The landscape is spare, but far from serene in “Eden/Eden,” Wayne McGregor’s ambitious and compelling ballet, which San Francisco Ballet gave its American premiere on Program 4 of their repertory season on Tuesday night. This is risky work for SFB, but ultimately both rewarding and haunting.
Created originally for the Stuttgart Ballet, “Eden/Eden” is ostensibly about cloning, but, never simplistic, it’s also a meditation on the seductive intersection of technology and the human machine.
“The process is as follows,” intones one of the five unseen vocalists in a scientific drone. Over the pulsing Steve Reich score from his opera “Three Tales”—conducted here by Gary Sheldon—their measured monologue sets us initially in the midst of the cloning debate.
Muriel Maffre, in flesh-colored skivvies and skullcap, ascends into a stark spotlight, all androgynous, hairless muscle, while projections assembled by Ravi Deepres unfold like a universe behind her. Maffre has never had a problem with finding the beauty in an ugly line, and in “Eden/Eden” she makes the most of a torqued spine and limbs yanked in every direction. Joined in a weirdly agonistic duet by Gonzalo Garcia, they create a vision of biology gone haywire.
Like Autons, the creepy mannequins of sci-fi’s “Dr. Who,” the dancers seem to multiply, eventually filling the stage with flails, as if the impulses for each movement were directed from the wrong nerve endings. Bathed in Charles Balfour’s sickly green-gray light, the figures in this fearsome gymnasium are nearly impossible to tell apart. And the whole exercise becomes even more disturbing when they shed their skullcaps and don Ursula Bombshell’s tunics to become individuals. There’s a moment of mental resistance--you don’t want to believe that these “Bladerunner” replicants could ever become human.
McGregor--whose metier in his own company, Random Dance, is modern dance-- has his own lexicon of movement that is far from ballet-based, although curiously he utilizes the women’s pointe work effectively, perhaps because his understanding of the technique stems from expediency rather than tradition. Nevertheless, the dancers eat up this style and spit it out like nails, offering performances of surprising depth and aggression. If you find yourself seduced by the physical beauty and apparent perfection of the alien uber-humans before you--including Katita Waldo, Pascal Molat, Rory Hohenstein, Jaime Garcia Castilla, Moises Martin, and notably corps members Dana Genshaft and Hayley Farr-- you might notice that there are no apples on the silvery tree hovering in this Eden. That fruit has been plucked and we’ve all taken a big bite.
Only a few weeks ago, when William Forsythe brought his company to Cal Performances, I wondered idly if San Francisco Ballet would ever perform a piece like his “Three Atmospheric Studies,” a complex, heavily text-based, but thrilling work with almost no traditional ballet steps. We have our answer. SFB Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson has taken an enormous risk in presenting McGregor’s very unpretty, but very absorbing work, and we can only hope that there more of these sort of challenges lie in the future.
In a different vein, two other works premiered on the ballet’s Program 5 on Thursday night—none more anticipated than Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carousel (A Dance),” made originally for New York City Ballet. Set to excerpts from Richard Rodgers’ “Carousel” –the grand “Carousel” waltz and “If I Loved You”—this version offers a sketched, dream ballet of Julie’s ill-fated romance with smooth-talking carny Billy, danced on Thursday by Sarah van Patten and Pierre-François Vilanoba. In a lemon-colored dress with matching ribbon, Van Patten brings a lovely unsuspecting freshness to her role, although Vilanoba is perhaps a little too likeable to convince as her no-account beau.
The main weakness in this “Carousel,” though, is the choreography. Wheeldon jam-packs every count with steps and the result, while impressive, hasn’t quite nailed the feeling of giddy freedom. Many of the lifts in Van Patten and Vilanoba’s duet were lovely, but with all the swooning and the swooping happening early in their waltz, there was very little room for emotional build.
Wheeldon might do well to take a look at Jerome Robbins’ “Fancy Free,” which got more than a little lift from Molat, Anderson and Garcia as a trio of roguish sailors on shore leave. The young Robbins—who reportedly refined and pared back the more cartoonish antics of this larky 1944 vignette—offers more bang for your buck with a twitch of an eyebrow than all the swooning lifts in the world can accomplish. If the dancers (and the orchestra) could have been a little looser and jazzier to match the bounding Leonard Bernstein score, it was nonetheless a delightful excursion that brought an instant smile to the lips from the first burst of energy onstage.
Filling out Program 4 were the Arcadian gambols of Paul Taylor’s “Spring Rounds,” led on Tuesday night by Vanessa Zahorian and Garrett Anderson, and Helgi Tomasson’s “Chi-Lin” with an inscrutable Yuan Yuan Tan in the title role. Program 5 saw the return of Mark Morris’ “Pacific” and Tomasson’s “The Fifth Season,” with the music delivered under the capable baton of Martin West.
