The Blake Works

Dance more than any of the Seven Lively Arts, affirms that actions speak louder than words. Before reading mine, reserve your seat for San Francisco Ballet’s “Blake Works.” In a single lifetime, you’re not likely to encounter its equal, danced with such exuberant joy, conviction, and exactitude.

If dance notation entered into a situationship with kinesiology, would it wax as portentous as the drop that choreographer William Forsythe commissioned to open his tour de force trio, “Blake Works”? From that engrossing rendering of a dancer’s musculature and supporting sinew, to the lullaby diminuendo squiring the dance artists’ final steps, Forsythe’s “Blake Works” serves to certify and anoint San Francisco Ballet as Terpsichore’s refuge from the mediocrity of up-sold sneaker, “woke,” and techno-mad programming.  

That realization evokes a memory from a quarter-century ago. On a coffee break from my day job, I hesitated before greeting then-corps de ballet member Rory Hohenstein. He sat at his usual table at a Hayes Street café frequented by dancers and musicians, where he could often be seen catching up on his reading. On this day, he appeared to be lost in thought. I asked to know his thoughts. He said, “Billy Forsythe. We’re rehearsing ‘In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.’ I’m exhausted, but he’s such a great guy to work with that he pulls things out of you that you never dreamed you could do, and all because you want to thank him for what he brings!” Then comes the recollection of former San Francisco Ballet principal Lorena Feijóo dashing home from a rehearsal of Forsythe’s “Artifact Suite,” to finesse a Spanish/English translation for my interview with her mother, the Cuban-born ballet teacher Lupe Calzadilla. Generous by nature and training, Feijóo credited the extra lilt in her step to having worked the whole day with Forsythe on his “Artifact Suite.”

Time-travel two decades to the present, and I’m taking in a tripartite, late-Forsythe homage to the Academy. Left to his own deeply sourced devices, he has filled the drop’s open spaces with matices that the caesura-inflected score inspire. They tender a dare to  the dancers to master near-impossible counts to entrainments punctuated by plush plié or italicized tendu or counterintuitive dehors where you might anticipate dedans. The work opens with “Prologue.” A quintet of dancers in black factors into solos, duos, and trios, then ricochets back to its original  constellation of avian shapes you’ve seen in an unlikely “elsewhere,” such as  the Bluebird brisé or the ubiquitous chaíné, here delivered at warp speed, like a DJ scratching. You spy Joe Walsh hunkering into a jazzy walk downstage from upstage, long and low. Is he a shadowy side eye from Casablanca, cruising the casino to spot table trouble or suss out a dissolute opportunity?  

Next comes The Barre Project, introduced with a visual that reaches for the remnant that spent the better part of a lifetime in ballet class every morning. You’re taught to place your hands on the barre lightly and slightly rounded, but they do end up traveling, in an intractable search for higher ground to signal better placement. Three screened diagonal light streaks consolidate into a barre suspended in time and deep space. Hands approach and fingers find their resting points. Then the hands change course, crossing over one another, to tease out a caress that resists the forbidden grip. The barre is the only furnishing in a drafty studio that you could count on to be  both for and against you.

The curtain opens on a barre, centered upstage. It’s the dispatch point for launching dancers to center. It is the stolid instrument that your father predicted would rob you of your inventiveness. You feel ridiculous recalling his admonition, but this evening’s performance  might just definitively resolve what has survived as a lifelong conundrum. At six, Mme Nina’s voice rang out, edged in her wisp of a Swedish accent, “Toba, show glissade,” and from the barre, surprised because it was the first time, and a frisson awakening your gangly  arms, you embark on the five steps to center, face the impression in the mirror, and in spite of or because of it, gather up the you the mirror insists you are, to shape a preparation from  Fifth, a glissade, and a landing, all propelled from a pictogram in your scant mental archive into a fait accompli. Now you are six.

The James Blake score keeps tapping the audience on its collective shoulder, no doubt delivering memos similar to mine. It asks, “Do you see what just a few lyrics can have this looking like? “Give me a point and I’ll move the earth.” Give a musician a rest and he’ll give you a counterpoint. Archimedes, Blake, and Forsythe: They walk into a barre and order the dancers a round we’ll never forget.

What a bountiful cast Forsythe has at his disposal! It is led by the newly-signed Madeline Woo, whose storied reputation has preceded her. Her astounding facility is matched by a boundless buoyancy and clarion musicality. They burst forth like flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la! And what a botanical harvest this company can boast: There’s Nikisha Fogo with Walsh, cutting a swathe that her fingers and out-turned palms overtly praise; Jasmine Jimison, and Isabella DeVivo are squired by a commanding and then countermanding Esteban Hernández. Joshua Jack Price answers lushly to the interrogatory: what price glory? Wei Wang rises high above even our loftiest expectations. Max Cauthorn, Price, and Nathaniel Remez, are pivoting speed demons.

Sasha de Sola and Cauthorn thread together a finale that sows arabesques into cambré and monumental lifts, and bind all lingering lit filaments into a closing pas de deux dubbed F.O.R.E.V.E.R.

Toba Singer