★★★★✰ I’m a Nutcracker fan. And I’m a fan of San Francisco Ballet’s current production, choreographed in 2004 by Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson...
Tag - Pascal Molat
★★★★✰ It’s a treat to be in the theater when a dancer achieves a triumphant performance...
★★★✰✰ By way of a défilé, the evening opened with the “Waltz of the Hours” from Balanchine and Danilova’s Coppélia ...Soloist Jennifer Stahl led two dozen girls from the SFB School, adorable in cotton-candy tutus.
Choreographed by artistic director Helgi Tomasson in 1994, the ballet is popular with audiences here and makes a satisfying coda to his thirtieth-anniversary season...
Swimmer is one man's journey from being the stereotypical breadwinner... to his own self-realisation in a kind of isolated freedom.
Principal dancers Mathilde Froustey and Carlos Quenedit were exactly what the audience wanted on opening night.
...Kochetkova and Luiz told the tale beautifully...
America’s oldest ballet company, San Francisco Ballet, opened its eighty-second season with a triple bill that encapsulates the uniquely varied repertory developed by artistic director Helgi Tomasson...
The SF Ballet premiere of choreographer-in-residence Yuri Possokhov's pas de deux from Bells is my all-round favorite of the evening. Sublime dancing from Maria Kochetkova and Davit Karapetyan...
San Francisco Ballet – From Foreign Lands, Beaux, Classical Symphony and Symphonic Dances – New York
In its second mixed bill here in New York, San Francisco Ballet once again impressed with its vitality and the depth of its bench, as well as with its pleasantly unified look.
From Foreign Lands: "This amusing, yet subtle send-up of classical ballet is rewarding in its expertly-shaped choreography, and made all the more appealing by the slight wackiness of the costumes and visual jokes."
Possokhov’s Rite of Spring is a mixture of mostly good choices with a few that seem rather odd to me.
Perhaps the best pas de deux of the evening, judging by the audience reaction, is one from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain.
San Francisco’s second programme was better balanced than the first, with contrasting works created for the company within the past two years.
Kochetkova and Domitro, together and separately, dance extraordinarily well. They don’t have the elusive chemistry that she has with Boada, but they still are very much in tune with each other, both musically and artistically, and make a very satisfying partnership.
Calling this ballet a guide (Guide To Strange Places) is not really precise because it’s more like a portal that lets you in and then leaves you on your own to figure out where you are. Whether you have absolutely no sense of direction or can find your way anywhere blindfolded could determine how you explore this terrain