The June 2024 announcement of the death of Karl Burnett, beloved stager of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon,” evoked memories of his kindness that those fortunate to have danced the work feel deeply attached to. I share them. I must fully disclose that my son James Gotesky was one of the fortunate, having danced three of the leading roles in that work when he was a Soloist with Houston Ballet. With those memories musings arrived about the future of MacMillan’s works.
Even without the grueling rehearsal schedule imposed by the San Francisco Ballet’s cohabitation of its home venue with the city’s opera company, Manon is a undertaking that can strain the musculature and nervous system of a company that’s never danced this storied work before. Costumes and dressers arrive from London’s Royal Ballet; accommodations to light the orchestra leave an opaque view of sets not meant to be visible. A Danish-trained guest artist will sub for an injured principal. Will staging, under such conditions meet the standard set by Burnett? Will performances fill the house? Will mental and physical stamina carry dancers through a two-and-a-half-hour show in which each one is in character for every staged minute? It’s easy to forget the most important question: Will the audience love it?
“Tell us about the steps,” interviewer Mary Wood prompted during a pre-curtain chat with Principal Dancer Sasha De Sola and guest artist, Alban Lendorf. “They set the stage for the conversation, don’t they?” she asked. De Sola spoke of a dramaturgy that limned a conversation the dancers could engage in through MacMillan’s musical and eloquent choreography.
When Cuban pedagogue Fernando Alonso communicated what he had learned from Michel Fokine’s stage direction and Konstantin Stanislovsky’s Method, memorable was his insistence that there are no observers on the stage. Every dancer must know the backstory of the character, why they are there, and the intentions that induce the audience to understand and appreciate what justifies their presence. In the libretto, precipitous intention changes bring sharp plot swerves. The dancers embrace what the flavorful Massenet score leads them to sample as they interpret steps that elaborate intention.
Manon (Jasmine Jimison) is an impoverished young girl looking to improve her odds, given the cards she has been dealt from a stacked deck. She is sold by her scheming brother Lescaut into the bargain basement chattel of the French aristocracy. There, being “in service” assumes countenancing any indignity, even from carousers, whether honor-bound or loosely tethered to the royal court. Along comes Des Grieux (Max Cauthorn), gentle, poetic, yet no less passionate in his amorous partnering of the responsive Manon. His vigor makes for resplendent solos. He takes a stand against Monsieur G.M.’s assumption of First Night Rights with Manon bartered for with the flash of a little bling.
With the passage of time events unfold that determine the serpentine path Manon will follow in hopes of sidestepping the debasement that marks her as a pauper.
The pitch-perfect corps de ballet could have been turned on a LeBlond lathe. Their lively determination contrasts with the legato or rough-trade pas de deux Jamison dances lushly or wildly, squired by Cauthorn, or a virtuosic Conley, and surefooted Thatcher, or contritely with Nathaniel Remez, who arrives as her Gaolor in Act III. His insult serves up a now-fragile, then-tensile, and lastly-infirm Manon.
Some details get lost in the heavy traffic. A lethal gunshot draws no blood. A rogue playing card is secreted in a pocket out of public view so that when the cheat is discovered, and the card table overturned—sous and francs crashing to the floor—the audience puzzles over what happened. Conley’s fabulously comic drunk scants a hilarious full-out backward fall-to-floor finish. On the bright side, there are no such holidays in the Cawthorn-Thatcher-Conley sword-jousting match.
The Cancel Culture that never sleeps, has discovered certain flaws in the 18th Century. If a critic brings #MeToo along as a Plus One to see works conceived before he or she was born (“Taming of the Shrew,” “Manon,” “Carmen Suite,” come to mind) and objects in pidgin “Cancelese” to the portrayal of female characters as “victims,” expect that the choreographer will be cited also for speaking in Misogynese. This can happen even when his mission is to show what it was like back in 1734 for women—not in a magical realism telling—but in the harsh vocabulary of a harsh reality. To appreciate those conditions for what they were, one must show them as they were. It won’t be the Cancel Culture’s take-downs of “micro-aggressions,” but the war on macro-aggressions on a battlefield populated by sword-wielding women and men, that will bring about the full emancipation of the Second Sex.
Layer by layer, Manon exposes an inner life of unremitting turmoil with an occasional spree of halcyon joy or ponderous sorrow. This was 18th Century France (and New World New Orleans) for the social class Polite Society didn’t and doesn’t acknowledge as accreditable. Flaubert and MacMillan immortalized the conversations that tell the truth about the tyranny of class rule.
Robert Tewsley, Manon’s stager for San Francisco Ballet, is an exponent of the Royal, Stuttgart, and New York City Ballets, and the National Ballet of Canada. The ground-breaking San Francisco Ballet production of Manon touched history. What a privilege to be able to bear witness to this stager having faithfully carried forward his fallen colleague’s legacy, and enjoyed the memorably vivid contributions to that legacy by two companies—Houston Ballet’s, a little over a decade ago, and delightedly, here in San Francisco.
Toba Singer