The darkness didn’t last long in “Harmony,” the last San Francisco Ballet world premiere of more than 50 choreographed by Helgi Tomasson in his storied 37-year career as artistic director. If the piece had its roots in the company’s experience through the pandemic, as its creator explained in a program note, Tomasson wasn’t about to craft a downer in his farewell new work before retiring at the end of the season.
在周六,4月2日的球et’s Program 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, “Harmony” debuted as a buoyant tribute to classical ballet’s ideals of beauty, grace, power, drama, tension, release and, yes, harmony, and to the dancers who bring those aspirations to life onstage. Set to a score of keyboard dances by the French Baroque master Jean-Philippe Rameau, the piece spooled out in a series of solos and pas de deux bookended by energetic ensembles. The piece both recalled the isolation of dancers under lockdown and celebrated their return to live performance.
It began in shadow, with the company seen as ghostly silhouettes milling uncertainly about. Soon enough, as Jim French’s luscious lighting warmed the scene, they were dancing full-on, as if they’d collectively remembered how to do it all at once. Emma Kingsbury’s costumes — flowing calf-length skirts for the women; smart jacket-vests for the men — added the feel of a dress-up ball, but one where the guests were free to loosen up and strut their stuff.
No sooner had Alexis Aiudi and Carmela Mayo mirrored each other’s moves in perfect sync than Diego Cruz charged on, hand jauntily planted on hip, to launch some serious jumps. Moments later Lucas Erni seemed bent on one-upping him in sheer bravura.
By opening with these short numbers, each one set to a variation (or double) of the same Gavotte theme, “Harmony” may have reminded some listeners how one day after another during the early pandemic times began to feel alike. But here were the dancers putting their distinctive stamps on each iteration of the theme, performed with period elegance and restraint by pianist Natal’ya Feygina.
There were other COVID watermarks, none more poignant than the work’s penultimate number, “La Cupis.” Danced with aching urgency by Misa Kuranaga and Angelo Greco, it captured the agony of separation, of keeping one’s distance even from a beloved.
But “Harmony” was primarily about seeking and finding one sweet spot after another, whether in Kuranaga’s crisp, bright steps and sudden gaze of recognition and connection to the audience in “L’Egyptienne” or Max Cauthorn’s mighty split jumps in “Les Sauvages.”
It was altogether fitting that this premiere should close with the company dancing in unison as an expression of solidarity. If “Harmony” didn’t shed new light on the pandemic conditions that birthed it, art doesn’t have such obligations. Delight was the purpose here, which was more than enough for an audience still wearing masks and happy to forget that it was for a while.
The program opened with an earlier, warm-hearted Tomasson work, “The Fifth Season” (2006). After an expansive opening ensemble set to composer Karl Jenkins’ Minimalist thrums, partnering in various modes took hold.
Two couples larkily traded partners back and forth in the Waltz movement. Sarah Van Patten, using her liquidly smooth carriage and a teasingly dropped shoulder, got three men to herself in Tango. Dores André and Benjamin Freemantle seemed weightless one moment in their Romance, and heavily bound to each other the next. Yuan Yuan Tan and Tiit Helimets gave their intricately entwined duo a sense of hard-won, sustaining vitality.
The evening closed in the absurdist fever dream of Yuri Possokhov’s “Marittomania” (2000), a mad fantasia on the Surrealist painter René Magritte.
Thyra Hartshorn’s sets and costumes featured the artist’s signature bowler hats aplenty as well as his giant green apples. Under Ming Luke’s lively baton, Yuri Krasavin’s score sent snippets of Beethoven themes through a kind of sonic funhouse mirror of woozy string distortions and percussion wobbles.
The result was a droll joyride of cognitive dissonance, whether a body was being rolled out from under a curtain, a trio of men tossed off a lively klezmer folk dance or the bendy-jointed company capered about in matching black suits and bowlers like something Mel Brooks might have dreamed up.
The most incisive dancing came in a long and wonderfully weird pas de deux. Their faces shrouded, Jennifer Stahl and Luke Ingham seemed to be inventing new ways of connection and avoidance, their bodies angled together and then apart in some advanced form of human geometry. Did it feel like Magritte in motion? It hardly mattered by then, as dance, music and spectacle had wormed their way into an observer’s own chaotic subconscious.
And then like that, with a sight gag, the dream vanished.
San Francisco Ballet’s Program 5:Through April 16. $29-$448. War Memorial Opera House. 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-865-2000.www.sfballet.org