<i>“Next@90” Program:</i> Gateway to the Sun / Violin Concerto / MADCAP

A 2022 article in Slipped Disc appeared under the subtitle “Women Are Now Bosses of the Ballet World.”1 This declaration drew upon an earlier essay by veteran dance critic Alastair Macaulay, which chronicles the sharp rise of female leadership among otherwise male-dominated ballet management. This shift is significant, in that it upends centuries of workplace tradition. As Macaulay elaborates, “In the last century, George Balanchine [the Russian émigré choreographer] said that ‘Ballet is woman,’ but he invited very few women to choreograph for New York City Ballet; and he seems never to have considered any woman to be his successor in running his company. . . . A hugely disproportionate number of ballet choreographers and ballet directors has been male.”2 Tamara Rojo, now the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Ballet (SFB), is among the new female luminaries in power whom Macaulay extolls.In May of 2024, SFB finished a milestone first season under Rojo’s helm. Hailing from Spain, Rojo graced English stages as a beloved principal dancer with the Royal Ballet and the English National Ballet (ENB) and also directed ENB from 2012 to 2022. Flexing her “bossdom,” Rojo recently helped procure an anonymous $60 million donation for SFB, the largest gift on record for any dance company in the United States.3 Moreover, she dedicates herself to making ballet more inclusive and equitable, often commissioning female choreographers and choreographers of color.Rojo’s inaugural spring season was entitled “Passion without Boundaries,” and encompassed eight programs total, including two encore programs. According to the program notes, the works within Passion without Boundaries showcase the “heroic ascent” of the dancer: “Every step represents thousands of hours of work, but the earthly becomes divine, the dancer becomes extraordinary, and the audience gets carried away.”4 Indeed, the spring 2024 season proffered thoughtful meditations on ecstasy, enchantment, mortality, and transformation. The “Next@90” program (April 2–13), reviewed here, comprised three works: Nicolas Blanc’s Gateway to the Sun, Yuri Possokhov’s Violin Concerto, and Danielle Rowe’s MADCAP. The Next@90 program was especially religiously inspired and inflected. This balletic triptych overtly paid homage to Rojo’s predecessor, Helgi Tómasson, who commissioned these works in 2023.5Gateway to the Sun, choreographed by French-born Nicolas Blanc, began the program. Currently the Rehearsal Director/Coach and Choreographer with the Joffrey Ballet and a former Principal Dancer with SFB and the Joffrey, Blanc derived inspiration from the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207–1273), the great medieval Sufi, or Islamic mystic. Blanc set his choreography to a composition for cello and orchestra by Anna Clyne. Made for thirteen dancers, the ballet revolves around a solitary individual, i.e., the poet, danced by SFB Principal Wei Wang, and the emotions that he inspires.The curtain opened to a painted backdrop depicting desert sands. Soft whistling sounds heightened the atmosphere of isolation. A single male dancer, Wang, enacted hand gestures, underscoring further the sense of solitude. Male and female dancers moved their way to the stage and luxuriated in the space. Although the women danced en pointe (on the tips of their toes), Blanc’s movement often queered traditional gender norms prescribed by the classical ballet idiom. For instance, women sometimes partnered women when executing steps that typically utilize a (male) partner—long arabesque balances (lifting the working leg to the back while standing on a straight supporting leg) and développés (unfolding extensions of the working leg), both executed en pointe. Elsewhere, men partnered men, thus enhancing the queer aesthetic. The costumes by Katrin Schnabl (also the set designer) were billowy and fluid. Their muted and earthy hues (e.g., burnt orange, moss green, ashy blue, dusty lavender) suggested an androgynous quality.Blanc is particularly adept at creating a dynamic interplay between synchronicity and diversity. In Gateway, dancing couples (here female-male partnerships) moved within and against each other. All the while, Wang interlaced them, weaving in and out of the spotlight. Another splendid moment produced coruscating choreographic canons (i.e., when dancers perform the same movements, but in succession rather than in unison). At the conclusion of this partnered sequence, men lifted women overhead and rotated them in their lofty positions. Juxtaposing earth-bound revolutions and vertical lifts recalled the classic image of the “whirling dervishes,” as well as the Sufi ritual dances known in Arabic as zikr (also transliterated as dhikr). Paradoxically, Sufis believed that dancing brought about self-annihilation and liberation.6Indeed, the generative tensions in Gateway animate the relationship between humanity and divinity. Many premodern religions, including Sufism, conferred a cosmic significance on dance. In this sense, the human dancer mimics the movement of the spheres—planetary motions, the circling sun, and spinning stars. Dance, therefore, is an exercise of harmony. In Gateway, the individual dancer, like the individual mystic, strives toward union with another entity. Interestingly, Blanc transposes this premodern tendency onto the lexicon of contemporary ballet, which is indebted to postmodernist principles. What Blanc gives us is an ideal vision of corporate selfhood; even if we are alone, we are implicated in the world together through primordial creation and the divinely inspired universe.In its closing section, Clyne’s music, which thus far predominantly featured string instruments, accelerated. The score also introduced a percussion section and followed with brass instruments. Amid these sonic shifts, a pas de trois comprising two men and one woman demonstrated a push-pull dynamic; the woman arched back toward one partner and then was pulled away by her other partner. The woman’s contradictory motions seemed to dramatize the epic struggle between the flesh and the spirit. In doing so, Blanc’s movement paralleled dance studies scholar Anthony Shay’s neologism choreophobia: fear of dance. Shay applied this term to negative or ambivalent attitudes toward dancing bodies in Islam.7 (A similar anti-dance stance, in which dance conjures illicit sexuality, also appears in Christianity.) Blanc incorporates this tension, while simultaneously mitigating a choreophobic atmosphere with his ode to Sufism.8 Thus, Gateway taps into the more ritualized and esoteric valence of dance in ways analogous to Islamic mysticism. Consider a stanza from one of Rumi’s most celebrated poems:Dance, until you shatter yourself,Dance, when you’re broken open.Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.Dance in the middle of the fighting.Dance in your blood.Dance, when you’re perfectly free.9Rumi’s verses indicate how sacred dance ushers in asceticism and transcendence. Blanc adopts a similar philosophy. Ballet requires tremendous discipline and sacrifice, yet, as Blanc wrote in the program notes, also yields “liberation,” a “sense of soothing,” and “solace.”10This paradoxical texture informed the ensuing pas de cinq (dance of five people) that meshed formalized and free-form movement. Here five women linked hands in intricate ways. (Perhaps Blanc intentionally inserted a cameo of the “Russian Dance” section from George Balanchine’s 1935 masterpiece Serenade?) At times, this cluster—with its ceremonial walks and linear formations —resembled ancient sculptural friezes. When the music became livelier and more percussive, another group took the stage, alternating between synchronicity and improvisation. Adding to this complexity, Blanc peppered his choreography with “courtly” elements (e.g., regal gestures and stately walks) that resembled a Renaissance or Baroque aesthetic. The slippage between Islamic and European stylizations is not necessarily contradictory. As musicologist Michele Temple has shown, premodern European dances and dance music appropriated numerous Islamic forms.11 Moreover, the intense spirituality of Gateway shares an affinity with another Sufi motif: samā. Often translated as “audition” or “listening,” this Arabic term stressed the divine stimulus that undergirded sacred motions.12 The audition-like aspect of Gateway—which begins with control, builds in confidence, and culminates in consummation—adumbrates the ordeal of the spirit, and leaves the audience feeling fulfilled and uplifted.The second piece of the program, Violin Concerto, a work for fourteen dancers by Choreographer in Residence and former Principal Dancer with SFB Yuri Possokhov, is a tribute to the composer Igor Stravinsky and his 1931 Violin Concerto in D. This same musical composition inspired George Balanchine’s 1972 work entitled Stravinsky Violin Concerto; at times Possokhov’s version echoes Balanchine’s aesthetic. Under the baton of Principal Guest Conductor Ming Luke, the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra accentuated the aural enigmas and clever playfulness of Stravinsky’s score.Although Possokhov’s piece does not portray an explicit religious theme, it wrestles with the concept of iconicity. In this way, Possokhov’s choreography frames Stravinsky and his legacy within a hagiographic framework. Here Possokhov’s movement vocabulary is frisky but not frivolous—the women enacted twerking manipulations of the hip while the men executed traveling steps. With the exception of the “The Muse,” danced with alacrity by SFB Soloist Sasha Mukhamedov, who wore a knee-length, bubblegum-pink ensemble, the other women wore crisp, chic black-and-white tutus.13 The stage décor/props included three metallic ballet barres placed upstage, and, most strikingly, a large-scale backdrop onto which musical notation and black-and-white archival photographs of Stravinsky were projected. Stravinsky’s visual presence haunted the ballet with a quasi-holiness.The juxtaposition between the live dancers and the frozen portrait imbues Violin Concerto with a contemplative intrigue. Given the deep reverence for Stravinsky in ballet history, his projected photos operated like icons, effectively sanctifying him postmortem. The devotional atmosphere that Possokhov conjured resonates with the scholarship of art historian Bissera Pentcheva. In her analysis of Byzantine icons, she argues that the essence of the icon was not about picturing a holy figure. Rather, premodern Christians espoused an “essentialist model,” in which the icon, under specific sentient conditions (e.g., incense, candlelight, sunlight), became animated by the Holy Spirit. (Hence the “essence,” or life, of the icon.14) In Violin Concerto, the dancers’ quicksilver footwork and capacious leaps resurrected the spirit of Stravinsky. This phenomenologically charged and performance-enhanced variety of iconicity mirrors how Possokhov himself experiences the Stravinsky score: “The music . . . sounds contemporary—more contemporary than some music happening right now. To me, Stravinsky is talking to the audience.”15 In Violin Concerto, dancing bodies beckoned the iconic composer to quicken with life and immediacy.Further along in Violin Concerto, Possokhov contrasts traditional danse d’école (academic ballet technique) with a more athletic aesthetic. For example, upstage a group of women executed formal, academic exercises at the barre, whereas downstage a group of men adopted an asymmetrical and neoclassical style while zigzagging across the space with buoyant jumps. Perhaps Possokhov intended to depict the progression and modernization of the balletic idiom, while also honoring its classical foundation. As this section ensued, the choreographer incorporated industrial-style movements. At one moment, the Muse/Mukhamedov unfurled her leg in a luscious développé à la seconde (an extension of the working leg to the side) and, for support, grabbed onto a black curtain near the downstage left wing. Elsewhere, Possokhov reimagined the pas de deux (partnered dance). While he did not deliberately queer the partnerings, some female dancers enacted supported movements that do not typically require support (e.g., échappé relevé, an escaping, sideways motion of both feet; and relevé coupé, a springing of the supportive foot to full pointe, while lifting the working foot and resting it over the supporting ankle). If we dissect this engineered dynamic, it seems that Possokhov employed heteronormative partnerings to showcase the very artificiality of them. During a subsequent memorable moment, the dancers stomped their feet and clapped their hands intermittently, thus echoing Balanchine’s famous dictum: “See the music, hear the dance.” Despite Possokhov’s obvious debt to Balanchine, his choreographic vocabulary is innovative in its own right. In Violin Concerto, Possokhov artfully devises synesthesia, or when specific sensory stimuli give way to other sensory experiences—hence hearing the dance. He also disrupts classicism and symmetry with dynamism and risk, including preordained falls. These aspects function collaboratively to construct and intensify the ambient iconicity and sensorial afterlives of Stravinsky.The Next@90 program concluded with MADCAP, an eerie, clown-themed ballet choreographed by Danielle Rowe, formerly a Principal Dancer with the Australian Ballet and currently the Artistic Director of Oregon Ballet Theatre. The literal meaning of “madcap” denotes foolishness and recklessness. The word originated from the Shakespearean era, during which mentally ill individuals supposedly wore distinctive head coverings. Rowe’s ballet, however, revalorizes madness. With uncanny music by Swedish Indie rocker Pär Hagström, carnivalesque costumes by Emma Kingsbury, and macabre lighting by Jim French, MADCAP, according to SFB’s website, “transports us seamlessly into Rowe’s sinister world of the clown after the circus lights go dark.”16 An unabashed fan of standup comedy, Rowe explained that the loose narrative underpinning of her ballet evolved organically in rehearsal, not unlike improvised comedy. In her words, MADCAP is “a narrative that has been designed and written together. . . . The story is being written as it’s being made.” Rowe also noted that part of this collaboration involved dancers incorporating their voices into the musical score.17 Underneath its sinister stylization, this ballet unleashes wondrous overtones of illusion and (re)enchantment.MADCAP began with a solitary clown downstage, poignantly danced by SFB Soloist Myles Thatcher. Under the single spotlight, the clown’s curly yellow wig, red nose, garish makeup, and black-and-white pinstripe balloon pants came into view. After executing some floorwork, the lights faded. Then, a goth-girl-esque “Oracle,” entrancingly portrayed by SFB Principal Jennifer Stahl, emerged from downstage left in a sheer black and dark blue dress. Defying classical ballet conventions (i.e., silent pantomime), the Oracle spoke into the microphone. Emanating mystery and provoking bewitchment, she conveyed that what we are about to witness is real, yet it only resides in our minds. After the Oracle’s invitation to enter this strange realm, a horizontal lineup of clowns/dancers created an optical illusion by tapping their feet in oversized red shoes (the audience could not see the rest of their bodies). The ballet continued to develop its ludic and comic elements with feats of juggling. Similarly, Hagström’s music resembled a circus atmosphere by highlighting accordions, chimes, and brass. In a mesmerizing pas de deux, effortlessly executed by Benjamin Davidoff and Nathanial Remez, two dancers relayed and suspended a red balloon. Other moments of MADCAP were tinged with pathos and melancholy. As the ballet progressed, the solitary clown became increasingly alienated, intervisually echoing the tragic figure of Petroushka, the titular character of Mikhail Fokine’s / Igor Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet of the same name, immortalized by Ballets Russes legend Vaslav Nijinsky.18In other sections of MADCAP, Rowe’s choreography—namely, the “Oom Pa-Pa” section—was deliberately hokey. 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