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Paul Parish

San Francisco Ballet
Dancing in the Dark

BY PAUL PARISH
The Daily Californian
Friday, May 5, 1989 T

"In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" Is bathed in a ghastly light coming from so high up It makes the stage look like the warehouse scene from the movie Diva. The light hits the dancers' bodies so impersonally -- lying on their shoulders, buttocks, and feet like snow on a statue -- with so little regard for any life in their eyes or sweetness in their hearts that the dancers seem to have grown accustomed to neglect. Only the young could show to advantage in such harsh light. Their youth. energy, skill. and beauty seem to become commodities that predatory consumers are stealing from the performers even as we watch them dance: Warhol-ish overtones of voyeurism and exhibitionism augment the sense that something nasty is going on somewhere.

William Forsythe, the American choreographer who directs the West German Frankfurt Ballet, has provided two big hits for San Francisco Ballet, the dark, bitter "New Sleep," and "In the Middle." For Forsythe, the latter is a light ballet. For all the tough looks, these kids are as harmless as a Rocky Horror Picture Show audience. It's as though we're looking at a latterday tango palace: what holds the dancers together Is a melodramatic style, a code of cool moves that 'say it all" - usually some version of "Drop dead, honey. I'm it." It's a ballet making glamor the be-all and end-all of life, dancing as If there were no tomorrow. (The eIectronic music is a sort of sci-fi -rock.) The attitudes and steps are akin to the heartless posing of music videos - a competition to look the most confident, the most in control. Surly and slouching, two ballerinas look as though they'll pull out their knives; instead each flaunts her wares. In dancer Jamie Zimmerman's case, it's ankles to die for. (This is, after all, ballet-a ballet that was originally made for the Paris Opera Ballet, home of drop-dead chic.) when Jarmie brought her heel forward, some dancers standing near me groaned in envy and wonder. It's not fair that someone should have feet like that.

The ballerina's part went to Tracy-Kai Maier, who is San Francisco Ballet's most interesting dancer. She slouched fine and she kicked great, but it was Shannon Lilly, in a smaller role, who made the ballet moving. The way she suspended herself on pointe - her timing as she floated, hovered, yearned into positions that grew like flowers opening to the sun, or perhaps a love-sick creature achIng be touched - it made my heart go out to her. The piece is about adolescent longing, fear and defensiveness - about people who know only the reality of their moods - which leaves them very fragile. This Is basically Gothic material, and Gothic is the idiom Forsythe works in.

Of the great Gothic stories the one that really scares me has no crypts, no velvet curtains, and no premature burials. It's Edgar Allan Poe's "Man in the Crowd,' about a man who paces day and night, walking the streets of a city, drifting In whichever direction the most people are going. He can't stop. Even at six in the morning he's milling about, gravitating towards people who seem to know where they're going. It's as though all ego-function ceases. I've sometimes had the same experience. when vague lust draws me into crowds, and fluid dynamics takes over: as the crowd flows and eddies, the weak libido vacillates and shifts and drags me along.

It's this experience I refer myself to when my friends tell me they don't like William Forsythe's ballets. (Dancers In Forsythe's work seem to have been drawn to the same place, but scarcely to know each other. They cross and recross the same ground as if they didn't recognize the place.)

One after another of the people I respect most - poets, dancers, critics - tell me these ballets are empty, have nothing to say, or make them heartsick. Forsythe's ballets evoke a part of me that longs for self-annihilation; to surrender my identity to a group. And It's the dancers who ordinarily look like they judge themselves harshly who burn It up In his ballets - Christopher Stowell, Magdalene Parangao, Christine Peary, Tiffany Heft, and above all Shannon Lilly.

Forsythe sets these dancers free. In other ballets, Christopher Stowell executes the steps perfectly, though often has a look of injured merit, as If someone had snubbed him just before he came onstage. In Forsythe's New Steep, we see In him a god-like power, as if he were Invincible. Each cabriole could demolish a brick wall. (It's like watching Bruce Lee in slow motion.) Far upstage in the dark. he sails around in awesome extended pirouettes as If It were Inevitable.

The risks Maggie Parungao takes In In the Middle! She snakes on pointe with a rare spinal fluidity. She usually seems brittle, an anorectic Filipina with a desperate look In her eyes. In Forsythe she dances with amazing courage, fire, and anger.

Forsythe's dancers usually perform unsupported. They'll stalk In like Inch-worms on pointe, or unscrew their heads In spiralling pirouettes, while minding their own space and moving independently. Some of the details are sordid; at least once, the ballerina's partner lets her sag to the floor, starting to walk off and leave her.

The dancers are turbulent Inside their own space. Forsythe experiments with spiralling pirouettes which move like whitewater rapids, as he asks dancers to turn on more than one axis. Christine Peary, for one, can jacknife at the waist while pirouetting. She dives sideways out of her turn, but always In control.

Forsythe's company, the Frankfurt Ballet, Is coming to Zellerbach Hall in June. It will be fascinating to see what his own dancers can do and the attitudes they present. Will they look as vulnerable as the San Francisco Ballet?

San Francisco Ballet performs through Sunday at the Opera House.