprice, and The Rite of Spring.\u00a0 Maelstrom was conceived and choreographed by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11214","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"