Tomasson’s Rigor Anchors San Francisco Ballet

San Francisco Ballet is not only the oldest American ballet company (it was founded in 1933), but one of the strongest, as its recent 10-day season at City Center demonstrated yet again. Its artistic director is Helgi Tomasson, the Icelandic dancer trained in Denmark who became a treasured member of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet—a model of classicism, a superb partner and a highly adaptable and appealing stage presence. (Among the roles created on him there: the hero, Franz, in the Balanchine-Danilova Coppèlia; the male lead in Balanchine’s haunting Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fée; and the central figure in Robbins’ Dybbuk.) It was also at City Ballet that he began choreographing.

When Tomasson became head of the San Francisco Ballet, in 1985, the company was in the doldrums. Over the past two decades, he’s not only invigorated it with new repertory but brought to extraordinary heights the level of technique and the remarkable consistency of performance style—no easy achievement considering that, as with most companies today other than City Ballet, the San Francisco dancers have been gathered from all over the world; there aren’t many principals or soloists who are American-trained.

By general agreement, it’s the men who are the glory of the company. But they’re not, as they are at ABT, a collection of thrilling virtuosos—there isn’t a superstar among them. Instead, they’re a homogeneous group reflecting Tomasson’s rigorous training and rigorous standards. And much of the current repertory displays them that way: Again and again, as in Tomasson’s own Concerto Grosso, five or six guys are unleashed to show off their easy and pleasing prowess. It’s impressive, it’s exemplary, it’s a little bland.

There’s the rub. I can’t think of another important company in which individual dancers are so undifferentiated. Of course, we can recognize them, and of course they have different virtues (and weaknesses), but essentially they all dance the same way: correct, strong and somewhat inexpressive. You see it most clearly in the two Balanchine works they brought. The Four Temperaments was superbly staged, and more than adequately danced. But except for Sofiane Sylve, that recent refugee from City Ballet, there didn’t seem particularly good reasons why this dancer rather than that dancer was cast in a given role. Sylve was a properly dominating “Choleric”: She danced it her own way, she filled it with herself.

That other masterpiece, Divertimento No. 15, which demands endless and personal subtleties of phrasing, fared less well. I saw the second cast, but I can’t believe that made much difference. This glorious ballet was made on five of Balanchine’s greatest ballerinas. Even in this reduced performance you could detect the qualities Balanchine loved in Tanaquil LeClercq, Diana Adams, Allegra Kent and the others—their perfume, he might have said; their idiosyncrasies of plastique and style. But the San Francisco dancers, although they didn’t actually look alike, had few distinctive dance qualities of their own: Their dancing was interchangeable. In the sublime adagio, where the five women and three men soar across the stage, there was none of the delicate phrasing, the musical inflection, that comes from true Balanchine dancers; and no melting, heart-stopping lyricism. Just good dancers doing the steps. To make matters worse, the relentless smiling—the endless, aggressive display of teeth—blemished the entire proceedings. This is not the Balanchine way.

TOMASSON'S SEASON—buoyed by consistently fine musical accompaniment—was highly ambitious. Apart from the Balanchines, he presented eight works new to New York. Three were his own—each of them respectable and negligible. He’s not a bad choreographer; he’s a boring one, responding  literally and doggedly to the music. He’s not the only artistic director to overvalue his own work, but he may be the only one who would showcase three of his own ballets in so brief a season.