Program 4 Notes

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World Premiere: June 13, 1911—Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Théâtre du Chatelet; Paris, France

San Francisco Ballet Premiere: March 2, 2010 War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California

Performed with the permission of The Fokine Estate-Archive.

From The Hellman Family in honor of Patricia C. Hellman, also known as “Patrichka,” a former professional ballet dancer and soloist with London’s Festival Ballet.

World Premiere: January 27, 2009—San Francisco Ballet War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California

The 2009 world premiere of Diving into the Lilacs was made possible by Lead Sponsors The Bernard Osher Foundation and Yurie and Carl Pascarella and Major Sponsors Athena and Timothy Blackburn, with additional support from the Byron Meyer Choreographers Fund.

World Premiere: May 29, 1987—Paris Opéra Ballet Palais Garnier; Paris, France

San Francisco Ballet Premiere: March 14, 1989 War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California

Petrouchka

In Michel Fokine’s treasure trove of ballets, Petrouchka stands apart. A masterwork of dance-theater, it rises beyond its magical premise to tell a poignant, human story about the desire to be free. In his then-innovative fashion, Fokine blurred the line between drama and ballet, making Petrouchka in essence a play without words.

Fokine, born Mikhail Mikhailovich Fokine in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1880, was a radical in his day, developing a choreographic style that changed the course of ballet history. In his famous Five Principles, submitted to the Imperial Theatre (the Maryinsky) in 1904 and published in the London Times in 1914, Fokine challenged ballet conventions. He argued for originality, proposing that a ballet’s style should be suited to its subject; all movement and mime should serve the dramatic action; expressiveness should come from the entire body (not merely pantomime); ensemble dancers should be individuals and part of the story (rather than decoration); and dance, music, and design should serve the story in equal measures. These ideas, rejected by the Maryinsky, found a home with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, established in Paris in 1909. Within that vortex of creativity and collaboration, Fokine created his most important ballets—Les Sylphides, Firebird, Le Spectre de la Rose, and Petrouchka. Ballet was never the same again, at least outside of Russia.

The idea of doing Petrouchka came to Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson via the suggestion of former San Francisco Ballet board chair Chris Hellman, who had danced it in England. The idea appealed to him for two reasons. Acknowledging the importance of the Ballets Russes (2009 marked its centenary anniversary) was one; the other was what Petrouchka would bring to SF Ballet’s dancers and audiences. In this kind of ballet, Tomasson says, “you have to be in a crowd scene and make it come alive, and without doing [classical steps].” With such an emphasis on storytelling, sometimes characters were defined more by pedestrian movement and acting than by actual dancing. “I thought it would be very good for the Company. We’re so much more physically oriented, so athletic,” says Tomasson. And he liked the idea of showing audiences how ballet has evolved since Fokine’s day. Despite those changes, “Petrouchka has held up over the years and is considered one of the major pieces of dance art,” he says.

Petrouchka premiered in 1911 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, with Vaslav Nijinsky in the title role, Tamara Karsavina as the Ballerina, Alexandre Orlov as the Moor, and Enrico Cecchetti as the Charlatan. With choreography by Fokine, music by Igor Stravinsky, and designs by Alexandre Benois, the ballet stands as the pinnacle of the combined genius of these three artists. “It’s a masterpiece on so many levels—musically, and the story is fantastically poignant, and the choreography tells [the story] in a way that transcends the art form of ballet,” says Isabelle Fokine, the choreographer’s granddaughter, who staged Petrouchka for SF Ballet. “It’s a great piece of theater, without being limited by what any one art form can be.” She describes its scope of characterization as encompassing “every level, from the pedestrians involved in their own lives to a sort of heightened reality—a distorted reality, if you will—of the internal life as personified by these magical dolls.” And the choreography is as varied as it could be within one short ballet, she adds, from the Ballerina’s classical footwork to Russian folk dancing to acrobatics to the staggering of drunkards. “But not merely for its own sake,” she says, “to tell the story.”

Isabelle Fokine, whose dance career ended prematurely due to injuries, traveled the world with her father, Vitale Fokine, learning her grandfather’s ballets and immersing herself in his papers, notations, and scores. Without intending to, she became an expert on his ballets; she now stages eight to ten of them a year. “What [that period] gave me was four years of intense work with the person who knew these works better than anyone in the world,” she says. Working with her is as close as a dancer can get to Fokine the choreographer.

As the ballet begins, Fokine fills the streets of 1830’s St. Petersburg with noblemen, drunkards, nursemaids, street performers, and commoners—all revelers in a pre-Lenten festival. They laugh as the Charlatan’s magic puppets come to life and dance for their amusement. Petrouchka cries out to them for help—unlike the Ballerina and the Moor, he has a human soul, placed in the puppet body by the murderous Charlatan—but his suffering goes unnoticed. The crowd’s raucous celebration makes his pitiful existence all the more poignant.

The character of Petrouchka (“little Peter”), based on the Russian version of commedia dell’arte’s Pierrot and the British puppet Punch, is a classic tragic clown. According to Principal Dancer Pascal Molat, the role combines subtlety and musicality in a challenging mix. “Like Isabelle is telling us all the time, we are the music,” he says. “There is subtlety about the face or the intonation, and with the music it creates an ambiance of sadness, of resignation, of craziness, almost. For Petrouchka, it’s a lot of mixed feelings—anger, sadness, love. So it’s very strenuous.”

The choreography reveals much about each character, but in rehearsals Fokine goes deeper. Besides teasing out precise positions of the hands, arms, and head, she asks for shades of meaning in the dancers’ expressions and movements. The Moor reveals his childishness in his goofy grin and proves he’s a bully with his turned-out stomping; the Ballerina flits and flirts and shields her eyes in fear. And Petrouchka, through every gesture, every desperate lunge and plea for help, shows us his agony.

Moving like a puppet that’s made of wood and manipulated by strings requires a feeling of “being out of control, off your body, but doing a motion,” says Molat. “That’s what’s tricky, but it’s also the most interesting.” He says he tries to feel like his movements come from outside of his body, “where you don’t have control of it. You have to be very supple, but not too floppy because you’re a piece of wood, too. You have to really think that somebody is doing [the movement] to you, with the strings.”

The demands of dancing Petrouchka are not technical; mournful eyes and an expressive mouth are as important as caved-in shoulders and turned-in feet and knees in conveying the puppet’s thoughts and feelings. “It’s about expression and how to find the subtlety,” Molat says. “We have to work on finding the little different [positions of the] head to the side, the way to put your mouth, using your shoulders, to create a picture.” Even when he rebels against the Charlatan, his arms hammering through the air as if he had fists, Petrouchka knows he is powerless. “This ‘in’ position with the feet and the knees shows that he cannot free himself,” says Molat.

What the character of Petrouchka embodies, to Isabelle Fokine, are themes of “human cruelty, of repression, of desperation, and what we’re all longing for—to be free.” Referring to the long pause before the ballet’s final note of music, she says, “In a way, that’s saying to the audience, ‘Fix on that image.’ ” The dramatic ending makes it easy to leave the theater feeling exactly how Fokine’s granddaughter intends: “touched by Petrouchka’s tragedy.”

Scene 1
The Butter Week Fair, 1830’s St. Petersburg

It is night with snow covering Admiralty Square where a bustling carnival takes place. St. Issac’s Cathedral is in the background. The traditional dyed “grandfather” of the fair keeps up a stream of coarse jokes; dancing girls display their skills to the crowd; gingerbread sellers and others hawk wares. An old Showman dressed as a magician announces that he is about to exhibit some animated dolls; the illusion has in truth something miraculous about it. For these dolls—Petrouchka (a simple-minded Punch figure), a Moor, and a Ballerina—dance with such verve as to suggest they are living creatures.

Scene 2
Petrouchka’s Compartment in the Booth

In the privacy of his compartment, Petrouchka dances, dreams, and suffers; he is in love with the Ballerina and jealous of the Moor. He curses his fate and the old wizard who possesses him. The Showman taunts Petrouchka by pushing the Ballerina into his cell. Petrouchka is delighted, but the Ballerina, realizing that she is in Petrouchka’s compartment rather than the Moor’s, soon leaves.

Scene 3
The Moor’s Compartment

More favored than Petrouchka is the Moor, a robust fellow who thinks of nothing but his material needs. The Ballerina comes to visit him and exerts herself to charm him. She finally succeeds, but in the middle of their duet, Petrouchka forces his way in. He overwhelms the lovers with reproaches but is kicked out by his rival.

Scene 4
The Fair

The fair is at its height. Dance succeeds dance: nursemaids, coachmen, then gypsy girls. A mad round is danced by some men disguised as animals – “a devil’s diversion.” Suddenly the songs and dances are interrupted by shrieks from the magician’s booth. Petrouchka emerges, pursued by the Moor, whom the Ballerina tries without success to restrain. The Moor overtakes his rival and strikes him with his sword. Petrouchka falls to the ground, his skull shattered.

The onlookers refuse to believe that they are merely dolls. The police are called and arrest the Showman. But he calmly picks up Petrouchka’s corpse which, to the vast astonishment of the crowd, is nothing but a doll stuffed with sawdust.

The people disperse. Left alone, the old Showman, in horror, sees the spirit of Petrouchka rising from the roof of the booth.

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Diving into the Lilacs

For choreographer Yuri Possokhov, the scent of lilacs transports him back to his years as a ballet student in Moscow, where he measured time by the phases of those fragrant flowers. Diving into the Lilacs, which premiered in 2009, is about “feelings of the time, of the smelling, of moods,” he says. “It’s not about memories; it’s about emotions when I was in the school. So many things were happening, and sometimes there’s happiness or sadness but on such a huge emotional level that you don’t know why.” Those powerful emotions influenced the choreographic choices he made in Lilacs decades later.

Possokhov, San Francisco Ballet’s choreographer in residence since 2006, often works from images that he doesn’t necessarily want to make obvious to his audiences, and that’s the case with Diving into the Lilacs. The emotions tied to that floral fragrance from long ago led Possokhov to the ballet’s title and set his imagination in motion. And his choice of music, Boris Tchaikovsky’s Sinfonietta for String Orchestra, carries the same emotional weight as his memories. “It matched my mind, the feelings,” he says. “It is so beautiful, so emotional.”

The ballet, with seven couples and three contrasting duets for the principals, starts in silence, an idea that Possokhov drew from his memories of a dark, silent Moscow. “Moscow is a very loud city, but sometimes there is a darkness where nothing is happening, not one sound. In this huge city, darkness and nothing—how is it possible?” From there, the ballet’s four movements, a sonatina, waltz, adagio, and rondo, propel us through variable moods. “For me, it’s kind of seasons of the lilac,” says the choreographer. The first movement is “wintertime—it’s gloomy, no light, black and white; everything is strange. The second movement is spring—fluid, calm. After that, late spring, I would say, when we always fell in love.” The fast-paced fourth movement, he says, is when the flowers were in full bloom.

The feelings that Possokhov has linked to the life cycle of the lilac are deeply personal. He doesn’t want to explain the meaning behind his choreography, even to his dancers; he wants them to find their own reasons for doing the steps. That is one of his struggles as a choreographer: finding the right shapes, steps, and structures to say what he feels—and the more meaningful a particular part of the ballet is, the more difficult it can be. “I like the first movement so much, but it [was] the hardest movement for me to do,” he said during the ballet’s creation.

Audiences might not recognize the moment in the third movement when the man “dives into the lilacs,” but for the choreographer it’s a direct reference to the ballet’s title. We might see shades of lilac blossoms in the women’s dresses, but who would know that to Possokhov an extended arm motif, with wrist bent sharply, echoes the graphic lines of a lilac bush’s leafless branches? The point is that viewers don’t need to know; the shape’s visual impact, magnified by the expressiveness of the dancer, is enough to provoke a response.

Possokhov expects his audiences, like his dancers, to take from the ballet what is meaningful to them. It’s like listening to music; each of us responds to the sounds through a filter of emotions, experiences, and references. Possokhov makes that point when he talks about the music for the third movement. There’s “some kind of magic thing, completely personal,” that binds listener and music. “In this particular part, when I’m listening to it I think it’s only for me,” he says. “It’s a huge personal connection.” In the same way, the emotional subtext of Diving into the Lilacs, like so many of Possokhov’s ballets, gives it a resonance that endures beyond the span of a performance.

Program notes by Cheryl Ossola

in the middle, somewhat elevated

William Forsythe’s in the middle, somewhat elevated is, in the choreographer’s words, “a theme and variations in the strictest sense.” Created in 1987 for the Paris Opéra Ballet, with pulsing, percussive music by Forsythe’s frequent collaborator, Thom Willems, in the middle takes place on a barren stage with exposed wings—the choreographer’s vision for his dance. The sole element of décor is a small cluster of cherries, hung “in the middle, somewhat elevated.” Bathed in sometimes obscuring lighting designed by Forsythe, the ballet’s nine dancers take an aggressive approach to classicism with an off-kilter edge.

San Francisco Ballet’s dancers first performed in the middle, the second Forsythe ballet to enter the Company’s repertory, in 1989. (The first was New Sleep, which made its world premiere at SF Ballet in 1987.) The central pas de deux from in the middle is often excerpted, but it’s most effective when seen as the culmination of 25 minutes of dancer one-upmanship.

If there’s one constant in this ballet, it’s that nothing remains constant. The dancers’ perspective shifts from downstage to upstage; groupings have barely formed before they dissolve; exits are both complete and partial, with dancers at times remaining onstage to watch the others; classical steps emerge and then morph into more asymmetrical forms.

Forsythe, artistic director of The Forsythe Company, choreographed in the middle during the same period of limit-pushing experimentation when he made Artifacts (a version of which, Artifact Suite, San Francisco Ballet first danced in 2006). After creating in the middle on a classical ballet company, Forsythe brought it into his own contemporary company (then Ballett Frankfurt) and changed it. Further changes came when it became the core of his Impressing the Czar, in 1988.

According to Laura Graham, a ballet master at Dresden Semperoper Ballett and a former Forsythe dancer who now sets his ballets, “in the middle was from a very classical sense; it was created on the Paris Opéra and he wanted to tilt them a little, I’m sure. That’s how Bill works. You take the person, or the concept, or the idea and you look at it in a different point of view.” It’s an attempt to redefine structure, at least partially inspired by Balanchine and his aesthetic, Graham points out. “At that time, maybe he was starting to investigate the familiar territory of ballet, and then trying different things here and there—the unevenness, the groups. There are many, many things, on so many layers. It’s reevaluating and redefining how we see ballet.”

Though there are visual similarities between Artifact Suite and in the middle, Graham insists that when it comes to dancing the two ballets, they are completely different physical experiences. “In the middle is more classical and aesthetic and strict. In Artifact the men are partnering more, and with in the middle they’re dancing with. They are partnering, of course, but they can’t just stand there—if the girl goes for it, she’ll pull him over.” She laughs and adds, “Here’s a great quote: When I set it in Dresden a couple of years ago, Bill said, ‘She wants that line [of the body], gentlemen, but you want her to have it more.’ ”

Experiencing in the middle is like watching athletes compete: Aggressiveness and a sense of sexual power are built into the escalating choreography. “It’s how people are. It has nothing to do with anything except one’s personal best, and a little anger helps you keep going, doesn’t it?” says Graham. “It’s a human thing; there’s no acting involved. You want to do your best and not disappoint yourself. It’s keeping it together and pushing your boundaries.”

With its extreme physicality, demanding partnering, and edgy classicism, in the middle is as hard to dance as it appears. Says Graham, “It’s full energy most of the time. It doesn’t rest.”

Program notes by Cheryl Ossola