Mark Morris is notoriously picky about the companies he allows to perform his work, almost as picky as the late Jerome Robbins. So it says a lot about the class and personality of San Francisco Ballet that both choreographers feature strongly in its repertory. It says less for the travelling power of ballets, however, that Robbins's Fanfare, the brash intro to San Francisco's London season, looks to British eyes more like a cracked memento than an exuberant barnstormer.
This dance version of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was made in 1953 and it shows its age. The costumes look as if they have been fished out of an old fancy-dress box. So does the narrator, who struggles under the weight of his heftily sonorous bonhomie. Fanfare doesn't serve as a happy introduction to the company's ranks.
Morris's The Garden, however, shows him to be on an inventive roll, drawing lush and witty nuances from the music and the basic ballet vocabulary. At first it looks like nothing - simple classical steps set to Richard Strauss's orchestration of keyboard music by Couperin; yet it builds into a complete, idyllic world. Women dance in tightly perfect groupings arranged like formal flower beds; men are as gently dreamy as a flock of sylphides. This is dance at its most eloquent, a pastoral poem written in bodies and space.
It put us in the wrong mood for Yuri Possokhov's Magrittomania, a meaningful homage to the Belgian surrealist that flags up every big emotion and every kooky image with laboured intensity. The dancers perform it well but it doesn't build into anything beyond slick and bitty stage effects. The concluding number is Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements, set to Stravinsky's score. Terrific music, implacable choreography and feisty dancing from the principals, especially Lorena Feijoo and Kristin Long.
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