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Alexandra Tomalonis
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MAKING AN ELEGANT POINTE

Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
October 12, 1996; Page C7

The San Francisco Ballet is as fine a collection of dancers as any in America, and it showed its quiet class in three contemporary works last night at the Kennedy Center Opera House. These dancers aren't merely able technicians; they have individuality and style that are a tribute to Helgi Tomasson's directorship. Two of the works were, in different ways, musings on dancing. The dancers-in-the-studio look of the opening minutes of Mark Morris's "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" complements its score: 13 piano etudes of Virgil Thomson. As the work builds, Morris's always inventive, often witty choreography moves far from the classroom. The 12 dancers were sublime: Evelyn Cisneros and Christopher Stowell were especially exuberant; the elegant Julia Adam and Vadim Solomakha responded to the music as if it were a private pleasure.

David Bintley's "The Dance House," to Dmitri Shostakovich's Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, is actually set in a studio; the ballet begins with eight women doing exercises at a blood-red barre. A man whose face is painted the same blue as his costume eventually joins them. He's Death -- Death as ballet master or neighborhood stalker. The work is especially appropriate for Washington's Quilt weekend, as it was suggested by the death, from AIDS, of one of Bintley's friends. The ballet is not always clear, especially its central pas de deux (Did someone die? If so, why did they come back for the finale?) but it's powerful nonetheless, especially its dance-to-the-death ending. Tina LeBlanc's crisp dancing in the first movement, and David Palmer's slightly mad Death in Blue Face, were outstanding.

The program closed with Tomasson's "Tuning Game," set to John Corigliano's 1975 Oboe Concerto. Tomasson chose the music because he wanted a score that was contemporary but melodious, and that it is: sometimes sweet, sometimes brassy, but always sympathetic to dancing.

The work begins with a stark image: seven men in green form a sculptural grouping, holding aloft a woman in orange (Elizabeth Loscavio). The image of men supporting a woman, and the woman dancing free of them, is present throughout, and though the ballet has no "story," the relationship between men and women, and between dancers and music, are its subtext. Katita Waldo was luxuriously stylish in the Scherzo's pas de trois, Yuri Possokhov and Loscavio intensely stylish in the Aria.