Smuin Ballet at the Palace of Fine Arts: Chasing the high

Right in the middle of the show--it felt like almost exactly halfway-- a frisson ran up my spine and I thought, "There it is."

When I used to perform, I felt like I was always chasing the high I'd get from the perfect moment when everything hung together in just the right way. As a professional watcher of dance now, I chase the same  kind of high, but from the other side of the footlights. It seems just as elusive, transitory and difficult to quantify, and yet so thoroughly satisfying that I keep coming back for more.

Sometimes I think that the mental headspace I put myself in for the "job" of being a writer gets in my way of getting that fix. A ballet master I know says that he can't enjoy performances for their own sake anymore because he finds he can't turn off the part of his brain that is making mental notes for the dancers all the time. It's a little like that for me too. At the opening of Smuin Ballet's season at the Palace of Fine Arts last Friday, I was enjoying the show, but on a slightly detached, almost technical level. 

Smuin Ballet dancers Jonathan Dummar and Jane Rehm with the men of the company in Dear Miss Cline by Choreographer in Residence Amy Seiwert, performed as part of Smuin's XXtremes Fall Program playing October 4-12 at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. Photo credit: David DeSilva

Amy Seiwert's "Dear Miss Cline" is a warm, zippy cavalcade of vignettes to the music of Patsy Cline, that perfectly suits the company personality. It being the first night, many of the dancers looked a little serious, although Terez Dean was adorable and fresh foolin' around with Christian Squires, and Erin Yarbrough in her fitted pedal-pushers had exactly the right zany humor in her trio and duet. 

Christian Squires and Terez Dean in Dear Miss Cline. Photo: David DeSilva.

I love seeing a show with good production values, and that's one thing that Smuin Ballet has never skimped on. So, as I sit there, part of my head is taking note of the striking sets (Brian Jones) and the frothy costumes (Jo Ellen Arntz) and appreciating just how professionally everything has been put together. 

That continued right into the second piece of the night, Jiri Kylian's "Return to a Strange Land." I'd watched Arlette van Boven rehearsing it with the company and I was duly observing that certain details she had worked on were there. The company doesn't perform the ballet with the preternatural precision that I remember in Nederlands Dans Theatre, but there is instead a realness, a humanity and sensitivity to Smuin Ballet's approach that really appeals to me. It warms the sculptural quality of the choreography.

I like Terez Dean's restrained longing in the first trio, as she melts into the arms of Eduardo Permuy and Ben Needham-Wood. Later in the ballet, during Dean's duet with Permuy, there is an echo in Janaček's music of a theme in his "Sinfonietta," and Kylian likewise echoes the motif of wrapped arms that he scattered throughout his ballet of the same name. I wondered what he was trying to say with that motion, a kind of empty self-hug that feels lonely and internal, yet abandoned at the same time.

All of this, however, is happening on the conscious brain level. Look at that interesting movement, how nicely they execute that step, what clever lighting, and so on.

Until that moment. It was in the enigmatic melancholy duet for Jane Rehm and Joshua Reynolds, as he took her in a quick spiraling promenade in attitude. I can't explain why there was that frisson of something that just clicked exquisitely into place. And if I had glanced away for a second I wouldn't have seen it at all. Quite frankly, I'm not sure that that instant even struck anyone else in the audience the same way that it did me. But it was gorgeous, and for a moment, all the frontal lobe processing evaporated and the visceral took over. 

And then it was gone, but that didn't matter. Like the blue wash of light over the pas de deux, it had already colored the whole evening for me. 

Joshua Reynolds and Jane Rehm in Jirí Kylián’s Return to a Strange Land. Photo credit: Keith Sutter