The moment was surreal, by all accounts. One minute, the dancers of Smuin Ballet were in high spirits, finishing a quick allegro combination in company class with artistic director Michael Smuin—he was even poking fun at his own choreographic invention. And then, in a flash, he was on the ground and they were struggling in vain to save him.
Throughout the afternoon, as word rippled through the dance community, there was shock at the death of Smuin, who was 68, to an apparent heart attack. In many ways it still seems laughably strange to imagine the Bay Area’s dance landscape without his charismatic, larger-than-life presence. A vital, lively force, Smuin made a buoyant and outspoken ambassador for dance as dancer, director and choreographer, and he had an undeniable impact on how ballet was and is perceived, both locally and internationally.
“It’s a profound loss for all of us, and a personal loss for me that’s indescribable,” said Celia Fushille Burke, who has been Smuin Ballet’s associate director, and now steps into the gap left by his passing. “The outpouring of love has been amazing. I’ve had calls and emails from all over the world. He was very well-loved.”
By chance-- or as some might say, with Smuin’s impeccable sense of timing and showmanship-- the Bay Area’s dance community was already scheduled to gather Monday night for the 2007 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. Onstage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Amy Seiwert, along with five other Smuin Ballet dancers appeared to announce his passing and ask for a moment of silence to remember him.
But it was later at the Izzie Awards, during John Kloss’ freewheeling tap performance, that I had a moment of bittersweet memory. Smuin, more than any other major choreographer of the Bay Area’s scene, had a way of capturing the infectious joyousness of dance. And surely somewhere he had to be smiling, because more than any other ballet choreographer he understood the appeal of a good-looking guy dancing and humming along to his own inner music.
Like so many of his generation the Montana-born Smuin fell in love with ballet through the Ballets Russes. Spotted by San Francisco Ballet director Lew Christensen at the age of 15, he joined the company in 1953. It was at SFB that he would meet and marry fellow dancer Paula Tracy, with whom he had a son, Shane. And in 1973, he returned to co-direct the company with Christensen, overseeing the PBS broadcasts of his “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Tempest,” both of which won Emmy awards.
A gifted character dancer and ebullient raconteur, Michael Smuin brought his zest for telling a story as well as a mischievous sense of humor to his choreography. From his 1968 “Pulcinella Variations” to last year’s zesty “Obrigado, Brazil” Smuin’s ballets were wonderful fun. If they didn’t leave a mark with the intellectual crowd, nevertheless, you couldn’t deny that his were well-made, and entertaining dances. His fault, if it could be called that, was that he was always so eager to give that sometimes he went over the top.
Serious ballets like “Medea” highlighted the dancers’ dramatic abilities, but even small vignettes such as “The Last Song” in his Elton John-inspired “Come Dance Me a Song” offered a special poignancy. Smuin’s romantic adagios, particularly his pas de deux such as “Romanze” or “Bouquet,” remain achingly beautiful. Balletomanes who came of age in the 70s have searing memories of American Ballet Theatre stars Cynthia Gregory and Ivan Nagy in “Eternal Idol,” or Diana Weber being swept off her feet by Jim Sohm in “Romeo and Juliet.”
“He was the turning point for San Francisco Ballet,” says former SFB principal dancer Evelyn Cisneros, who joined the ballet under his direction in 1976 and retired in 1999.
Reached by phone in Southern California, Cisneros recalled Smuin as “a gifted and artistic presence. He was the beginning of a new era for the company and he helped bring it back to international status through his commitment and determination and energy.”
And yet, he never forgot the small things, or forgot what his dancers brought to his work. As a young apprentice, one of Cisneros’ earliest memories of Smuin was from the morning after the premiere of “Songs of Mahler.”
“He came into the studio before class and he went to each of the women who had been in the ballet and gave each one a flower,” she recalls, “and it so touched me to watch that.”
Unlike the stereotypical ballet director, Smuin loved for his dancers to have a life outside of the studio-- to have families and their own projects.
“One thing that set Michael apart from all the others was the love that he has for the individual,” Cisneros said emphatically, “He never saw a dancer as someone to mold – he wanted you to be the person you were. I think that’s why dancers loved working with him, you felt artistically enriched because he asked you to bring who you were to the dancing.”
After his infamous parting of ways with San Francisco Ballet in 1985, the endlessly energetic Smuin picked his dancing shoes up and moved onto a wide variety of projects, including his 1988 Tony Award-winning version of “Anything Goes” on Broadway.
“If there’s one thing he taught me,” Cisneros says, paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, “It’s this: It’s not what is before us, or behind us, but what is within us that matters.”
In 1994, he founded his own fledgling company --Smuin Ballets/SF, later Smuin Ballet – and created new work at a prolific pace, usually two or three ballets a year.
With a brazenly theatrical flair and canny professional instincts, he coaxed in audience members who had never before even considered going to a show that had the word “ballet” attached to it. Ever the entertainer, Smuin put his dancers into new unexpected places—dancing the national anthem at a Giants game in PacBell Park, slithering through the remixed cantina scene in “Star Wars,” at the Macy’s Passport benefit.
There were no stick-figure ballerinas for his company, where the women are sexy and the men bold. The stories he wove through his dances were about real people, and starred real people. It was a winning formula that appealed to audiences who made the company arguably the most consistently popular small dance troupe in the Bay Area.
As with any loss of this kind, the road ahead for Smuin Ballet is difficult to imagine without its charismatic founder and auteur. Nevertheless, Smuin was nothing if not the consummate theater professional, and the organization he built will have no trouble standing on its own legs with Fushille-Burke and newly-arrived Managing Director Dwight Hutton, at the helm.
On Tuesday morning, at the insistence of the dancers, there was company class-- as there is every day --at 9:30 a.m. Fushille-Burke, who was out of town on Monday, flew back that night to be with the company. “We will go on,” she said early Tuesday. “That’s what Michael would want and that’s what he did want.”
Smuin’s final work-- set to the Scherzo of Franz Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony-- was mainly completed, and the company will premiere it during their May seasons at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and at the Lesher Center among other venues. Smuin Ballet still plans to tour to the Joyce Theater in New York in August.
And yet, even as they move forward, one can’t help but feel the hole left behind by the buoyant, forthright presence of the man who so loved dance, but even more, so loved to bring dance to anyone and everyone.
This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.
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