Ballet is an art that transpires in flesh and blood, so let us begin with a flesh and blood moment.

It is March 2006 and Bach’s “Partita No. 2” is spinning through the War Memorial Opera House, propelling two couples though a maelstrom of partnering that looks as though it could tear them limb from limb. Then the piano sounds from the pit, and 26 dancers respond with ferocious synchronicity — arms swing with gale force, feet snap onto pointe with the precision of switchblades. The power of finely trained human bodies moving in a unity of higher purpose overwhelms all senses.

芭蕾舞是“工件套件”威廉·福赛斯e. It is a thrilling, monumental and monumentally demanding work, one that San Francisco Ballet could not have danced before the arrival of Helgi Tomasson, the quiet yet steely Icelander who, after 37 years as artistic director, will step down from the role following this season. Its premiere here was emblematic of Tomasson’s methods of reshaping the company since taking the helm in 1985, both deeply rooted in the language of classical ballet and fearlessly innovative.

Helgi Tomasson’s famed reserve begins to melt as he prepares to step away from S.F. Ballet

Past and present S.F. Ballet dancers reflect on Helgi Tomasson’s profound impact on their careers

在2000年我开始看旧金山芭蕾舞团。通过that time, the narrative of the company’s transformation was well established. Everyone knew that Tomasson had taken a “likable American regional troupe,” as former Chronicle dance critic Allan Ulrich termed it, and forged from it an internationally admired paragon of cosmopolitan classicism.

This is true, though fans of the company before Tomasson will rightfully assert that the Ballet of the 1970s and ’80s was no Podunk troupe. The company could boast of being the oldest professional troupe in America, and of giving the first U.S. productions of “Nutcracker,” “Swan Lake” and “Coppelia,” led by Utah’s famed Christensen brothers, Willam, Harold and especially Lew, who had been an important early dancer for George Balanchine.

A guide to Helgi Tomasson’s final San Francisco Ballet season

Timeline: Highlights from Helgi Tomasson’s nearly 40-year tenure at S.F. Ballet

通过the time Tomasson took his final bows at New York City Ballet and flew to San Francisco with no prior leadership experience, the company counted masterpieces by Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and Jerome Robbins in its repertory. It had fought back from the brink of bankruptcy with a Save Our Ballet campaign in 1974 and had been featured, twice, in PBS’ “Dance in America” series.

The razzmatazz works by then co-director Michael Smuin leaned more toward stage effects than classical technique. But if the company defined itself as “West Coast,” it was not only a way of reclaiming the “regional” label during a New York-centric time, but also an identity the troupe sincerely embraced. In their introduction to the 1983 book “San Francisco Ballet: The First 50 Years,” Lew Christensen and Smuin defined their intent to create “a uniquely Western body of classics.”

Tomasson changed all that.

But to say he raised the company to an international level imparts a sense of cold homogenization, of molding dancers to some abstract standard of perfection. When I think of the San Francisco Ballet under Tomasson, I think of the energy of individuality and the beauty of pluralism. Tomasson created a company of dancers and choreographers from many nations, speaking with very different accents, but all communicating through the lingua franca of classical ballet.

He did this from within and without. His superpower was his soft-spoken way of energizing dancers. As Christopher Stowell, one of Tomasson’s first dancer hires, recently told The Chronicle, “There was a special energy, a sense of being a team.” Already dancing with the company when he arrived, Joanna Berman responded eagerly. Meanwhile, Tomasson took dancers that broke the mold, looking not for a “type” but for clarity, presence and musicality.

Principal dancers Stowell and Tina LeBlanc had been judged too short for major companies at the time; later, the majestic Muriel Maffre had been deemed too tall.

Tomasson would weather controversies over body conformity during his tenure, particularly the PR spectacle of a mother filing a complaint with the city of San Francisco alleging her daughter had been rejected from the ballet school due to height and weight. But when the news cycle ran its course, the truth remained: a diversity of body type far more open-minded than most has been part of Tomasson’s pluralism.

A series of international recruits (former Bolshoi star Yuri Possokhov most prominent among them) fielded enough Prince Siegfrieds and Albrechts to partner all that emerging talent in “Swan Lake” and “Giselle.” By the time I began watching the company, a technical standard on par with American Ballet Theatre, long considered the country’s top classical company, was a given.

Anyone who saw it can’t forget the vision, in 2000, of 24 corps members executing endless arabesque penchée in mesmerizing clarity during the third act of “La Bayadere.” It set a bar for the company that has never fallen, and reflected a vision that can awe both ballet experts and those who don’t know a plié from a passé.

San Francisco Ballet under Tomasson has been vaunted for its who’s who roster of contemporary international choreographers. But what has driven the company is Tomasson’s love of showcasing his dancers.

He chose Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations” as an early challenge not because he wanted to create a West Coast “Balanchine company,” but because he wanted to challenge the dancers to move in ways big, clean and bold. And they did.

Thinking back over 21 years of viewing, many of the company’s most awe-inspiring moments have come in Balanchine ballets, from Yuan Yuan Tan in “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” to Sasha De Sola bringing imagination to every step of “Diamonds.” To see some glory from earlier Tomasson days, search YouTube for Elizabeth Loscavio in an excerpt from “Who Cares?” and try to pick your jaw up off the floor.

But what about all his grand, ambitious new works festivals, you say. Isn’t risk-taking with contemporary choreography Tomasson’s defining mark? True, Tomasson was an early commissioner of James Kudelka, David Bintley and Christopher Wheeldon, and most of the ballets created for the company by Mark Morris remain transcendently beautiful. But neither the 2008 New Works festival nor 2018’s massive Unbound festival fielded a bounty of groundbreaking masterworks, which are hard to come by in any age.

To my mind, the greater importance of those festivals was their influence on the company culture. The extreme rehearsal demands encouraged the dancers to live in the moment; the comings and goings of such aesthetically varied artists created an environment of exchange and spontaneity. Still, one lamentable shortcoming of Tomasson’s tenure is that the company did not work with more women and non-white choreographers.

As for Tomasson’s own choreography, perhaps one word for it is “safe.” But in his own works, innovation has never been the drive. Instead, he used it to develop dancers. Along the way, especially when working with Baroque music, he made several works of dignity and enduring grace. “Concerto Grosso,” in which five male dancers prowl the stage with the regalness of lions, tossing off bravura jumps and turns, is perhaps the best. And we should not forget the achievement of his story ballet classics. For my money, Tomasson’s “Nutcracker” tops even Balanchine’s in its combination of narrative excitement and pure dancing thrills.

几个主要由托马斯·舞台舞蹈的名称n into the Ballet’s repertoire have not been touched on: Stanton Welch, Alexei Ratmansky and perhaps the dominant American choreographer of the moment, Justin Peck. But the dance maker whose dances persistently reappear in my mind from Tomasson’s tenure is Jerome Robbins.

Tomasson worked closely with Robbins, who was as famously temperamental as Tomasson is placid. Yet to me, the Robbins ballets hold the same spirit that characterizes San Francisco Ballet under Tomasson. Robbins’ works don’t present dancers as idealized beings, but as individual humans who happen to be speaking entirely through the bodily language of classicism. (Please go see “In the Night” this season to understand what I mean.) These ballets are difficult to dance well and, partly for this reason, not frequently danced. Will they still be danced at the San Francisco Ballet when Tomasson goes?

But this kind of holding onto the past while looking into the future, deluding oneself into an idea of static idealism — this is exactly what ballet at its best demands we surrender. Tomasson knew this, and it’s what made the San Francisco Ballet under his leadership unforgettably alive. As Christopher Stowell recently remembered, “He had a deep commitment to the performance that night, and faith in the artists to deliver it. A belief in the moment. And that hasn’t been institutionalized.”

Tomasson’s achievement is both simple and endlessly complex: He always knew that the dancersarethe dance.